TYNESIDE POETS!

TYNESIDE POETS!

Saturday 30 August 2014

MY FATHER WORKED ON SHIPS




























My father worked on ships.
They spelked his hands, 
dusted his eyes, his face, his lungs.

Those eyes that watered by the Tyne
stared out to sea
to see the world
in a tear of water, at the drop
of an old cloth cap.

For thirty weary winters
he grafted
through the snow and the wild winds
of loose change.

He was proud of those ships he built,
he was proud of the men he built with,
his dreams sailed with them:
the hull was his skull,
the cargo his brains.

His hopes rose and sunk
in the shipwrecked streets 
of Wallsend
and I look at him now
this father of mine who worked on ships
and I feel proud
of his skeletal frame, this coastline
that moulded me
and my own sweet dreams.

He sits in his retiring chair,
dozing into the night.
There are storms in his head
and I wish him more love yet.

Sail with me,
breathe in me,
breathe that rough sea air old man,
and cough it up.

Rage, rage
against the dying
of this broken-backed town,
the spirit
of its broken-backed
ships.


                               Keith Armstrong

Wednesday 13 August 2014

POEM FOR MY FRIEND GARY (1962-2014)
























Your thoughts ran deep by the Wear.
You were the only one
who brought Franz Kafka to the writers’ group meeting.
The Durham mines were your veins
and you took your genuine heritage onto the Horden bus.
Many’s the drink we poured over
our thoughts and dreams of Socialism.
In lots of ways, our hopes were cruelly dashed
but you strode on
with that serious chuckle of yours,
nobly bearing your ideals
for all the passengers to see
on your daring journey 
through this dangerous life.
You took your reading abroad
to share with others 
in worlds as far apart
as Poland, Oman and Kurdistan.
Teaching was your calling
and you had divine patience for it,
a love of times of being together
like those golden days I remember with you
listening to Dollar Brand in a Bremen concert,
washing down the day with apfelkorn,
talking cricket with you in Chester-le-Street
and laughing at NewcastleGateshead on a tourist bus
as the sun set on a New Town
and another Empire died.
Gary, I wish
I’d got to see you again
before your sweet smile left our streets and avenues.
One thing I know though:
when I googled you today,
all I found was kindness.




KEITH ARMSTRONG

Wednesday 6 August 2014

ST. MARY'S ISLAND, WHITLEY BAY


FRIENDS OF ST. MARY’S ISLAND


Around the low water mark,
kelp beds grow.
Network of rockpools,
boulder shore.

Long-legged bar-tailed godwit,
expert
at finding
mud and sand-living worms.

Seabed of rocky reefs,
shipwrecks dived within and around.
Wrasse and lumpsucker.
Seashore Code.

Remembered rambles,
geology jaunts.
Soft coral communities.
Relic dunes.


























THE BEACON


A St. Mary’s Light
incandescent
with rage.
A three ton lens,
balanced
on a trough of mercury,
kept revolving,
round the gas mantle,
by a simple pendulum 
wound up
on the hour.
A climb
up 137 steps,
inside the 120 foot tower,
a hiss of flame,
clamping 
of a prism
constantly
turning.
Since medieval times,
across the ocean fields,
this beacon 
has burned,
blinking
on the drink.
Years sailed by,
memories
of shipwrecks,
of Russian soldiers
cholera-wracked
in 1799,
of the ‘Gothenburg City’
and rats with chewed tails.
These heartbreaking waves,
the illumination
of shafts of history:
the rays
and days
of a shining Empire
sunk.




KEITH ARMSTRONG