National Poetry Day 2024 - I Love North Shields - Special

I Love North Shields.

National Poetry Day 2024

October 2024

Poetry: Editor Richard O'Brienn Published issue1,2,3,4,5,6

Poetry

NATURE POEM III

By Raine Rutherford

How the sea bellows from the bottom of the street.

A lorry pulls by.

A pearl bank of cloud, harsh, towering, bright mountain, the horizon its base.

Solitary lighthouse, desperate for our company, winks for attention.

A hand pushes me forward with some urgency.

A border is crossed.

The sea-soaked sky claims a pulse. Tynemouth’s warm, rose lights are worth pursuing.

CRAFTS & VESSELS We want to read your poems responding to the history, landscape and culture of the North East, North Tyneside, and above all, North Shields!

If you'd like your work to be considered for a future issue, please send no more than three poems in a single Word document to craftsandvessels@gmail.com.

Poetry editor Richard O'Brien (from the Creative Writing team at Northumbria University) will get back to you within a few weeks with any editorial suggestions.

Poetry

A JAR OF TEETH ON CAMDEN STREET

By Richard O'Brien

Clacking us back into the past, the memory of a jar of teeth on Camden Street; one woman with her arm in up to the elbow.

It took some gumption, this: to pick your way past heaps of pram wheels, bike bells, mounds of bullets, to that pearly prize, behind the foggy window.

When the shop came down, all questions over provenance, beneath the rubble, fell beyond dispute.

An old man, stoic in a worn black suit, watched crowds of rats, not sure where they were fleeing to, erupt from the last chunk of wall still standing stubborn as a snaggletooth.

WHISPERS

By Sofia Barton

The land whispers tales of brine: salty breeze on cobbled line.

Fishermen with weathered hands haul their nets on golden sands.

Docks stand tall, a bygone dream.

Ships once gleamed, a bygone stream.

But still the Tyne, a ribbon, flows past castle walls where history grows.

Poetry

Tynemouth, Any Mouth

By Toni Hurford

The gull cat-mewls a cry-baby protest as it tugs at the grass, stuck in its fact, fractal, part of the wave, particle surfing its place in the blast, the explosion of fact.

The element stew of each filament hair charged to glow in the current of time’s time-lapsed fire-fall tail-swallow act.

We explore how it burns, what we may be.

Amber warning: let’s get back to the facts, the star-scattered sea, dancing with light, eternal, the heart of all in each flasah.

This is my cry, my tug at this earth, the best I can do at this now on the wave, part of the sparkle of a sea in a sun.

CRAFTS & VESSELS We want to read your poems responding to the history, landscape and culture of the North East, North Tyneside, and above all, North Shields!

If you'd like your work to be considered for a future issue, please send no more than three poems in a single Word document to craftsandvessels@gmail.com.

Poetry editor Richard O'Brien (from the Creative Writing team at Northumbria University) will get back to you within a few weeks with any editorial suggestions.

Our Town

By Roslyn Renwick These are our streets, of our ancient well loved feisty town which we weave our lives around, built from the hopes and dreams of all of us, and all those who fought for its survival, down the centuries before.

Hardy fisher folk began it all on enduring foundations of harvests from the deep, building their berths in the shelter of our river’s inlets, and temporary shielings, which gave our town a name that’s lasted centuries, that nurtured its docks, mines, boatyards and engineering works.

Now, along with fishing, its building societies and banks still stand guard over our everyday aspirations of roots and home.

And the everyday pilgrimage for groceries and household supplies, the remedies for sore hips and knees and aches and pains, a treat of pasties or sticky buns or cream cakes for tea for the bairns, are the tiny bricks these streets are made of.

It’s where we go for the blow dry weekend hairdo, or bait for a bit of fishing off the quay.

It’s the vistas we stroll along on Sunday afternoons to view and photograph and paint the songs we play and sing in its halls and pubs and clubs.

These streets are not just a few historical fading images in some dusty book, given a reluctant hasty look, before being “regenerated,” “improved,” or even “condemned,” by developers and planners with unreal coffee table photos, and brittle, bottom-line smiles.

No. They’re our streets, we lived them.

We are the ones to say how they’re woven through our lives, in this, our well-loved feisty town.

Gift Horse

By Andrew Mellon We stalked the shoreline that day, both lost in thought, a pace or two apart, turning over stones, looking under rocks, back in time to past epochs we came to hunt for fossils or bottles, to see the world from underneath.

A ladder led down from the wall above, an hour on wet sandstone was all we would risk to slip and slide, but no longer jump for fear of a fall, a crack to a wrist or worse; old hips don’t make for good jumping.

And soon she called, “It’s time to leave.

The seas are coming in quite close.” Winter waves broke on the shore, a short way off.

Frigid waters eddied, whirled, and there in the wash I saw the tooth. Not that I could imagine it yet.

Old coral tubes or worms I said, but no, as though dropped from a white horse mouth; Equus the app said, an ancient tooth, strange and long, three million years since lost, to be washed out on this discard coast; long dead kindred of scourers’ nags pulling sea-coal bagged along the sands, or ponies squashed in lightless shafts, and who knows where their teeth fell? In some knacker’s yard

or down below a pit-propped seam, I bet.

They’re mine, for now, unsaintly relics, displayed where all can see the ravages of time; like useless broken chessmen, kept for show, until perhaps re-found by diggers on our family shore, or lost again in strata beneath some future unbroken ground.

Seacoal

By Andrew Mellon They say society is not a word anymore, community an order, not a way of life, and this coal used to scrape by, a poison.

But beauty is in the eye of the beholder; where grace and dirt go hand in hand and not one thing could call itself right, you saw beauty where none should exist: in the bend of a spine, in the flow of a cloud, in the tone of a wave, in the white of the ground.

And too many look and what do they behold beyond shit and straw on a stable floor, one more family of nothing, an instant in the wind?

You dare me to see, you draw me in

Poetry

THE DEATH OF A CUSTOMS OFFICER JOHN HARTLEY

Climbing the rigging Contraband-digging No sights to see At sea by night I won’t look down As illicit goods Descend to the deck Of this chance-your-arm wreck While the rage-blushed captain Says it’ll be me falling next time

CRAFTS & VESSELS We want to read your poems responding to the history, landscape and culture of the North East, North Tyneside, and above all, North Shields!

If you'd like your work to be considered for a future issue, please send no more than three poems in a single Word document to craftsandvessels@gmail.com.

Poetry editor Richard O'Brien (from the Creative Writing team at Northumbria University) will get back to you within a few weeks with any editorial suggestions.

Slinger Richard O’Brien for Robert Renoldson Demobbed at Goldsborough, a man whose ears still ache from North Sea dew stares blankly at the Carolina moon.

This southern sojourn wasn’t planned: life throws its loops like sailors’ rope.

At first, he followed what his father did; at Boston, gave them all the slip.

Time is untethered; fate’s a slope.

Perhaps he saw the 54th: free men in uniform who’d learned to love a country which did not return the favour. Or perhaps, just bored, he gladly took a stranger’s place to find adventure, friendship, something new.

He’s back now, muffled in the dew and quiet hardship, hauling crates of cargo down the heaving quay.

His death will not reach Goldsboro. And yet his wife refused to let his town forget the boy from Shields who served with Company C.

45

The Lighthouse Alex Skinner I am a people-pleaser, the guardian of the coastline.

Unwavering, I place myself in isolation, in desolate and dangerous locations, withstanding the harshest of conditions, to prioritise your needs above mine.

My purpose is clear: to keep you safe.

Yet now I have become unappreciated: weathered by time, my purpose, my utility declined.

Dejected, upgraded, replaced, I struggle to maintain a stoic face.

A dim glow I wearily project, dressed in cracks and blemished, yet you appear to be oblivious.

Now I’m nothing more to you than nostalgia, a mere backdrop to snapshots: a consequence of being a people-pleaser.

46 ISSUE 3

Poetry CRAFTS & VESSELS We want to read your poems responding to the history, landscape and culture of the North East, North Tyneside, and above all, North Shields!

If you'd like your work to be considered for a future issue, please send no more than three poems in a single Word document to craftsandvessels@gmail.com.

Poetry editor Richard O'Brien (from the Creative Writing team at Northumbria University) will get back to you within a few weeks with any editorial suggestions.

Poetry

from ‘Cuddy’s Cave,’ version 25 (Live at the Engine Room – 19/7/24) Nev Clay Kielder pine martens, Blyth Spartans Sodom and Gomorrah by John Martin Gibson Street Baths to Tanners Bank Freddie Shepherd’s Chieftain tank The Wooden Dolly, Newcastle Poly Abandoned shopping trolleys Bedlington Terriers, Heaton Harriers Persistent social mobility barriers Howdon Dock, Northern Rock Sparkie the budgie in the Hancock Wallington beavers, the Border Reivers, The Northern Goldsmiths clock Cragside rhododendrons To the Anson and Segedunum From the Low Lights to the High Main Crushing emotional pain Once Brewed, Twice Brewed Concrete hippos at Garth 22 Greaves Ash to Allerwash Longbenton Metro to the Nash Dickens, Rosetti, Garibaldi, Jimi Hendrix at Marshall’s chippy Wideopen to New Hartley Dwindling life expectancy Corbridge to Clousden Hill Snidey vapes and dodgy pills Fentanyl and nitazene From Denton Burn to Briar Dene Three kings at Tynemouth Priory Good old Ian Lavery In December, Xmas trees On the Formica factory

Poetry

What’s Seen, What’s Missing S. J. O’Brien Docked up above the Fish Quay, the sea fret almost clouds our view of what’s to come.

We wait in silence against the winter wind for a glimpse of a white-winged gull hunting for scraps of chum.

A pod of eiders lazily float in sparse rafts near the Gut. Elders know that there used to be more before – before I came to this cold country, before I was born.

We sit in silence against the winter wind and take stock on our daily lists of what’s seen, what’s missing.

An oatmeal-coloured Iceland gull spends its first winter along the coast of the harsh North Sea. It won’t be the first, nor the last, to live like this.

CRAFTS & VESSELS We want to read your poems responding to the history, landscape and culture of the North East, North Tyneside, and above all, North Shields!

If you'd like your work to be considered for a future issue, please send no more than three poems in a single Word document to craftsandvessels@gmail.com.

Poetry editor Richard O'Brien (from the Creative Writing team at Northumbria University) will get back to you within a few weeks with any editorial suggestions.

I Love North Shields.