The new Write Out Loud Poem of the Week is ‘Following the Money’, a poem about fracking in Yorkshire, by Tim Ellis. The poem compares gas and oil workers to Viking raiders and says: “The peaceful villages of Yorkshire / will suffer many years of torture. / Hills will clang with drills like warfare / as they suck the money.” Tim said: “I've been writing environmental poems for many years but recently I've come to focus more and more on the single issue of climate change, because it is something so huge and potentially devastating to the whole of life on this planet that it eclipses all other worries. 

“A few weeks ago I attended a protest in Scarborough when a number of companies involved in onshore oil and gas extraction were holding a conference there. It was a horribly cold, wet and blustery day but several hundred protesters drew a symbolic ‘line in the sand’ on Scarborough beach to symbolise the line that shouldn't be crossed - opening up any new fossil fuel fields in a world already critically overheating from the waste products of unsustainable energy generation.

“It felt to me as if we were trying to defend Yorkshire against some malevolent invasion from the sea, so that suggested the metaphor of Viking raiders. Later on, my partner was at the bar in Scarborough Spa where the conference was being held, getting a cup of coffee. A group of delegates were standing nearby and she overheard one of them saying "... we're moving onshore now. We're just following the money." When she told me this I knew I had a hook line for a poem, and the rest just wrote itself. I envisioned the poem primarily for the video medium, and it's now available as such on YouTube, albeit in a rather unpolished form since video is something I'm still experimenting with.

 

We also asked Tim a few questions, and here’s what he said:

 

What got you into writing poetry?

I've been putting my thoughts into verse in one way or another ever since I learnt my alphabet and how to hold a pencil. I remember when I was very young my grandparents had a 78 LP of Stanley Holloway I used to love listening to on a wind-up gramophone, and ever since, rhyme and metre has seemed a perfectly natural way to express my humour, anger and innermost cogitations. In my teens and early twenties it took the form of songwriting but when the grim reality sunk in that I will never be master of a guitar, I dispensed with the musical part of it. Once I discovered the open mic scene in Yorkshire I never looked back.

 

How long have you been writing?

See above.

 

Do you go to any open-mic nights?

Poems, Prose and Pints in my adopted home town of Harrogate is my regular haunt, and I was organiser of it for three years. It's great to see the event continuing to develop and flourish in the capable hands of Helen Shay.  These days I also regularly frequent Word Club at the Chemic in Leeds, and other events where you may occasionally have the (mis)fortune to bump into me include Speakers' Corner and Spoken Word open mics in York, and the Otley Poets.

 

Your favourite poet/poem?

That's an impossible one to answer! It changes day to day and hour to hour. I'm privileged to know many great poets who are unheard of outside the Yorkshire open mic circuit, but if I name any I'll be in trouble with all the others I didn't mention, so all I can say is "Get along to your local open mic and find out who's good!"  If you insist on me naming a specific poem I'll say that reading Blake Morrison's ‘The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripper’ http://www.blakemorrison.net/poetry/byr.htm about 20 years ago was a watershed moment for me in understanding what it is possible to achieve using traditional rhyming form with a modern vernacular. It also illustrates what a grim outlook I have, but if you've read even a few of my poems you will know that already.

 

You're cast away on a desert island. What's your luxury?

Until this year I'd have said a guitar, but I've recently got myself a digital keyboard and am obsessed with becoming at least a competent pianist before I die. I realise that learning from scratch at the age of 51 is leaving it far too late to achieve even this modest ambition but Hey, if I wanted everything to be easy I'd never have started writing poetry!

 

 

FOLLOWING THE MONEY

by Tim Ellis

 

From the North Sea, wild and grey

the horde bore down on Scarborough Bay.

I overheard one of them say

"We're following the money."

 

Like a Viking raiding force

they'd moved their enterprise onshore

to probe beneath the Yorkshire moors

for oil and gas and money.

 

A mighty fleet of high power cars

overran the Scarborough Spa.

I heard them, wassailing at the bar

thirsty for the money.

 

Men that work in gas and oil

come to portion up the spoils

of acid streams and toxic soil

poisoned by their money.

 

Deaf to demonstrators yelping

about the polar ice caps melting

they blindly row towards a healthy

rake-off on their money.

 

The peaceful villages of Yorkshire

will suffer many years of torture.

Hills will clang with drills like warfare

as they suck the money.

 

When the homeland is attacked

patriots must rise and act,

resist the marauders, drive them back.

It's people versus money.

 

Reckless in their haste to burrow

out the filth,  they'll gull tomorrow's

children, trade deep wells of sorrow

for a heap of money,

 

but when the flow becomes stagnation

they'll go to pillage other nations,

leave a trail of devastation

following the money.