My father brought them home from Hunslet Mills
and showed me how their thousand crochet hooks
could teasel out the matted warp and weft
to raise a layer of woollen air, a final touch
for pastel perfect blankets soon to swathe
in Marks and Spencer’s cellophane.
Before all this he’d seen them burst from bales
as soiled and oily wool, canvas-crushed
twelve thousand pungent miles to spring to life
in Goodman Street where he would shepherd them
from shed to shed: canal-polluting scouring
shed to carding, spinning, weaving shed where
shuttles screamed across a no-man’s land of
iron looms and head-scarved women broke their
voices on the din; and then to sulphur-
stinking bleaching shed to dyeing vat to
drying shed and then on tenterhooks to
whipping shed before that final raising shed
where rattling teasel gigs scratched gentleness
from this harsh world, all the days of his life.
Video-poem version of Teasels
Return to all poems
Leave a Reply