This poem is taken from PN Review 245, Volume 45 Number 3, January - February 2019.
Bingham’s Ghost
'Bingham’s Ghost' and other poems
Frederick Arnall
Son of a fugitive
alderman from Cornwall
my grandfather Fred
took up the shovel
in his early teens
to extract khaki alunite
from an upside-down mine
tunnelled inside a mountain
and send it cascading
down into commerce
as alum, the medicine that
fixed colours in cloth.
Marrying, he moved south
to dig refractive coal,
tarry fossil rock that still
...
Son of a fugitive
alderman from Cornwall
my grandfather Fred
took up the shovel
in his early teens
to extract khaki alunite
from an upside-down mine
tunnelled inside a mountain
and send it cascading
down into commerce
as alum, the medicine that
fixed colours in cloth.
Marrying, he moved south
to dig refractive coal,
tarry fossil rock that still
...
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