For the fourteen ‘luddites’ who were executed in 1813

thin rain rounds
almost everything
		
             over and again 	
             over and again

            and sounds like kindness
	    moving over the moors
	    and the wooly walls of stone fields

until it reaches mist 
and begins to be everywhere	
           all at once, like sickness

	  searching the blind edgelands
for any profit 
          deep enough to stick

	  but there is more than one way to count a cost

	  in York Castle
in the year of our lord 1813
in the pull of a lever

	     is the execution
		        the law and the sentence
			            dropped as one

					sound
				rounded in weighty hang
			the wet thrash of seventeen faces
			
		the day straining 
		against the clatter of iron and flesh

                        while a crowd of cottage cool
	                            faces gather the bloodless blues 
                        and grey-eyed skies
                                    in an embodied end to movement

			still warm in their coarse 
			woolen coats
				suspended
				like a cloud-damp shadows
a haunting threat
		because

smashing machines
	    is sophisticated
            organized and organic 
            and a capital crime

that hangs like flies
             round the pockets
of dead luddites
	    dreaming of field tracks

	    and sweeping the grass for machine parts
		        and knowing how many lashes
	    secure the windows of Nottingham
			             for King Ludd

	    because there’s
		       nothing but the wriggling fingers
            of industrial martyrs
                        in the broadsheets today

stung              mid-stocking
	   with a need to smash
			
                               apparently
		livid shake of violent North
				          your name
			    legendary round the corridors
                                             of palaces and factories
                                             and the feet of scurrying business

                             and spoken tight
                                             in a noosed tongue	
                                             along the tide-worn Thames

   Nedd Ludd
   headless among
	        the day-breaking hammers
	        and the velvet heat of industrialists

where are you in the heather, crouching
	    between sunshine and rain and the slim charm
	    that slips under the factory gate at midnight?

all that Victorian drama; the moors and the murders 

	    the darkness in the term luddite: 	inept, angry, absent	

	                               shouldering the wet cling of history

                    but darkness has a colour; between wet thatch
                    and horsetail, and our lives spark among the blue ash
	                          of tavern laughter; the happy nothing of the road
				                                      in every direction.

                    light, too, has a shade, a patient violet
	                         pooling in the eyes of a scattered many

                    gathering over and again
	                        and over and again.