Castle Cinema, Merthyr Tydfil

Here on the corner by the gimcrack faces,
This is where it was, the furniture store
And that little stifled sweetshop which the old Jew
Keeps, where the soldiers fired on the crowd
A hundred years ago; here their feet slipped,
Stained these streaming stones where writhing shoplights
Drown and muzzled buses endlessly sluice by; dark turbulence of heads

Tossing, turning at the muzzles, red mouths roaring,
Spitting at the stone lips gun-grey by the windows,
Fanged head of a crowd, giant black serrated
Python, coiling crashing through the town, back, miles
Black, thick and swollen in the twisted streets, curling out
Past Crawshay's castle where the school is now; cataract
Through the narrow streets, blind with new vision,
And a froth of drunks, foaming off the frightened walls,
Spilling out across this Tarmac, red against the inn,
Stained with sweat and the shrieks of women
Scuttling, crazy, round the corpses humped
Like sodden coalsacks on the streaming stones, here
It was, here, where the tram heels clip
Fastidious past puddles, past that sly nosing alley
At the cinema's blind flank, where on scarlet steps,
Diffident a dark boy waits, in his shining shoes,
And the frequent buses swirl, out to Dowlais,
Ten minutes and a jolting generation far away,
Where, close and clannish in their cramping hill,
Some remember the bodies still.