Just before moving east along Elswick Road towards the town,
I recall Barney’s pie shop and sitting on top of a drier in the coin-
operated launderette, my plastic banjo with its laughing mouth
doubling as the sound-hole: everything was in tune back then,
even the thinnest string sang its song. When winter takes hold
look past the ice inside the windows, trace petals with your finger,
point to the sky, never fall silent. Always remember to bleach
the front step, she said, because more walk past than ever come in.

For each of us held in the brine of north, is held as bone, as bird,
a direction – yes, but beyond dial and trajectory, it is our home;

a score in the darkness, fifty throats thrown open to the sky.

The ghosts have been evicted from the disused mills
whose floors are rattled by different shuttles
conducting sheets plaster-board and clear glass that glints when tilted
Northwards, framing the stuttering narrowboats below.
Bare brick interiors re-point the past towards the future –
rolled steel rulers columnise the spaces
tabulating the profit and loss.
Oh the souls are out and about, down and out

weaving through courtyards and underneath arches
and joining with revellers from all night parties

Permanently within the fabric.

Above, each arch weighs skyward,
suspending the land beneath:
the stillness of the river’s flow,
the restless shifting of the trees.
Below, my mind stumbles, falling,
like some inverted vertigo.
Time parts, then joins, flows on around
this mid-stream landmark, standing fast.

Waiting for a revolution
to call it back into the world.

Rising, unstained by industry.

Flowered calico, lilac-sprigged,
the fabric worn by Betty Burke,
reproduced for Jacobite ladies
by an enterprising manufacturer in Leith;
and, after Culloden, a sute of new highland cloaths
the better to disguise him –
Lady Borrodale’s Gift
to the young Pretender – her bonnie tartan.

In the bedroom on Skye, sheets of fine linen
reaching the mud of the earth when it rains,

kept by his conductress, and buried with her.

This is them learning the nature of glaciers. Scrambling
through the Kettlewell slit, Doc-footed, can-kicking sure,
mild piss whiff making them laugh so far from the Fiesta
engine idling at the school gates. The reach and roll-down of a window.
Sitting back in a sun-necked stretch hearing about deep lungs
of limestone sucking away below their bodies and old lead-mines
nudging those hard-edged caverns. Restless tongues poking the weird
sweetness from deadnettle flowers. And they’re sketching the U-shaped valley.

One girl, pencil-as-baton, conducts a sweep of the drystone spines
barrelling like a half-pipe, swooping like a beck-side rope swing.

Rolling over, rock under belly, she’s thinking of ‘Galena’ for a girl.

He came from the north carrying an axe with a hunger
that had bit through forests of oak and Scots pine, until
there was nothing left but scrub and stone, a straggle
of blackthorn, the low yellow creep of gorse.
He came to dig through layers of time with bare hands,
sand and lime, rip at the seams of the earth with his teeth,
made the mud bleed a brackish rust, foraged in the gullet
for red rocks to feed the fury of the furnace, clocked in

clocked out, returned soot-sodden to his black house, to
Mary, waiting, with hot butteries, strong milky tea and

eleven tiny gnashing mouths.

Ask, why I carve feathers to the spike of knives
when men are too busy to read. I should be bricking
windows into arrow-slots; should be bending
yew to longbows. The year roars with blood,
the murder of faith, and enemies close, closer.
Kings hammer mistrust into swords, demand
battle songs, and the world deafens with terror
of one’s neighbour. I turn to words.

Their little lamps will outlive my flicker,
that of lords, and of this current fear. I grind

gall, vinegar, hone my quill. Feed the dark age with light.

Our horizon had wheels. Tunnels emptied beneath our feet.
Coal seamed through our community like bone – its history
written on the leftover women, children and men.
Grandad grew roses – their beauty strange against his skin,
petals making angels against his rough coat. At night, his
stalks of rhubarb sang their growing songs, haunted the glass
with spindled ghosts – sat tart and sugared upon our tongues,
cutting through the stodge. Everything here was tied to the pits.

Their death was told on picket lines. There was only dust left.
I dreamed of Scarborough spilling in miniature

from the cliff. I saw the sand and seafront shops. I smiled.

You may track us wild, rutting among pulled up lines,
buttercupped in Summer on embankments of unlinkingness,
beside your roads paying their toll of tarmac to Winter.
Each pothole would prise laughs from the navvies, steam
hissing from sinews; each clack of a pick like the click
of a kettle. Not that they’d know one end of a plugged-in
boiler from the other. The tea they supped was served up
with a whistle from a funnel’s sooted black mouth.

An arm bridging borders, built by might, set with spit,
undone by slight of soft hand and calculating digits.

We drank as the shoreline lapped at Plashetts’ last stand.

Local lads lounging around boats strewn
haphazard in front of homes, like stolen cars.
Work comes and goes: ironstone hacked in tons,
then steel, kept the world turning, until, here,
it stopped.  But you are young and think you own
the sea.  The mackerel crowd beckons, and at night,
lobsters wave their claws, surrender to your pots.
How sudden, the summer squall, and you are lost,

hair streaming in the greedy waves, too far
from shore, the village glimpsed a final time

your life as short and vivid as a leaping fish.