Softly, in the Dusk
Softly, in the Dusk is my latest book. It shows photographs taken around the ex-mining town of Eastwood, Nottinghamshire. The photographs tell stories of how things were, how things are.
Limited edition of 20 copies. Price: £10, including a £5 donation to the Trussell Trust food bank charity
Be a good animal, true to your instincts
The young to-day are born prisoners,
poor things, and they know it.
Born in a universal workhouse,
and they feel it.
Inheriting a sort of confinement,
work, and prisoners’ routine
and prisoners’ flat, ineffectual pastime
The new red houses spring like plants
In level rows
Of reddish herbage that bristles and slants
Its square shadows.
The pink young houses show one side bright
Flatly assuming the sun,
And one side shadow, half in sight,
Half-hiding the pavement-run;
Where hastening creatures pass intent
On their level way,
Threading like ants that can never relent
And have nothing to say.
Bare stems of street-lamps stiffly stand
At random, desolate twigs,
To testify to a blight on the land
That has stripped their sprigs.
Somebody’s knockin’ at th’ door
Mother, come down an’ see!
I’s think it’s nobbut a beggar;
Say I’m busy.
It’s not a beggar, mother; hark
How ‘ard ‘e knocks!
Eh, tha’rt a mard-arsed kid,
‘E’ll gie thee socks!
The trees down the boulevard stand naked in thought,
Their abundant summery wordage silenced, caught
In the grim undertow; naked the trees confront
Implacable winter’s long, cross-questioning brunt.
He suffered the tortures of the damned on these occasions
Softly, in the dusk, a woman is singing to me;
Taking me back down the vista of years, till I see
A child sitting under the piano,
in the boom of the tingling strings
And pressing the small, poised feet of a mother who smiles as she sings.
Now, in the morning
As we sit in the sunshine on the seat by the little shrine,
And look at the mountain-walls,
Walls of blue shadow,
And see so near at our feet in the meadow
Myriads of dandelion pappus
Bubbles ravelled in the dark green grass
Held still beneath the sunshine
The cataclysm has happened, we are among the ruins, we start to build up new little habitats, to have new little hopes. It is rather hard work: there is now no smooth road into the future: but we go round, or scramble over the obstacles.
Stand up, but not for Jesus!
It’s a little late for that.
Stand up for justice and a jolly life.
I’ll hold your hat.
Stand up, stand up for justice,
ye swindled little blokes!
Stand up and do some punching,
give ’em a few hard pokes.
Stand up for jolly justice
you haven’t got much to lose:
a job you don’t like and a scanty chance
for a dreary little booze.
Stand up for something different,
and have a little fun
fighting for something worth fighting for
before you’ve done.
Stand up for a new arrangement
for a chance of life all round
for freedom, and the fun of living
bust in, and hold the ground!
Such resolute shapes, so harshly set
In hollow blocks and cubes deformed, and heaped
In void and null profusion, how is this?
In what strong aqua regia now are you steeped?
The proper way to eat a fig, in society
Is to split it in four, holding it by the stump,
And open it, so that it is a glittering, rosy, moist,
honied, heavy-petalled four-petalled flower.
Then you throw away the skin
Which is just like a four-sepalled calyx,
After you have taken off the blossom, with your lips.
But the vulgar way
Is just to put your mouth to the crack and take out the flesh in one bite.
Every fruit has it’s secret.
The dark, satanic mills of Blake
how much more darker and more satanic they are now!
But oh, the streams that stream white-faced, in and out,
in and out when the hooter hoots, white-faced, with a dreadful gush
of multitudinous ignominy,
what shall we think of these?
They are millions to my one
I know that view better than any in the world … that’s the country of my heart
All the texts accompanying the above photographs are taken from the novels and poetry of the writer D H Lawrence
(born Eastwood, Nottinghamshire in 1885, died Vence, France, 1930)