SWAN HUNTER VIKING

I am more inclined

to prowl the Jules Verne lanes of Amiens

or the backstreets of a Brecht Berlin

than shank the Black Mountains

of the massive States.

My nose points dripping cold 

from Shields to Scandinavia;

my battered cheeks reek of North Sea cod.

Instincts lead me to Munch and to Courbet,

to Hasek and De Nerval.

This Geordie’s inspiration comes alive

in translations of teeming Oslo streets

or dark Prenzlauer Berg cobbles

not from the vomit of the sprawling Bowery.

Baltic folk tunes still whistle in my ears.

I get the ghettoblaster belt of Smetena

clearer than the wail of Dylan.

The sexy accordions of Montmartre are in my blood.

I face this way:

my poetry sings with euro-balladry;

my feet itch with traditional rhymes:

border ballads in The Blink Bonny,

fiddles leaping in Sandy Bell’s.

I am no modernist.

I see my footprints in the snowy past

on the Old Tyne Bridge,

or outside a bar in Reykjavik

or on an icy lake of vodka.

Pushkin floats in my dreams,

Verlaine is on my lips,

and Rimbaud hammers knives inside my brain.

I cannot swim in Atlantic water,

only the German Sea will do.

I think my father built me Northern ships,

a Swan Hunter Viking

raiding the flooded dictionary of my soul.

I happily drift across the square in wintery Groningen,

smoke myself silly on Prinsengracht

and leap with light at Oeteldonk.

I once skipped school with boys in Heaton

and licked the breasts of Ipswich Jenny.

At home I am always 

dabbling my naked feet in lovely sand,

my fingers wet with new poems.

Think on Northumbrian bards,

my fellow country gents,

I tell you now

that I would rather die dead drunk

in a pool of Swinburne’s wine

than in a frozen field

of Bunting. 

KEITH ARMSTRONG

'Outlining vividly (and beautifully) the east-west divide! Those of us who grew up in landscapes dug by the Flemish, walking streets amongst Danes, and Russians and Germans; who went to school alongside Dutch kids and shared the despair of lost trawlers.'  

Paul Davenport