TAKING COALS TO NEWCASTLE... (My second poem about VERYAN, CORNWALL...)

 Taking Coals To Newcastle…

(Veryan, Cornwall, during a visit in 2011…)

‘That’s like taking coals to Newcastle…’

I recall

Being taught

And was then forced to understand,

Distraught, 

Despite initial ignorance.

And then at my leisure, I saw

A pair of ingots of fossil fuel,

Lying beside an inn’s stone fireplace

And I recalled the adage, 

The saying, the rule.

And irony ran apace…

For that Cardiff coal, salvaged from the deep

Had been taken from wreck of the Hera for the New Inn to keep

And were memorials to the drowned German 

crewmen’s souls,

In a hostelry which lay close to the yard of a merchant of coals…

The wreck near Veryan of that coal-laden vessel

was surely just like ‘…taking coals to Newcastle…’

Pete Ray

After thinking about the old saying quoted above, it was surprising therefore to discover that coal was 

taken to the New Inn at Veryan by divers, who had explored the wreck of the German ship Hera, which had been wrecked nearby in 1914. 

And in 2011, the inn lay just along the road from the ruins of a coal merchant’s yard…