‘Lament for Didcot A’

I will lament your cooling towers, those pale hyperboloids
monumental as a temple for giants. I will lament
their demolition, each falling to its knees in slow motion
like a man hamstrung in battle who dies in the dust
keening for glory that will never be sung.

I will lament the dragon of your superheater
ripping the black prehistoric sun from its prison,
your pulverizer, its fervent teeth, your fly ash and bottom ash.
Let me beat out my grief on your steam drum,
for your cold-side electrostatic precipitator, the effulgence
of your chimney, your heroic deaerator;
for turbines, hoppers, flues, all the bright metal words
you were. You might have reigned ten thousand years.

And I will lament the men whose work was you,
who came to you day piled upon day
and lived in the overall pocket of their lives,
jetting operatives, burners, outage planners,
who go to cancer and heart attacks,
headlamps on a country bend, plastic-covered
chairs in nursing homes, two sticks looped on the wings;
the four gone already, brave dead, from Rotherham,
Teesside, Swansea, caught in the collapsing boiler house
and remembered.

Leave me night drives on the A34, the red-starred
space-station bulk of you holding up the sky.
Without you I am beaconless and there is nothing
majestic in the world.

O Didcot, you who set our kettles trembling,
who lit our lovemaking, each evening endeavour,
by whose alchemy the clammy pallor of our pastry
rose and sang, we lament you.