1.

press-ganged drunks who woke in Bully Roberts’ hold

or one-eyed Captain Crow's; who, at slack water when winds veer

and gulls go quiet, watched the wind-milled heights of Liverpool

wave them away; slaving men who heard at dusk

all Africa dance, pig-tailed bucks who ransacked Calabar,

clambered out of Black-filled holds, sweat-drenched, and felt

the breeze clamp shirts ice-cold against them, winds set fair

for Kingston, sugar, rum, dragging with them wakes of shark.

2.

And one in particular – not for any merit (walking upright

is a trick of walking of decks) and not for vices (common

in men like us) – he's singled here for knowing goodness,

telling it as such. When booze unselfed him to a gentler man

he spoke of love with love, enough to show

how heart and grace might help men bear the sky, the sea.

He talked of Kitty Wilkinson, and how this woman put

such love to work the city thought it had been blessed.

Now blessings go unread, unlooked-for. Indefatigable

and Self-denying, the support of the Orphan, the Fearless

and Unwearied Nurse of the Sick: the Originator of Baths

and Wash-houses for the poor. Blackening words.

But there's a stained-glass window if you look for it,

where sunlight plays with colours like a child, of Kitty's face

among the saints. Please God there's a Heaven

and Kitty Wilkinson's among the meek

turning a creaking mangle like a barrel-organ there.

Kitty Wilkinson: ‘During the 1832 cholera epidemic, without personal or public

resources, she prepared food for the hungry, nursed the sick, cared for unwanted

children and the aged, made her tenement-home available to all, and used her boiler

for the fever-tainted clothing of neighbours; she once worked for 23 hours

continuously at her mangle; in one week she washed over 170 articles all infected

with cholera. From such selflessness sprang the decision of the Town Council, in

1842–46, to provide the first public washhouse in the world.’

PETER HOWELL WILLIAMS: Liverpolitana