A Ship Launch - Edit 1 Dukealien, Kolemath

[kolemath]

This poem is great! colloquial, philosophical, nostalgic, I really enjoyed this snapshot of time which has implications far beyond the day the poem captures. minor suggestions and complements follow:

A Ship Launch

When I was seven my Granda took me to see a ship launch.
Hundreds of folk with union jacks and nautical smiles
flooded the streets of Wallsend and floated buoyantly
two by two down into Swan Hunter's shipyard. great use of water-related terms in this stanza

The Queen Mother was there in a posh frock
and some said she looked bonny in her frilly hat, ha! "bonny.." I just saw this work in "As You Like It" describing a 'sturdy prize fighter' ..today the dictionary says bonny=beautiful, but i love the irony of a something both sturdy and frilly (ah, semantic shift..)
but Granda said, "Cannit see it meesel son 
and anyways the days bonny enuff for us." great contrast of characters here

We hadn't come to see the fashions of a royal OK maybe my reading is polluted by shakespeare but this flip of syntax reminds me of Touchstone from the same play (intentional?)
but royalty fashioned in the building of a ship
on the banks of the Tyne in a yard of wonder 
the place where I stood with senses alive. might this setting and exposition of place and character be introduced earlier? it works well for me as S2?

A faint salt breeze beneath the river's stench,
colliding steel clatters the seagulls screech.
Acetylene flames spit sparks into the sun
as an oil drum thunders down a metal ramp. should 'thunders' be in past tense?

A rhythm, a pulse, alive. I'm a fan of repetition, but I'm not sure how to interpret this line. is a pulse too a rhythm? what's alive?

Cacophonous klaxons scream a pathway clear,
huge sentinel cranes swivel, pivot and rise.
Synchronised forklifts pirouette on an axis great diction
as dismantled scaffolding is thrown onto a heap,

A rhythm, a pulse, alive.

Electricity crackles, sparks and arcs to fuse,
the white hot welders flame rumbles as it fires.
Syncopated hammers beat a ragtime groove
as a distant pneumatic drill trembles the ground. I second the comment on rhythm; smart work, turning shipyard noise into music

A rhythm, a pulse, alive.

Everywhere beaming smiles 
beneath hard hats on hard heads. again, exposition of setting and characters earlier in the poem? let the event move straight through these stanzas?

Everywhere pride.

And at the centre around which everything else orbited
the Ark Royal stood silently slumbering on the slipway
an anaesthetised behemoth soon to be awoken
and set free from the hammer and the anvil. great diction

Enormous serpents of rust lay coiled in her shade
poised to pounce should she still need a final shackling do snakes pounce or strike?
before a river baptism and the seas confirmation more great diction and metaphor
opened all points on her compass to endless horizons.

I don't remember waiting,
or the passage of time.
No countdown crescendo. 
No flag fluttering fanfare.
No building of anticipation and precipice
drop.
No bottle swinging concussed,
helpless at the end of a rope. I like this stanza in and of itself, but it seems to contradict the 'building of anticipation' and 'crescendo' which (to me) are the function of previous stanzas.

I remember the skyline slowly moving
as the giant grey beast woke up moaning.
Gathering an unstoppable momentum.
Down and down shaking the ground.
How she howled as her metal shuddered
and how she screamed the rest of the way
until she met the river with an almighty thunderous
boom that sent a tumultuous wave surging towards the far bank. this stanza does smart work at capturing the enormous action of a ship launch, but is 'tumultuous' too latin and formal for the work of a shipyard? (seconding the previous comment on this line)

Then, without warning
there came a furious rasping hiss
and in an impetuous rage 
the serpents gave chase.

Violently jolting and shedding their skin way to carry the metaphor across stanzas
as they uncoiled and hurtled to the water,
leaving behind a thick cloud of rust
that obscured everything from view.

Gradually

the haze cleared to reveal

emptiness. also a fan of line breaks, (don't tell uselessblueprint). 

A decayed wasteland, half a decades dilapidation.

Workers, wizards, well wishers all vanished
and in their place half dismantled cranes lay strewn 
across the storm battered yard, roofless fabrication sheds collapsed
onto seaweed carpeted slipways, scaffolding poles and pylons
toppled, power cables ripped from concrete, concrete ripped from earth
the whole damn forest completely upended.
No saplings, no roots, no life except rats—bigger than ever
—and the stray cats that refuse to leave the home they've known for years. this stanza is smart to offer critical commentary on the environmental (and human) impact of such large-scale endeavors (while also establishing strong contrast, a calm after the storm sort of effect, to mix metaphors)

"Wu used to build ships here ye knaa",
Granda reminds the cats as he hands
out the last of the food we brought for them.