Three Poems from the Archives of Poetry North East

Your Words

your words like echoes across an empty carpark,

torturing the trees that made us sleep,

     lost pines, scenting the evening

     falling secrets from your wet mouth.

your words like small whips against my back,

swaying in the dead music,

     a harmony of sour wine,

     shines, and stands up to boast.

your words like raindrops against cracked windows,

seeping quietly through my loud skull,

     the virgin and the widow within

     can only tell me of love.

your words like marching ghosts from their graves,

tearing hearts with invisible hands

     a clash of dark weapons beneath the sand,

     the smile vanishing quickly into space.

your words come and go like passing ships,

slotting into violent grey seascapes,

     impossible pathways, twisting back the head

     to see the last movement of lips.

your words

your words will live forever

     as soon as I see what you say.


                                        Paul Harland


Sunset In Chopwell Woods



The sun is balanced on the straight edge

Of a distant hill;

A filmed dancer in tip-toe pose

She collapses into herself

With slow serenity

Like a moving picture

Whose projection has slowed.



And last left

Is a curved lip of light

And the afterflow

When the audience flows

With delight to applaud

And the curtains close

On a perfect show.


                                        Wendy Zoula



Visitation (Leazes Park)



In the early chapter of a mid-winter’s day

only the bird-choirs erase

the stillness of trees.



Something moves and you consider.



With this existence evolves the judgement

of thought

after the acceptance of memory.



                                        Gordon Phillips





Demolition of Sunderland Town Hall


Such a building as you were

Demands an epitaph

As much as sealed copies of The Times,

Sovereigns and musty ideas of the future

They launched you with a century ago.

Your citizens won’t miss you,

Though you were their Hall,

To a stranger – well

It happens all the time.

Another hotel? What the hell,

We live in suitcases,

Who needs pillars?

The bells hanging from the end of a crane

Toll surprisingly deep, rhythmic, unnoticed.


                                        Michael Standen

BYKER HILL

Poems by Keith Armstrong

FIRST PUBLISHED BY IRD ARTS CLUB 1972

byker

antique mart of memory’s remnants

glad bag of fading rags

bedraggled old flag

blowing in the wind over newcastle

    

we stand on street corners shivering in the winter

like birds sheltering from the wind

we do not rattle loose change in our pockets

only the nuts and bolts of poverty

we are splinters

ill-shaven

our clothes droop on us

using our bones for hangers

we avoid mirrors and images of ourselves in shields road doorways

we do not look through windows

we draw curtains of beer across our eyes

we sleep/place bets

every week on dole day hunger prods us awake

it is instinct

it is a fear of never waking

yesterday’s records in a raby street window

yesterday’s news

revolving today

pictures of byker trapped in a camera

yesterday’s photos

developed today

yesterday’s headlines

today’s wrapping paper

yesterday’s wars are bloodless today

snot drips nose

wailing ragman drags a foot

and sniffs

any old rags

any old rags

hair like straw

homespun

snot runs

licks cracked mouth

any old rags

any old rags

as raby street

               declines

          into

water

any old rags

any old rags

watson’s toffee factory

wrapped in mist

melts in the watering mouth of the dawn

another byker child is born

another byker son assumes

the dusty jacket of a byker man 

and this is the truth

the wind-ripped reality between the grave and the womb

the aimlessness

the weary broken people

shuffling through the measured lines of architects’ reports

the cripples

the dying streets

behind the brash and snatching shops

the coughing strays

this is all the small print

the drifting words

beneath the glossy covers

and this is mother byker now

a wasteland of schools

churches public houses

a frail old woman

her mouth and eyes bricked over

tilting

on her last legs

change

creeps like a lizard over the face of byker

dragging behind it its retinue of planners

                                                wreckers 

                                                builders and

                                                    visionaries

tomorrow

you will wake from your years of sleeping

and find what you knew to be yours being hauled away

over byker bridge on the backs of lorries

your yesterday

in clouds of dust

byker folk are living still

byker folk on byker hill

fading flowers on a window sill

byker folk

                hang

                        on 

Returning to the Sea

Lounge seems such an inappropriate word

Even though he sits there quietly,


Bolstered by cushions,


Idle hands folded casually in his lap,


Eyelids drooping.


The world outside is sliced into thin strips


By a Venetian blind


That’s probably dusty because they always are


And the dust will be him,


Slowly flaking away his four score and five.


There’s barely a sliver of him remaining.






Am I looking into a scrying mirror


Foreshadowing my own future?


I know I should be recording his history


Before he’s engulfed by it,


Making a record to give voice


To those albums of snaps I’ll be left with,


Illusions in monochrome and paling colour,


As if time


Could be developed at an optimum moment


And fixed.


Over Pendle, that whale of a hill,


An ocean of dark cloud swims before the wind,


Our present sunshine,


Colloped into long thin ingots of light pyrites,


Is too glittery to last.






Rain, when it arrives, will be unwelcome,


He’s already drowning


From internal springs which wont be staunched,


Bronchials barely coping with the flash-flood,


Bloated legs mocking emaciation,


And weeping pores.


Years must weigh heavily


To result in such weariness as this,


To press his world inwards,


Downwards,


To hobble him


So he shuffles between easy chair and dining chair


And bed.


Such, these days, is the geography of his life.






Just a room away a silent piano,


Old scores laid to rest,


Bass drone of the dehumidifier


Sucking the last of his fluid playing from the air.


All those composers he tended to so passionately


Are long dead


Even to him now.


Finally, all music must end in silence,


Whether the last note is emphatic


Or pianissimo,


The performance draws to a close.


He doesn’t even listen anymore,


A library of CDs


Mute in their sleeves as blanks.






Rain arrives


Pebble dashing the picture window


Bars of the blind giving an impression of security.


With stoic deliberation


He lifts his lids,


Turns to stare out,


Draws an arid breath across sandpaper


And, in a near whisper strained through a pillow, says,


“Looks bleak, doesn’t it.”


Words are feathers catching in his throat


Inducing a spasm of coughing


Which might just shake loose every bone in his body


From its flimsy fixings.


There is no freedom of speech anymore,


Not under this regime.






Newspaper still folded,


Too weighty with world events for him to lift;


It will be slipped neatly into the magazine rack


A daily countdown


No one seems able to cancel,


Not while he still occupies, however slightly,


The absence forming in his chair.


I pick up the paper and read it,


I can at least do this for him


Or myself,


Suspending my disbelief.


Also, I can look out at the slatted weather


Seeing he’s slipped into a doze again,


And, I admit,


Glance to check his thin chest still has a rhythm to it.


Cloud, shattering against unyielding glass, is running,


Via gutters and channels,


Back towards the undifferentiated sea.


There is a shallow beat to his chest


And his eyes prise themselves open


To look once again


Out into the drenching gloom.


“Yes dad,” I say nonchalantly, “It does look bleak.”

                                                                          




 Dave Alton