GOODBYE!

On 23rd August 1305, William Wallace was executed. At that time, the punishment for the crime of treason was that the convicted traitor was dragged to the place of execution, hanged by the neck (but not until he was dead), and disembowelled (or drawn) while still alive. His entrails were burned before his eyes, he was decapitated and his body was divided into four parts (or quartered). Accordingly, this was Wallace's fate. His head was impaled on a spike and displayed at London Bridge, his right arm on the bridge at Newcastle-upon-Tyne, his left arm at Berwick, his right leg at Perth, and the left leg at Aberdeen. Edward may have believed that with Wallace's capture and execution, he had at last broken the spirit of the Scots. He was wrong. By executing Wallace so barbarically, Edward had martyred a popular Scots military leader and fired the Scottish people's determination to be free.

WALLACE’S RIGHT ARM

Wave goodbye ye oafs of culture,

let your rootless dreams drift away.

History has come to drown you in blood

and wash up your empty schemes.

Yon tottering Palaces of Culture

are seized by the rampaging sea.

They are sailing back to the Equator

to burn in a jungle of fear.

Three hundred million years me lads,

unseen from these high-rise days:

an ice-sheet  thick as an ocean,

all those hours just melted down.

Into rich seams of coal,

tropical plants were fossilised;

the sandbanks grew into sandstone

and the mudflats into shale.

And the right arm of William Wallace

shakes with wrath in this firework night.

It is waving goodbye to your history,

it is saying hello to Baghdad.

All the brains of your Labour Party

are stashed in a carrier bag.

Down Bottle Bank in the darkness,

you can hear Wallace scream in a dog.

And will you hang, draw, and quarter my home street?

Will you drop bombs on the music hall?

You have taken the bones from our loves

and taken the piss from the Tyne.

So give me your arm Good Sir Braveheart,

I’ll take it a walk through the park

and I’ll use it to strike down a student

with an empty shell of a soul.

And I’d give my right arm to make ships,

my left to stoke dreams alive.

And I will dance on in the brilliance of life

until oppression is blown away.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

NORTHERN INFORMER!

http://northerninformer.co.uk/news/news-select.php?id=19

NVCP Joseph Skipsey Award winners in action!

Two poems by Laurice Gilbert, National Coordinator of the New Zealand Poetry Society.

Percival Street

We proposed over Marcel’s Peppered Steak.

Me first, you first, one or the other.

From the Dixon Street steps

the lights of Wellington shone

at half-mast for the imminent death

of my current relationship;

the one you invaded,

the one I was ready to betray.

A room that should be storing bric-à-brac;

instead a single bed with evidence

the sheets have never been washed.

A succession of overnight guests.

Crestfallen curtains failing to meet;

a communal duvet past its use-by date

hovers over us long enough to disguise

reunion timidity. A minute, maybe three.

Laughter from surrounding student flats.

A couple in the next room argues and

our six-week separation drifts to nothing.

Night life on The Terrace breathes around us.

Scramble of skin meeting skin, face to face,

stomach to stomach. The scent of sensuality.

And the end of the night.

And the going home for breakfast.

So many breakfasts these thirty years,  

though none with the taste of Percival Street

where unwashed sheets and failing curtains

defied the boundaries we thought we knew.

Laurice Gilbert

Safe at Home

Night, and there is nothing outside my bedroom window

No red corrugated iron shed, by day ringing with the sound of Dad’s tools

No aviary of zebra finches peeping into the kitchen window below

No fairy flowers on the fuchsia, no posies on the hydrangea

No washing line to swing from, kicking the top of  Dad’s birthday kowhai

No swing of thick grey pipes from the council tip, carrying me high enough to reach          

the wash-house roof

No square of lawn piled high with leftover wood, sometimes a princess’s castle,       

sometimes a pirate ship

No outside toilet populated by whirling dervish daddy-long-legses

No hole in the side fence where I slip past the leathery taupata to visit Jeannie, who            

feeds me chocolate cup cakes and Robinson’s lime cordial when Mum is in hospital

No hill where the Governor-General lives surrounded by pine trees; where a Bad     

Thing happened to a lady so we are forbidden to play in the spicy darkness with the       

cushioned floor; where the policemen check up on you if you do

It is night so there is nothing outside my bedroom window. Except, of course, for    

passing spaceships flashing their comforting red and green lights.

Laurice Gilbert

AWARD WINNERS

There are 2 winners of the Northern Voices Community Projects Joseph Skipsey Award this year:


Rachel Cochrane - Stocksfield based writer and dramatist and the brains behind the Listen Up North website. Her energy and motivation and the help she has given to the region's writers is phenomenal. This award is well earned and overdue.

Dave Alton - Burnley born Dave has battled away with his poetry for years on Tyneside, his adopted community, and he deserves wider recognition for this efforts. His work is rooted in the traditional folk songs and ballads of the region. With Keith Armstrong he helped establish the innovative Poetry Tyneside blog. Now that he has moved to Barnsley, he will be very much the instigator of Northern Voices Community Projects' enterprises in the Yorkshire area, developing exchange links with Tyneside, as well as maintaining his own commitment to the north east.

Further information: NVCP tel 0191 2529531

www.northernvoicescommunityprojects.co.uk

BURNS NIGHT!

Burns Night with The Black Light Engine Room!!!
Friday, 25 January 2013
19:00 until 23:00

Celebrate Burns Night with BLER by coming along with your poems and getting legless!

Featuring the legendary Keith Armstrong!! Sara Dennis!! Midway Arcadia!!

Blast into the New Year with the Best! £3 entry. 

O'Connells,
29-41 Bedford Street, TS1 2LL Middlesbrough

Singing In the New Year

Here the old year’s put out

There in black bin bags

Where gutters chuckle as tarmac weeps.

Wind plays its horsehair bow

Plaintively across

Strings singing with electricity,

Drawn between pylons.

To the east,

In the middle distance,

A cloud hangs,

Fog forms,

Smoke

Is still rising,

Rising beyond control,

Fanned by ill-winds,

Virtuoso performances

By ensembles of discord and those agents

Pitching

For commission.

Looking back, Janus resolves

Not to look forwards,

Not this time,

Not ever again

As he does every year end,

But, he will of course,

At the first pop of the first firework as first note

Of Auld Lang Syne

Solicits a first kiss for the first of the first.

And he smiles,

As if all those sponges soaked in alcohol

Really do wipe clean the slate,

Really do delete memory.

Cross forearms, join hands

All in a line,

All in a circle,

Raise your glasses,

Raise your voices,

With whiffs of smoke signalling resolutions

Already broken,

Begin (with gusto)

Slinging out the old year,

Singing in the new.

                                                            Dave Alton

Happy New Year from Listen Up North!

http://listenupnorth.com/newsletter/513-happy-new-year