Rushbearing

We’ll have a wake like the old wakes,
As the townships close in.
Search the moorlands for rushes
While the probing wind pulls at the flax,
And tussocks of reeds are like stepping stones
For the children who dance through the wet marshes,
Watching the wakes dance through time
Bacup’s cocoanutters to Nick o’Thungs,
Rochdale’s “ceremonial gang warfare,”
A pulsebeat pumping
With the life of generations.
Defeating the bosses by simply running off,
Returning home in liquor at 6 am on Tuesday morning,
Holidays carved by custom
Not the masters’ liberality.

Come then, children.
We’ll gather in the pubs of Underhill,
Step briefly in the church
Its floors flagged over
By the cold stones of modernism
Dig on our knees in the loam
As if looking for something
Someone
We will seek the wet peat beneath
Sifting through the bones
Of our long gone Tollund children.

Scatter the rushes once more
My friends.
They still play, I hear them,
The children of the moors.
Dancing wutheringly amidst the rushes and reeds.
Jayne MacDonald
Keith Bennett
Stefan Kisco, yes
Hear the rushes hush, the soothing swoosh.
Sleep now.
Sleep now.
Hush.

Rushbearing
http://www.rushbearing.co.uk/History/index.htm
Jayne
http://www.execulink.com/~kbrannen/victim1
Keith
http://www.manchesteronline.co.uk/news/s/62/62367_one_last_hope_to_find_keith.html
Stefan
http://innocent.org.uk/cases/stefankiszko/1.htm
Rochdale Rushcart
http://www.rochdale.gov.uk/living/libraries.asp?url=DPrushbearing