Poetry Contest and Inspiration

"The Great Unwashed" 

Line count: 13
Free verse
For Promptly Poetry, Week 25. Now entered for Poetry Contest and Inspiration, January 2022.
Prompt: Riding on the Bus: Write a poem based on a time you’ve traveled by bus – whether a school bus, around town, or a long distance trip to visit a certain destination.
Note: I pondered a long time how to name this poem. It is an account of riding the bus every morning in Coventry in winter, sun not quite risen but a grey sky casting some dismal light upon the world, and we, the workers, trying hard not to think of the day in the factory getting ever nearer. Some worthless toff once described the English working class as “the Great Unwashed” and it came to me as a fairly apt description of us in those moments.