THE SOUND OF TOWNS
Announcing my address in Gateshead
Usually started me feeling half dead.
The flames crackled as the Detroit River burned to Toledo
While my soft guitar chords echoed over Rio de Janeiro.
But I couldn’t help but dance the samba
When reciting my address in Cochabamba.
Now I wanna live back in Jujuy with the mountains near -
Address sounds like a football cheer.
……………………………………………….
NOTES
Gateshead - a dreary UK industrial city of my childhood
Jujuy - high in the foothills of the Andes in Argentina
Cochabamba - Bolivia – the Garden City
Rio de Janeiro - Brazil – football and music
9 April 2021
ONLY TWENTY YEARS
Who can know the future of twenty years
And discount the dim offerings of Gateshead?
What 12 year old can imagine
The emptiness of prairies in Montana
Or smell from fifty miles away Russia’s boreal forest
Or feel the rocky fossils of Donegal
Resisting the Atlantic combers
Or standing on a windswept Gateshead corner
Can hear the beauty of old Quebec French
Or collecting coal pieces in cobbled streets of Teams
Can feel the blueness of flax fields in Alberta
And crossing the Tyne bridge
Can see over the Roebling bridge
On the Ohio at Cincinnati?
FOUR LOVE AFFAIRS
The French health food shop
Near Vasilyastrovskaya metro,
With a tiny patio garden bench -
Fell in love there with the language of the French.
Closed now for property development.
Ironbridge Folk Club,
In the shadow of enormous cooling towers
Of the power station majestic -
Fell in love there with folk music.
Demolished now for road widening.
Under-a-Fiver second-hand bookshop
In Henry Street, Dublin,
Found many bargains, many gems of writing -
Fell in love there with literature so exciting.
Redeveloped now as a mall.
The Chippy take-out, Bensham Road, Gateshead,
Fragrant in smells of vinegar, and delightful
On cold nights with its steamy swirl -
Fell in love there with my first girl.
Slum clearance has now razed it.
TWO ENGLANDS
Sinewy towns and men with tight muscles
And cloth cap against grey rainy skies
Houses, trees, open spaces blackened
And crowded urgently together
For maximum profit in
Unheard of, unsung places
Salford mills, Gateshead pits, Rotherham foundries
Pouring money into men from Bury St. Edmunds
With wives wearing velvet gloves
To flint churches on Sundays
And taking tea at cricket matches.
GATESHEAD MUSIC
Not a storybook place of rhymes and chimes of bells
My childhood England was dark and dirty,
And instead of the skirl of bagpipes or the weeping fiddle,
There were factory sirens
And clashing steel loads on trucks to the docks.
Caught between black coal and brown ale,
I searched the streets for music and found nothing.
One day I never returned -
And note by note forgot their tuneless heritage,
Now in the silent moments of creeping age and grown children,
The steep pitch of streets down at the waters of Tyne
Draws my mind and probes the waves
Where the sound of coal dust still echoes -
And always will.
And I hear again the empty places, dark places, the places singing
My name in dialect I have long abandoned.
Somehow their music is not off-key;
And my inner melody
Seems to merge into that blackened score.
I hear its siren song and cannot shake free
Its bass notes from the balladry of my life.
THE OCEAN OF THE CHILD MIND
Mirage of shimmering hot air
Between the bus stop
And the newsagent's shop
Above the tarred road there.
Saltwell Park lake shipped
Me out on voyages of mind-ocean;
With swans moving to lake motion,
Not knowing their feathers were clipped.
With imagined snow-deep slopes,
Clouds immense rose like mountains,
Life’s uncertain curtains,
Above the factories for steel, tyres, and ropes.
..................................................................................................
Note
....Saltwell Park was for long the only park in Gateshead, England.
WHAT’S IN A NAME ?
Who can ever define what they really are? I‘m . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . a….?
Even God wasn’t sure and said only - I am who . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . am
Define electricty? All we know is it’s measured by the . . . . . … . . . amp
But to lift something, the non-electric Greeks defined a . . . . . . . . . ramp
If you can’t define and spell you may end up as an illiterate . . .. .tramp
Illiterate cows from Gateshead may think that they. . . . . . . . . . . . trampl
But educated cows from Toledo Ohio know that they .. . . . . . . .trample
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .. . . . . . . . . . . . .. . .. . . . . . . . . . . . . .
NOTE
Gateshead, England and Toledo, Ohio are
well-known “beauty spots” crammed with cows.
. .. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Entered in Paula Swanson’s Contest “ Trample”
SHADOW TOWN
A shadow town with only a past
Abandon hope all ye who cross
The black iron bridge over the smell of the Tyne
Tyres hiss on the wet road as they pass
And leave me here in the dark
Murky rain dirty roads
November in Gateshead
In the shadow of gloriously dirty Newcastle
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Note
Anyone who had the misfortune to live in Gateshead in
the 1970s will understand the feelings in this verse.
SHORT TRIP TO CULLERCOATS HEAVEN
Summer day in Gateshead grim
Go with limping uncle John
Leave the slums and factories dim.
Train to Cullercoats on our own.
Steep cliff steps and sandy ramps
But cliff-edge binoculars explore -
Though his lost leg gives him cramps -
My sandy-play and the wreck offshore.
Appetites from cool breeze salty
Gravy ducks * then stand in door
Of pub-wood polished, shiny, malty -
One lemonade - or maybe more.
Pocket-sand home now, and shell,
To extend the joy for a time,
Thru dark train tunnels back to hell
Across the river in Gateshead’s grime.
Note : *A gravy duck was a meatball dipped in savoury sauce, extremely tasty
GATESHEAD 1954
My home’s between vinegar factory
And a small-time scrap metal dealer
This town is an ugly and grimy
Industrial place - and it doesn’t get any realer
Like rich woman next door to a poor one
Newcastle’s ashamed of her dowdy neighbour
Like San Francisco is of Oakland
Or Washington is of Baltimore
Our shared property fence, the Tyne
Bridges are landmarks of Newcastle, it’s said
But lead to nowhere across the river line,
To my home, grimy Gateshead. **
It is a shadow town, all but dead
And no one really cares - the best can be said
About coming from Gateshead
Is…..coming from Gateshead.
**Gateshead – a large heavily industrialized town across the River Tyne from Newcastle,
England.
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