poetry by catherine graham

Hyem

Home

She welcomes with a smile as wide as the Tyne:

This city celebrates different voices.

Her daughters sold clothes, second-hand at Sandgate

as the boats sailed like long-lost lovers into Dean Street,

keeping their promise.

Reborn, her lassie sings a brand new song,

silencing the battalion of buses

that bully past the building societies,

while the lads that once danced for their daddies

push bairns in buggies, with one hand.

And still, people remain puddled

by the play of her spirited, underground rivers

that flow, like lifeblood right up to Spital Tongues.

She is a carnival of bridges skinning a heron-coloured sky.

Flooded with pride, she lands her logo

like kisses, on lamp-posts in Grey Street.

Catherine Graham

Dad

Sometimes he'd bring home 

samples 

of brand new chocolate bars

and mis-shaped 

wafer biscuits in a silvery tin.

His big delivery van 

would roll up 

onto the cobbles and mmm

the smell of Rowntrees jelly

on his tall brown gaberdine.

Catherine Graham

a new poem by Thomas Alexander - David Williams

the sun is hanging low in the november night
and the winter wind is hitting me hard
i think of my gorgeous goddess
and only warmth is what i feel and i think of you
then my whole day seems brighter than 1000 solar systems
and you make me a better man
when i hear your angelic voice it makes me realise 

how lucky i am

speaking to a goddess
my goddess
and you've helped me in so many ways 

so this is something in return

Thomas Alexander - David Williams

MORE FROM THE POETRY NORTH EAST ARCHIVE

ALL SAINTS




Prickly grass
perilous edge to the street below
                            and tiny people.
All bones beneath me;
                            ghosts and memories.


Summer days when the
                           rich met
Sunday mornings; church steps.
The sweep to the Tyne
                           (blood in our veins)
The dome of the circle
                            and rounded pews.


Pink tinged sky for vespers
As carraiges roll by
                            down to the quay.


Deep the bones buried.










Dorothy Neil






STATIONS


I was the middle of the town,
Up line or down
They gathered round,
Shopkeeper, newsboy, knowing best
Where served their human interest.
Less central by far,
Library, Church or Cinema
Claiming their special congregation,
But thy came and left from the
Railway Station.


Build me then of monumental stuff,
Only the best is good enough,
Wrought iron, brass, teak and stone,
For I am middle of your town,
Robing with rich and noble feature,
All your arrival and departure,
Your fond greeting and sad farewell,
Like the son who left for Passchendale.
And here his mother stood,
For only at this place
Could they ever meet again
Or else in heaven.








Tom Hadaway

Axe

It’s just the wrong angle for the bow saw,
With a new blue-steel blade tempered and tensed,
For it to rip into the still wet flesh
Of the forsythia lopped to a stump.
Father and son debating the best way
When granddad brings an old short-shafted axe
Pitted with rust from two generations
Of non-use, corroded, but still quite keen.
Both father and son weigh, heft and wield it
Each in turn, hacking into sap bleeding
Rump and root of the shrub, sharing the thrill
Of thoughtless, brutal labour. Afterwards,
Father discovers the axe is but one
Of so many immemorial tools
His own granddad employed with craftsman’s guile,
Making the red wooden pull-along train,
Loco and tender: Bang-bang granddad who
Was struck from life and memory of his
Four years old grandson by the rap of the
Policeman’s knuckles hard on the front door,
Reluctant harbinger bringing dire news
Of the real train and the dead platelayer.
The old axe, with due diligence, severed
Stump and root from the earth, leaving an absence
Along the line of bushes and bedding plants;
And father knowing he doesn’t have the craft
To employ those venerable tools to fashion
Some wooden toy that might become well loved
By his own grandchild still in gestation,
But who may, one day, also forget him.

                                                 Dave Alton

Certainly

Certainly morning must be deaf to me,
While streets and streets are tumbling with litter,
Headlamps are bright as the song of a thrush
Sung while trees hold hard a moon over the road.

There can be no suggestion I appeared,
With too few letters being written on ice.
An obscure church clock finds time for echoes
As if dumb office blocks are all bell towers.

Although CCTV pays me no heed
That very blindness causes me to worry.
Should pavements split open spewing lava,
Who’d stop shadows being incinerated?

Clouds must not be allowed to rain my name
To shatter on kerbstones, run in gutters.
Bankers, behind closed doors, are at a loss
As the red shift measures out distances.

Now’s the time to slam books of poetry
And make libraries crematoria.
From dust and ash and the spit off my tongue
I’ll mould a golem, then refuse it life.

First glimmer of light betrays the darkness,
Memories collectively forget dreams,
Dissembled church, ringing with silence, allows
That I might slip away quite unnoticed.

                                                    Dave Alton

Two poems from the archives of The Tyneside Poets

The Drinkers


“Booze and booze again.

Along this beach, Mastodon traces still
in sand.

A single cloud, one bruise I can feel
swelling behind my brows.

The denim-blue Ocean gives up its garbage,
white as a blind man’s eye; cratewood, flint beads and khaki weed,
a dead seal buffeted by the tide, like a
lost kid suitcase.

Time waits, bottle-wise for every man, it
finds us here drunk and windswept, the
daylight itching like sand-mites in each
other’s eyes.

The distinctive canvas of that racing
yacht is not so now;
becoming one with the Danish coastline,
or is it Germany, that transparent blue-
skin of rock?

Seals are gutted and their pelts salted and
keel-hauled:

the sun cooks blisters on my thighs and
back wine slops from my flask,
blood from a gash.”

                                        Vincent Morrison

Aubade

Day breaks with the resonant clatter
of dustbins being emptied;
the unintelligible chatter of milk bottles
and the tuneless solo of a vacuum cleaner.
There is the breaking and revving,
the coming and going,
the greeting and objecting,
of delivery vans.
The vague orchestra of traffic
unfolds, gathering momentum,
as the non-winners of the football pools
seethe into the non-enthusiasm
of a new day.

                                       O.M. Canning

ALEXANDRA STREET

Pout-chested pigeons pick
Their way through garbage
That litters pathetic plots
Of sour earth.
And soot-stained privet,
Plastic to the touch,
Struggles in vain and fails
To decorate or brighten
The crumbling decay
Of once fine buildings.
Threadbare is the corpse,
Its rotting rafter bones
Protude from tileless roofs
And corrugated sheeting shutters its eyes.
A diesel like a death watch beetle
Scuttles past
Disturbing the twitching sleep
Of the dying geriatric.
Yet human life,
Like a maggot in a carcass,
Nibbles away at existence,
Viewing with alarmed suspicion
Footfalls and voices
That ring hollow through the tomb.
Faded curtains twitch
And the mad eye of the lonely
Peers through stained glass windows.
And the mad brain of the lonely
Atrophies
In fear of that fatal knock.






Goff Esther

the spanish city, whitley bay (1910-2010)

BAY WHEEL

Here I come

through Bay Fog,

gold ring glinting

in the Park Road dark.

Seeking a North Sea fortune,

looking for a tuneful lass

to make my aching skin sing

of Wooden Dollies

and Spanish Galleons,

sailing across the old fairground

to sunnier climbs.

There’s this guy in the Rockcliffe

and he looks like a ghost.

He’s as pale as the weather

amd mist drips from his nose.

He’s an Old Waltzer,

my young Uncle Walter,

and his eyes are all talk of the War.

He did his strong courting

in an Old Spanish City

and the rose he seduced

was a Cullercoats’ flame.

Now those cold bones are ready

for the warm Crematorium:

a Memorial to seconds flown by;

the joy of the candyfloss,

the hum of the summer,

the simmer of hamburgers,

and the hot suck of kisses dashed off.

And I am the dome of your past,

the breast of the future,

and I will hug your treasured snaps,

stick your faces in my locket

and spin you down my blouse.

For I have given you joy.

I have thrown you lifelines 

and bobbing girls and boys.

And my Bay Wheel

keeps on turning.

My Big Heart

goes on burning.

My Sweet,

my sweet Streets,

my Catalon Whitley,

kiss me.

Kiss me.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

football poetry

Angels Playing Football

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 2006    as arranged and performed by folk singer jim mageean

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 notorious Gateshead Angel’s prodigious back by local fans before the 1998 F.A. Cup Final!


football poets: http://www.footballpoets.org/p.asp?Id=26031

Two poems from the archives of The Tyneside Poets

The Whooper Swans at Delaval

One night I whispered to her
In late October – “The swans are back.”
But she was asleep, and so
I threaded them on our dreams.

And since, she saw them on her way to work,
And counted – ninety at least,
All feeding in a field, and not on dreams.

Then, one cold November weekend,
Pitching heavy footsteps around the lake,
We saw them coming in –
Or rather, heard, the sound-path low
And harsh, as if some beautiful weapon approached.

Out of the dark they came, stooped low,
The backing wings hollowing the air,
Paddles feeling for the other element;
Then wave after wave, and each time
Holding back the heart so that
Its beating waited on magnificence.

They carved themselves as strong in me
As the still ponds held the ageing light
Like china in the darkened fields.
But perhaps the shape was always there –
An image in the mind from Yeats –
And needed but the borrowed sky
As manuscript for mind and sight.

For they unearthed in me a need I did not know was there,
Not just for beauty planing out of air,
But need that is the same for me as for those Northern men,
My ancestors who sailed the winds,
Who knew no need but water, sky and shelter from the ice;
And when they saw it, settled, but
Did not delude themselves their foothold held upon the earth.

                                                                              John H. Earl



Bede

The gulls rise in a white wave
from the Slake.
A plague replaces flood.
The wind blown in the wattle is
as tuneless as a trembling boy
who sings his prayers here
seven times a day;
yet holds to faith
the straw, the wood, the stone.

Here Michael stands triumphant
when
the manuscripts illuminate.
A white wave rising
from the Slake
has filled all Europe
with its Saxon light.

                          Eleanor Makepeace

Two poems by Alwyn Gornall

BOMBAY DREAMS


With industry closing and skills eroding,
lost souls become re-training volunteers;
re-cast as 1–1–8 operators,
retail assistants and micro-chip pioneers.

Swap your overalls and steel capped safety boots
for Italian chinos and fashionable frills.
Swap hard labour and sweat producing toil
for customer care and inter-personal skills.

Become a call centre operator,
Information at your finger tips.
Experience isn’t necessary
When stored on micro-chips.

Become part of the new revolution,
new technology arriving every day;
hyper fast processors and touch-screen phones
and quick-fix jobs that can be thrown away.

Oh! Sorry,
we’ve now replaced you
with someone in Bombay!

WILD HORSES

Young love... delicate and fragile,
Like a spiders web.
Prone to be broken as easily
As a strand of gossamer thread.

Excitement and passion
Filling young ones’ dreams.
A kiss freezing time...
For an eternity, it seems.

Mature love... soaring like the wind
Powerful and free.
Beating in our hearts
Like the pounding of the sea.

As binding as an oath;
Held fast by the heart.
Two becoming one,
Wild horses cannot part.

A Renga by the Byker Writers' Group

Kaleidoscope: Flights of Fancy


We are sad today,
Watermelon moon hangs low:
Winter is coming.


Ghouls and ghosts are out abroad,
Bonfires blazing in the sky.


Placid pup looks sad,
Cats are tigers hunting mice:
Our toast is sticky.


Thorns, berries above mud, snow:
Clear blue skies assault noses.


What in life is true?
What around us is falsehood?
You need evidence!


Trees are out, the shoppers too,
Christmas time creates good will.


Tennis, a good game,
Football, the sport of nations:
This is not cricket.


First shoots of warmth and colour,
Longer days, shorter nights: hope.


The green creature smiles;
An extra-terrestrial,
Laughing at the earth.


Upside down in warmth, down tools,
Brush bench, pour drink, relax, bask.


On the beach laid back,
Sun shining, but not for long,
Down comes rain, run quick!


Colourful leaves drifting,
How sad to be rejected.

THE WHITE HORSE OF KILBURN - A FILM

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQXzN-RBOWY

Poetry North East magazine - a selection from the archive

Fingerprint


They have taken the marks and whorls
Of a universe which is purely personal
To the individual but common to all
And used it as a weapon against him.
Who else could think of taking the pattern of a snowflake,
No two identical,
Documenting it in a computer,
Letting the snowflake know,
Just in case it made a wrong move,
Totally oblivious to the beauty of snow?






Dave Howe

This Side of the Rainbow


Precarious farmsteads sitting
on the edges of their fells
jus balancing economies
across close contour lines.


We passed them by
when I was five
and climbing Chapel Fell to look
for "where the rainbows end".


Instead there stretched
dissected plateau
crouching to a neutral sky.


Like folks off now deserted farms,
we never found a rainbow's end.






Eleanor Makepeace

The Hoppings, Newcastle


Last night was the last: today
the lorries and dormobiles
are ready to go, the dodgems are stowed away,
dive bombers and ferris wheels
are packed as neat as biscuits. Jack the Ripper
is roping canvas, Dracula's Daughter brings
the baby's wind up, and the stripper
(naughty but nice) is clearing the breakfast things.


Where children play in the sun,
under the lights the servants of the Lord
advanced their placards against the Evil One;
they wake to Sunday, the promise of their reward
bright for another spell. But rich and poor
are points of refernce here, not body and soul:
loud engines jam the larksong over the moor,
and the big trailers roll.






Richard Kell

Newcastle


The alleyways where we’d hide
from prowling policemen.


The corners where tramps
could be comfortable.


All the meandering places
for twilight walks have gone.


At times the ghosts were real,
Carriages on Sundays at All Saints.


Voices shouting through arches.
The square of Holy Trinity
Now a place for quiet meditation.


This was my city
but now the concrete belies
all the tales and stories


now the earthdiggers defy
the rattling carriages.
Only the moon is left unchanged.


But not untouched.


                            


Dorothy Neil






Star Over Lindisfarne


Cold star,
Winking down the rolling vertigo of sky,
Here I am, alone,
With nothing between us but the pulsating void of night.


Beneath the naked sky,
I have come to you.
Washed by waves of night,
Encircled by the heaving purple sea,
Bathed in spangled night-brightness across the jagged dunes
I have come,
And you don’t care


My eyes burn in the night wind;
My heart burns –
And you, cold star, inanimate,
need no love.
Yet you and I are intimate.


The great black castle lurches behind me:
Heaving, eerie, into the sky,
As if to weigh me to the Earth.
But you, star,
You and I are pulled together.
Forever apart, we hurtle through the universe.
You and I are intimate.






Roger Harvey

Two Songs by G.F. Phillips

The Watermen


The Craig family worked as watermen along the quayside in Newcastle. They carried out many a rescue from the Tyne at a time when there was about an average of one drowning per week in the mid to late 19th century.


James Craig he lived in Ouse Street, a Quayside waterman,
Who at the age of fourteen he went from lad to man;
He heard shouts from the river; a man was in distress,
He was saved, he was saved gannin’ under
Afore the waters got him forst.


An’ James his reputation was sealed reit from the start,
The tark that he was dead brave, a true waterman at heart,
For he lived his life in danger - divvn’t aal the watermen –
How he saved, how he saved some twenty folk,
They were one an’ the same t’ him.


His son who was his namesake he didn’t have to ask,
He would be a waterman an’ got doon to the task;
He learned the swell an’ currents; he was the savin’ grace;
Who was there, who was there to be rescued,
An’ nowt bad was said t’ their face.


Then George put in a rescue, a brotherly resolve
An’ got a floatin’ polisman in a slippery tight hold;
So up he comes, he’s collared; they were cold an’ tired an’ wet.
So shackled, so shackled to his body, oh -
Much better than a noose round his neck.


Now last of aal was Joseph he wouldn’t be ootdone,
He never bragged aboot it or said me, A’m yor best son;
He never wanted glory an’ he never wanted fame;
To be strong to be strong to haul them up
If he must he’d de it agin.






A Second Look (Hannah’s Song)
‘I have often said I was, still am and always will be a plain country woman, and proud to be a plain country woman.’
Hannah Hauxwell of Low Birk Hatt farm, in Teesdale


With Hannah’s trusty bucket
She trudged down to the burn,
Her stick to break its icy grip,
How living alone she learned
To savour every running drop
To wash in, drink and cook,
The least she’s got – she’s none too proud
To give things a second look.


Long has been her moor-land home,
Her farm’s ancestral seat;
Her dale this one big garden,
And through winter’s slow retreat
Make do and mend they were her ways
Despite her threadbare looks,
The least she’s got – she’s none too proud
To give things a second look.


Now Hannah’s trusty bucket
Hung up it had no worth
For age had loosened all her grip
And ice hardened rebirth;
Though she to village ways was bound,
With keepsakes, all she took
Reminds her that she’s none too proud
To give things a second look.

the long march back

25TH ANNIVERSARY FOLK AND POETRY SOCIAL COMMEMORATING THE END OF THE 1984-85 MINERS' STRIKE AND AFTERMATH



7:30 PM, SAT 6 MARCH 2010,UPSTAIRS LOUNGE,BRIDGE HOTEL,CASTLE GARTH, NEWCASTLE--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

MUSIC: BEESWING, MARIE LITTLE, GARY MILLER OF THE WHISKY PRIESTS, KIDDAR’S LUCK,PITMAN DAVID DOUGLASS, THE LEGENDARY JOHNNY HANDLE AND A CAMEO PERFORMANCE BY MIKE ELLIOTT. POETS: PAUL SUMMERS, WILLIAM MARTIN, KATRINA PORTEOUS, LISA CAMPBELL ...AND MASTER OF CEREMONIES, TYNESIDE POET KEITH ARMSTRONG

bridging the gap

Bridging The Gap
Wednesday 27 January
11.00-11.30am BBC RADIO 4

Bridging The Gap is a vivid sound portrait of the Tyne Bridge. The programme draws on the voices and sounds of the bridge, the river, local people and wildlife, while exploring the history, construction and role of the bridge.

The bridge is hugely symbolic in the North East. As a giant arch, it reflects the changes that have taken place in the North East, including developments on the Tyne and overall changes in lifestyle. Today, wildlife has moved in; where the industrial giants of the past have moved out, salmon and otters can be found in the river.

The bridge is also a nesting site for kittiwakes, a species of ocean-travelling gull. More than 150 pairs have been recorded here, making it the furthest inland breeding site of kittiwakes in the world.

Contributors to the programme include sound recordist Chris Watson; poet Keith Armstrong; Ian Ayris from Newcastle City Council; Steve Lowe of Northumberland Wildlife Trust; Steve Mays, architectural and landscape photographer; and Tommy Proctor, River Tyne guide.

Producer/Sarah Blunt

BBC Radio 4 Publicity