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I Got On At Hallelujah Lamppost

by Bardonthewire

/

about

My first ever publication in a proper professional poetry quarterly: 'Anglo Welsh Review' number 81, 1985. I wrote it in 1980 after three months working as a bus conductor on Western Welsh up and down the Eastern Valley every day. It's rooted in that (soon-to-be-post) coalfield experience and below even that in the teenage years in which I grew up there.

Hallelujah Lamppost is an actual bus stop between mountaintop Blaenafon and the first stop down the mountain Varteg Hill.

That's Maz humming in support so technically this is a Phezant's Tail track.

lyrics

I Got On At Hallelujah Lamppost (An Eastern Valley Bus Ride 1980)
3
Fire & Brimstone

This valley had iron
In its guts,
Steeled itself to change
Moving with the trains,
Dug into its coal
For a port for the ores of Spain.

It had shod the Great Bear
Of the Steppes with skates
Made In Blaenafon
Had united the States
Across the wild west
With Monmouthshire iron.

And when King Coal called
For a Copper Grail
For his stainless steel Table,
Tongues of fire could purge
The iron in the soul
At Pontypool inferno.

4.
Conductor

The conductor stubs out
Nostalgia and fag
For the rush down valley,
While through his worn bag
Go all the colours of the river,
The green and the silver and the discoloured copper,
Changing
Forever.

5.
Afon Garde

Afon raging with the rain.
The cut steelworks sinks in the sodden clay.
Steel-faced pickets slam a portcullis
And draw up the bridge of their riverbank scrapyard:

The workers
United
Will never be defeated.

Red-soiled, livid, steaming, green,
Fed with liquid fire and gases,
Afon, desperate, blindly burrows
Like a dragon for the sea.

And all the Sunday School kids
Are Monday-morning singing....
The Word
Is on the dole
He'd rather give us the past tense of coalfield.
Emmanuel
Is on the dole
He's gone down the drain with all the rotten leaves.

Panteg steelworks at twelve o'clock,
Busmen chasing overtime, pickets - jobs,
Eyes calm as anthracite,
Clouds lined with lead

The workers
United
Will never be defeated.



6.
New Towns For Old

In Tal-y-waun
The girls are like leather, the beauty ingrained,
In 15, at 50, it remains, on the wane
Like the ghost of Coal always in the worked out vein
And what is already has, and what has will again
In Tal-y-waun.


The Anglo-Welsh Review publication included several more sections not performed here, including:

"I stood one day upon Varteg Hill
The slag heap green and time stood still,
My Lord hung once and his love hangs still
Above Varteg Hill.

And the sun bled into the rust-lipped rill
And in Bethlehem Court a star shines still
On Blaenafon Hill."

the music of which is reprised in the Tal y waun verse, which in turn is followed by this very different and brasher music:

In the the New Town
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
In the the New Town
The old canal is polished up, the gardens laid down,
And pushchair trolley women bus aroundaroundaround
And brakes and valves and services - autopias - abound.
Parked in his mother's arms high above the ground,
The brand new Son of Cymru gives a multistorey frown ,
MORE of lots of MORE to lose, mortuary-bound,
And after six, just trodden chips-
Not a soul to be found.

credits

released March 15, 2021

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Bardonthewire image

Bardonthewire England, UK

Performance poetry with a library card (voice & drum, folk ballads, ghazals, sonnets, beat poems, sound poems, raps) much of it happening 'on the street' or jostling to be heard in the tavern. Researched stories of folk heroes and real folk. History for you. Bardic poetry striving (as all arts do) for the condition of music (from punk though rap to to prog). Visionary lit. for your average Blake. ... more

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