Powder Mill

Black Powder

 

The curlew’s lonely, plaintive call,

drew me to  high Dartmoor

by way of moorland paths and woods of willow .

Ancient trees and trackways  led me to a legend,

to ruins of stone and to a powder, crude and black.

Below Birch Tor, stonechats nestled in juniper groves,

bees  landed on heathers, whose purple mingled  

with the  yellow of gorse and broom.

I dreamed  awhile  in gilded sunshine

beside the Cherry Brook of pure water.

Moss-covered  branches of dogwood

laid with  playful September shadows.

Nearby, within decaying buildings of  stone, 

I saw  the ghosts of the gunpowder-makers,

leather-apronned, copper-handled tools in hand,

working, safely, to prevent some dark catastophe,

making the cake  they called ripe charge.

I saw Indian saltpetre, Vesuvian sulphur

and dark black charcoal burnt from the moor.

I saw slabs of  cake being beaten, sieved and tumbled,

heated by gloomstoves  and dusted with lead.

As smoke rose from  tall chimneys,

slabs were packed in oak barrels, leatherclad.

Watched over by the skylark, they were carried

to damp tin  mines, to clearance cains,

to dry powdered quarries at  Swell Tor, Foggintoor, Merrivale,

cradled,  so very carefully,  in the moorland  ponies’  carts.

 

 

Cait O’Connor