Birmingham River
Where’s Birmingham river? Sunk.
Which river was it? Two. More or less.
History: we’re on tribal ground. When they
moved in from the Trent, the first English
entered the holdings and the bodies of the people
who called the waters that kept them alive
Tame, the Dark River, these English spread their works
southward then westward, then all ways
for thirty-odd miles, up to the damp tips of the thirty-odd
weak headwaters of the Tame. By all of the Tame
they settled, and sat, named themselves after it:
Tomsaetan. And back down at Tamworth, where the river
almost began to amount to something,
the Mercian kings kept their state. Dark
because there’s hardly a still expanse of it
wide enough to catch the sky, the Dark River
mothered the Black Country and all but
vanished underneath it, seeping out from the low hills
by Dudley, by Upper Gornal, by Sedgley, by
Wolverhamption, by Bloxwich, dropping morosely
without a shelf or a race or a dip,
no more than a few feet every mile, fattened
a little from mean streams that join at,
Tipton, Bilston, Willenhall, Darlaston,
Oldbury, Wednesbury. From Bescot
She oozes a border round Handsworth
where I was born, snakes through the flat
meadows that turned into Perry Barr,
passes through Witton, heading for the city
but never getting there. A couple of miles out
she catches the timeless, suspended
scent of Nechells and Saltley – coal gas,
sewage, smoke – turns and makes off
for Tamworth, caught on the right shoulder
by the wash that’s run under Birmingham,
a slow, petty river with no memory of an ancient
name; a river called Rea, meaning river,
and misspelt at that. Before they merge
they’re both steered straight, in channels
that force them clear of the gasworks. And the Tame
gets marched out of town in the police calm
that hangs under the long legs of the M6.
These living rivers
turgidly watered the fields, gave
drink; drove low powered mills, shoved
the Soho Works into motion, collected waste
and foul waters. Gave way to steam,
collected sewage, factory poisons. Gave way
to clean Welsh water, kept on collecting
typhoid. Sank out of sight
under streets, highways, the black walls of workshops;
collected metals, chemicals, aquicides. Ceased
to draw lines that weren’t cancelled or unwanted; became
drains, with no part in anybody’s plan.
.
by Roy Fisher
from The Long and the Short of It: Poems 1955-2010
Bloodaxe Books, Tarset, 2012