TYNESIDE POETS!

TYNESIDE POETS!

Saturday 23 February 2013

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


Saturday 16 February 2013

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

Sunday 10 February 2013

Friday 1 February 2013

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