The pigeons are returning home to roost in the soot-stained, blackened-timber shell of Dalton Mills. After a slim picking day, absent – the bread-crumbing gifts of grannies now tucked snugly up indoors with Winter coming on, the pigeons are wasting away huddling disconsolate in the Yorkshire drizzle beneath whatever shelter they can find in the arson struck building that once stood in for Downton Abbey and Peaky Blinders.
Keighley’s real Peaky Blinders, members of the warring Top Enders and Bottom Enders are gearing up for another night of selling drugs in their respective territories. Mid-level dealers rev their Subaru’s while they wait on telephone orders whilst Kingpins glide about overseeing their business in black Range Rovers with darkened windows and street-runners huddle, hoods up, like the pigeons trying to stay out of the rain in doorways and anything overhanging…
In Sainsburys car park, Roy pushes a train of supermarket trolleys from the far reaches to the entrance ready for the next customers to fill with shopping. Roy was a little slow at school but he has found his vocation, happily pushing trolleys around – for twenty years now. Everybody has seen him at one time or another but even the few that give him a wave do not know his name.
Across the traffic-churning foot of Cavendish Street, the Polish food shop requires its customers to suck in their breath and to steady themselves before threading the narrow canyons of its too-packed shelves towering up, laden with lines from the home country but also offering continental comfort to other mid-European countrymen, sausages of twenty different sizes, shapes and flavours, kefir from before it had its moment, beetroot-pink horseradish and large jars of sauerkraut, poppyseed cakes and bread, and of course, varieties of vodka behind the counter along with strong lager for the builders and grafters who cannot afford spirits.
Cavendish Street, once the purview of mill-spun wealth, the architecture reflects that time-passed – ornate carved stone details and a glass-canopied shopping arcade down one side – now home to money-laundering barber shops with outrageously blinging chairs and scant customers, the bored staff sitting and doom-scrolling on their phones. They never see the money that flows through the business, courtesy of the drug gangs but receive a regular weekly wage no matter how quiet the days and Winter evenings.
Nestled amongst the barbers’, charity and pawnbroker shops, Three Little Birds display fantastically decorated cakes and tasty dainties and offer classes to cake-crafters in how to achieve the magic. Is this delight a sign of a new era of opulence, or does it not matter what surrounds this niche business…
On the other side, tucked under the bulk of the multi-storey car park, the owner of the yarn shop and his wife are happy to work in one place at last, their son has taken over the recycling business and they supplement their wool sales with Keighley folk, topping up their tans under the UV lights upstairs and exchange news of the latest foreign holidays, taken or projected – news of dance or body-building competitions where a good tan is key to success…
The constellation of traffic lights at the top of Cavendish Street where it meets Skipton Road, blur and streak in the rain-wet road, cycling endlessly through red, amber and green and directing the flow of rush-hour traffic as commuters crawl home leaving the town to the citizens of the night, home-staggering pub goers, drug seekers and drug-dealers, the odd sex-worker and the lost and the homeless. But arriving at the side entrance of the Carnegie funded library, the poetry group are arriving for their monthly foray into words read and words imbibed. Catriona, Christina, Kevin, Tommy, Tony and Phil, Angel and Andrew, Dee and a welcome return of Bee is Happier taking a break from restoring her house to hang with fellow poets and have a Christmas drink next door in The Livery Room. Each reads their contribution and this one is saved till last…
Keighley Library Poets
We poets come here not to read books
But to share poems with compadres
An ever bright, creative band that looks
To build and share our poesie ardour
Applauding with gentle oohs and ahhs
Celebrating our small group of stars
Listening and gently enquiring
As to what lies behind the writing
No pressure and we take our sweet time
Certainly there’s no competition
Guided instead by intuition
For friends and their poetry sublime
In Carnegie’s gift so splendid
Our monthly poetry meet is ended…
And with the poets wending their way home, pleasantly befuddled by alcohol and friendship in equal parts, Keighley, cupped at the bottom of The Worth Valley, slides once more into night…
© Andrew Wilson 2026
I missed the deadline for dVerse Poet Pub’s Melissa Lemay in Poetics but the first of the uncharacteristically angular, architectural paintings by Georgia O’Keefe, resonated with a prose poem I have written for this month’s Keighley Library Poetry Group. The poem is written in the shadow of Dylan Thomas’s radio play Under Milk Wood – in particular, the closing passages where he puts the town back into the night. ITSO Under Milk Wood was my suggestion for this month’s theme – I look forward to seeing what other people make of it… A radio play it might be, but Under Milk Wood is full of poetry as well as actual poems by the Reverend Eli Jenkins, vicar and town poet, and my offering includes a poem I wrote abour the Keighley Library Poetry Group.
Under Milk Wood is such a rich and inspiring piece of poetry/drama, that I listen to it at least once a year – you can listen to it here.