Novocastrian Favours

Shades of magpies rising

From Tyne, from banks of Tyne,

From boneyards about churches,

Ancient and modern.

Match day! Mingling with hordes

Of the living

Who only see the world in black ‘n’ white,

Old and young.

“It’s our religion!”

Faith of the damned, the dreamed,

The dinned from birth;

Second hand and new.

Only, the game’s no longer played on turf,

But across spreadsheets.

Sport is a question of balance,

Profit and loss.

And there no fans any more,

Just customers, consumers, clients,

Footfall through the turnstiles,

Win or lose.

Come final whistle the dead return

To their plots and scatterings,

The living live for extra time:

Life and death.

                                          Dave Alton

LIKE THE SPANISH CITY

The days have gone;

the laughter and shrieks

blown away.

We have all grown up,

left old Catalonian dreams 

and the blazing seaside bullfights.

We are dazed,

phased out.

Spaces where we courted

bulldozed

to make way

for the tack of tomorrow;

the hope in the sea breeze;

the distant echo of castanets

and voices scraping

in a dusty rotunda.

I remember where I kissed you,

where I lost you.

It was in Spain, wasn’t it?

Or was it down the Esplanade

on a wet Sunday in July?

Either way,

we are still

twinned with sunny Whitley Bay,

and flaming Barcelona too;

and our lives

will dance in fading photographs

from the pleasure dome,

whenever we leave home.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

POETRY BY HEART!

SKY THE GUIDE DOG

Sky is a guide dog.

He will lick you

into light.

His eyes are pools of sparks.

He is a star hound.

Sky leads us across the universal fields,

opens up the lids of daydreams,

teaches us to feel

those tender rays.

Sky’s vista runs deep,

shows up a braille galaxy.

In this cold, blind dark,

we follow his moonlit trail.

We marry our lonely visions with his

and see

heaven.

KEITH ARMSTRONG