What does a poet do with a place that can’t be saved, can’t be celebrated, and will not recover? A place the world has simply finished with? Because there is a strong temptation, writing a poem like Cleator Moor, to flinch at the last moment. To reach for the redemptive ending. To find the wildflower growing in the rubble, the child laughing in the empty square, the green shoot that promises the town will rise again. We are trained to want that. We feel that a poem owes its