Tag: engineering

Insurance Matters

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

For @Dru_Marland (Blog)

Here – almost – an immolated whale
found bare – beached and dry

She is still – no stuttering breaths
of engine or pumps – cold dead

Almost a mounted catch on display
No slightness – no sway – no slippings

by lullaby currents or crosswinds
off loosely tied mooring ropes

For once – barefooted – landlocked –
awaiting brushes and touches below

as they look for ingress and pitting
from galvanic action – They mutter

as they chalk up indicative lines
on her rubbed clean underside

You agree to fixing sacrificial anodes
Done – then you are lifted with a rush

as your craft is back to old waterways
for another thousand days of drifting

Late Out

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

This dessicated path
is an off-white scar
under the moon’s phase
of waxing gibbous

Boots and tamed dogs
have worn this route
into a grass-bare map
which I read by that light

The holding flightpaths
of man-made meteors –
of ephemeral accords –
circle among the clouds

The transmitter mast blinks
with a beast’s red eye
shaming Arcturus and Mars
so even those stars fade

This as the bypass hums
a song of our war won –
our tilt against creation
by over engineering

Sheffield Park, East Sussex

~ mikebellwrites ~ Leave a comment

The wide open workshop
was beyond my education
(three terms of metalwork
forty years earlier was never
any kind of apprenticeship).

Greased tools, backs bent to it,
at components, stripped elements
of dead men engineering,
here exhumed across scale layouts
of locomotive parts, almost lost

until men in overalls, and tilted caps,
pulled on levers and tools to fix
the lines from one shut station
to another, suffered, under Beeching:
to get the steam into the pistons:

Our kids milled, kicked at ballast,
and were more intrigued by a ring tone
than the scale of rod-shoved wheels,
and steps so high, halfway to Heaven,
for these men, so we left the engine shed.