Dead Plants - a poem extract about steam and coal
Written by our Writer-in-Residence at Sittingbourne Steam Railway, Dan Thompson
Newcomen’s atmospheric engines,
the Watt steam engine,
Trevithick’s steam locomotives,
Coal-fired innovation, black rock
Burnt to make industrial steam
the white heat of revolution –
To build bigger furnaces
To make more metal,
To make screw-cutting lathes
And boring tools
And milling machines –
All of which enabled more and more
And more machines to be made,
A never-ending cascade of manufacture,
Machines tumbling from machines.
And all those steam-powered machines
Meant more steam-powered machines could be invented –
A self-replicating river of endless invention
Like the marching brooms in The Sorcerer’s Apprentice,
Steam power like nanobots, ever increasing –
Making machines bigger, more power to push
and to pull –
And the infrastructure to string them together,
Connecting machine to machine, joining
Crankshafts and cylinders and cogs
Flywheels and eccentric rods
Valves and pistons and pins
Like a steampunk proto-worldwide web,
So that what one machine could mine
Another could refine
So another could manufacture –
Under and around and over it all
Bridges and cuttings and tunnels
For roads and canals and –
for the Permanent Way, the railway,
From Benjamin Outram & Company’s
Butterley Ironworks
tumbled the first L-section rails
Ready for what would become the
Most refined steam-powered machines,
The perfect end in an evolutionary line,
Water and coal and heat in balance,
Speed and power – speed and power
Living breathing streamlined steam locomotives
That could travel faster than Intercity diesels.