DOMINIC WINDRAM - TWO MORE POEMS

Lost in the wilderness

We are lost in the miasmal darkness

With inadequate tools to help us find

Our way to the unbroken kingdom

We are lost in the labyrinth of words

For we are incapable of naming

The essence of blood or fire or star

We are far from hearing wise voices

Or signs in the wilderness we have to

Resign ourselves to fragments of bone

& obscure purposes that cannot

Be made clear by the light of reason

We pretend that we have made progress with

Liturgies that cannot adequately

Describe the sheer fullness of Being

Yet there’s a reassuring, spectral wind

From Time’s distant, long forgotten shores that

Still stirs intermittingly through the cracks

In the frail and all too human structure

Freedom Tower

Monolithic glass structure

Proudly reflecting the sky

Modern tower of Babel

Nerve centre of capitalism

With cloud bursting antenna

To receive signals from lesser gods

Born of grand hubris

Deliberately detached

From the world’s perpetual pain

With no sense of the tragic

For progress must continue

Despite contemporary hindrances

Monolithic glass structure

Penetrating the sky

Illuminated intermittingly

With the red, white and blue

Of a peculiar conception

Of freedom

SEAMLESS CHANGE

Standing on this hill, this mounded culm chucked
Out from hollowed earth, where darkness sucked
Men down into its precious depths, pressed them
Beneath pages of rock hard to the seam,
The black seam and all its different damps,
To pick out, despite scarred backs and leg cramps
And the wheezing of props, their value in coal.
But then, another blackening, the fall
From favour, the locking of gates, sealing
Of shafts, with a bitter present stealing
The future, leaving only heritage.
So very difficult these days to gauge
From atop this hillock of rough-grassed spoil
Where the headstock once stood. That patch of soil
And clay, fenced and sapling planted, must be
The site of the bathhouse. Not much to see
Now for joggers and dog walkers, strollers
And fly-tippers, those casual callers
Whose fleeting footfalls leave barely a mark
And no echoes deep, deep down in those dark
Galleries settling beneath a country park.

                                                                                                Dave Alton

'THE HOT-HEADED GENIUSES OF SANDGATE'

The hot-headed geniuses of Sandgate are leaping round town tonight
but the place is drunk and the walkways stagger
and there seems no sense in historic streets.
Where old sailors lamented and hand carts rested
and ships grew up on the river,
the times merge in the swaying crowds
and fancy dress keelmen swig in the night.
Here's the 'hot headed geniuses'
gannin doon with the tide
to plant bites on fresh lasses' necks,
and the hours keel over
and the days rock on,
as the love-bitten 'Lass of Byker Hill'
falls in the Keelman's Arms.
So let the pipers play
this Tyneside story
all over again.
It's a Geordie nightmare,
a black and white dream
all for you,
with knobs on.


 
KEITH ARMSTRONG/TREVOR TEASDEL