TYNESIDE POETS!

TYNESIDE POETS!

Wednesday 29 June 2016

From the Blackboard of Darkness

















































Trapper, scholar, Shakespeare’s custodian,

Unlettered pit-boy out of Percy Main,

Illuminating the blackboard darkness

With the lamp of his imagination.

Hewer of knowledge from the dust and gas,

Picker of words from amongst cobs of coal,

Drawing on fossils of creation

With a stick of chalk. Then his poet’s soul

Took wing, flying up and out of the shaft,

His tongue no longer tainted by the damps,

Though never lost the taste for those who graft

In the petrified colons of the earth,

Pressed between floor and roof into the cramps

Of crevices, when every shift could be

The very last for all eternity.

His verse – their voice, their words – his poetry.

Balladeer for those who had no reason to rhyme,

Who had no talent for pens, had no time

To make their marks on paper, a collier

Working those rich seams of community,

Willing to dig deep and ever deeper.

When the roof fell in, when the beam broke free,

He told the tale with truth and strict metre.

Miner poet, his three score and ten spent,

Returned to the Tyne where, to the theatre

Deep underground, a seven year old was sent.



Dave Alton