Cargoes (after Masefield)

You marked it well with that "Dirty British Coaster"
freighting "road-rails" and "pig-lead".
Up here, on a knoll of Harmondsworth moor,
I watch articulated HGVs roar
their shipments, hauled in 40 ton rigs:
Scanias and Volvos, multi-axled, spitting lead

from hot exhausts to spike the droning M25 air.
Emissions lift in putrid gusts, carbon printing
under Heathrow's cumulus. An Airbus streaks
a whorl of after-burn, newly turned over
like a white furrow ploughed in a blue field
where hawks overhang the hard-shoulder's road-kill.

"Christian Salvesen", "Waberer" from Hungary,
"Schavemaker Transport", "Bertschi", "Van der Meer",
Germany's "Willy Betz" and Korea's "Hanjin" Container
unloaded at Dover where half-starved stow-aways
from Eastern Europe un-huddle to foreign darkness -
no "Quinquireme of Nineveh from distant Ophir".

Caught in web-cams, the diesel stream is endless:
M25 - the "biggest car park in Europe" they say.
But here, this reclaimed land-fill sits at rest,
beside the haulage racing to industrial estates;
and all is adaptation to the modern way
negating your cargoes of ivory, peacocks and apes.

Anstey -
Wow that's very abstract.

Anstey -
Well that's a major update.

give me a few and I'll see if I can give a good comment on it.

Alcuin of York -

I wanted to like this, partly because I like much of your writing, and partly because I'm familiar with the original poem.

Well, I have to ask what you add to the discussion begun by Masefield? Honestly, very little, except perhaps that since his day, things have continued to degenerate - not a particularly revolutionary idea. The original poem wasn't exceptionally well-written, and he made his intellectual point by avoiding discussion of how the ‘commoner' lived. I don't feel you've carried his point to any real new height, nor have you revealed a new set of truths. I also feel this piece is not as well-written as the original, a problem when we write pieces that play off others' works.

Alcuin

U668857 -
Many thanks for the provocative review, Alcuin. Interesting - the comment
about the "play off" - so we're not to bounce off the original unless we can trump or equal it?
If I could trump Masefield I wouldn't we writing here (no disrespect intended)!!
As to the original, I've always read it as a pithy counterpoint between Romanticism/exoticism
and the utilitarian/prosaic; dreams against reality; the real against the ideal. While Masefield allowed
for both, I suggest the former is almost entirely negated. The piece is an extension but very much of our times - Masefield
had little caude to make reference to carbon footprints or illegal immigration!
Now "I must go down to the sea again/the lonely sea and the sky"...Rgds.,Alan