Jim William Jones was a Black Country poet who contributed numerous poems to the first 25 years of the Blackcountryman from 1967 to 1992. He is perhaps best known for his dialect poems, some of which can be found in two small publications by the Society – “From under the smoke” from 1972 and “Factory and Fireside” from 1974, both sadly long out of print. His contributions to the Blackcountryman were however largely in standard English. Jim Jones was born in 1923 and died in 1993, and to mark the 100th anniversary of his birth and the 30th anniversary of his death, I will post a number of his Blackcountryman poems over the next few weeks. Whilst his dialect poems displayed a gentle humour, those in standard English are generally darker and more serious in tone, and this will be reflected in my choice of those I include in the posts. I readily admit I am not a poet, but I find much of his work gracious and moving. I hope you enjoy them as much as I do.
Chris Baker
The first of today's poems is from the Blackcountryman Number 20.3 1987 - a sad, evocative tale of a long dead child - "A child's grave in Gornal"
A child’s grave in Gornal
An old jam jar
Holds a few battered daffodils
And two shrivelled sills
Of frost-bitten green;
And the stones are green
In the crumbling wall:
An infant’s grave….
It seems to rock
In the biting breath
Of bitter winter’s lingering death;
Only an illusion:
It is the pitiful flowers that rock
In the glass jar’s jellied slime;
A tiny grave…
From those old times,
Framed with bits of old brick,
And littered with old stalks
Of long-forgotten flowers;
Sixty years they say
Since this infant passed away:
His short life
Was in a day
When poverty held sway,
And disease stalked
Where children played and walked
And ran in and about
This Gornal street.
A lonely man….
Eighty-two now,
Remembers the young boy,
And comes stealthily,
Out of the shadows of day,
With is wistful flowers:
And as the light vanishes,
The cold muffling darkness,
Seems a huge and crying thing.
The second of today's poems, and the last of this brief selection is from the Blackcountryman Number 22.2 1989 "across the leas" - a lament for the Black Country as it was then, broken by the large scale closures of industry in the 1980s. "In these days, The Black country is lying down, Like a sick dog, no fight left".
Across the Leas
In the night
You would hear the big steam trains
Shouting to one another
Across the leas.
And the bark of their funnels
As they strained
At the snake-line of singing tricks
Loaded with coal, pig-iron,
Sheet steel from the mills.
In those days
The Black Country was an ‘empire’
Of industry; fire and smoke,
Iron and steel,
The wrenching of coal from deep earth.
And limestone
For the flux of boiling furnaces;
Foundries, rolling mills; big men
Grappling with great power.
And women,
Aproned in sacking, head-tied.
Tough as the men they married,
Working as hard,
And bearing crowds of children,
Some to die
In the constant battle to survive
In the boxy cottages, back to back
Sometimes six to a bed.
In the night
You would see, like an early dawn,
A yawning glow of red fire
Across the leas;
And hear the heart-beat booming
Of pistons.
Thrusting great wheels and heavy roll;
And the furnaces puking
Their radiant vomit out.
In those days
Factory sirens would start the day
In grand symphonic manner;
What wondrous notes!
With the sun’s baton beating.
And the sky
Shouting ‘bravo’, with clapping clouds
Giving standing ovations
From the galleries of heaven.
In these days
The Black country is lying down
Like a sick dog, no fight left:
Iron and steel—
The dribblings of an old tack tin;
Crumbs of fire
From the kicked ashes of bygone days;
Foundries, rolling mills, all dead,
Like the men who gave them life.