DURHAM

Cobbled webs of my thoughts

hang around your lanes.

A brass band nestles in my head,

cosy as a bed bug.

I’m reading from a balcony

poems of Revolution.

It’s Gala Day and the words are lost

in the coal dust of your lungs.

Your dark satanic brooding Gaol

throws a blanket over blankness:

a grim era of second hand visions

aches like a scab in a cell.

And rowing a punt up your Bishop’s arse

a shaft of sunlight on the river

strikes me only as true,

shining into the eyes of all the prisoners

swinging from Cathedral bells.

Old Durham Town, you imprison me

like a scream in a Salvation Army song,

release me soon:

someone 

get ready to hug me.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

ANGELS PLAYING FOOTBALL!

ANGELS PLAYING FOOTBALL

Some weeks before he died in 1988, the legendary Newcastle United footballer Jackie Milburn was sitting in his Ashington home with a grand-daughter on his knee. Outside, there was thunder and lightning, which frightened the wee girl: ‘What’s that noise?’, she asked her grandad anxiously. ‘Don’t worry’, ‘Wor Jackie’ replied, ‘It’s just the angels playing football.’

It was this incident which inspired the following poem, given added poignancy by the placing of an Alan Shearer shirt on the Gateshead Angel’s prodigious back by local fans before the 1998 F.A. Cup Final!

Sprinkle my ashes on St. James’s Park,

Fragments of goals on the grass.

Hear the Gallowgate roar in the dark.

All of my dreams came to pass.

Pass me my memories,

Pass me the days,

Pass me a ball and I’ll play:

Play with the angels,

Play on their wings,

Play in the thunder and lightning.

I leave you these goals in my will,

Snapshots of me on the run.

I leave you these pieces of skill,

Moments of me in the sun.

Pass me my memories,

Pass me the days,

Pass me a ball and I’ll play:

Play with the angels,

Play on their wings,

Play in the thunder and lightning.

                                                                               

Keith Armstrong