JINGLE ON MY SON!

JINGLE ON MY SON!
A doughty champion of his local culture.(Poet Tom Hubbard)Your performance at the city hall was soooooooooo good! Christoph thought it was excellent! (Carolyn)

25.7.07








SAVING GRACE



The Grace Darling League
must be one of those 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea.

In your Museum,
the Flotsam & Jetsam
drifts on a becalmed Bamburgh day.
A sharp sunlight cuts through the church window:

‘Out of the Deep have I called unto Thee’;

‘Charity, Faith & Hope’.

These tangled words that make up our lives,
the tattered wrecks, flaked skins.

I stare in awe at a piece of the Oar you used,
constructing a jigsaw of your life:

here is a scrap of your dress,
a throb of your ‘English Heart’;

here, locked up, a lock of your hair,
a handbag containing your thoughts;

and ‘There’s The Girl That I Love Dearly’,
a storm in a teacup,

a National Heroine of Japan

who coughed herself to death

like a seagull choking in oil,

like the bloodshot wreck of a dying Empire:

‘Saving Grace’,
save our souls:

Sister,
Save Our Souls.




KEITH ARMSTRONG


(as published in 'Grace Darling: Victorian Herione' by Hugh Cunningham, Continuum, 2007)

the jingling geordie

My photo
whitley bay, tyne and wear, United Kingdom
poet and raconteur