GRAPES IN BULGARIA

Grapes bulge in the seering sun,
fresh and healthy as a young girl,
rich with optimism
in a back street vineyard.
Taste sweet as your lips, dear.
Trickle down my throat.
Wine today in my poems.
Hang your head for life’s sake:
the portrait, decked with black ribbons,
nailed to the door,
stares at us as we drink
blood from the glass.
Along the rails,
hurtling headlong, we
spit out the pips
from the fruit an old lady gives us;
fruit of her heart,
her old heart,
decked with black ribbons.
Black wine in the night.
Stars bunch
over Bulgaria.
The rain refreshes our skin.
Peeling off our clothes,
we enter new towns,
strange rooms,
beds drenched
in yesterday’s kisses.
Picture on the hotel wall
is of a grape mountain.
Climb the stairs,
until your thirst is
quenched.
Sew seeds on the map.
Bulgaria, we’ll squeeze you
out of love,
to live.




KEITH ARMSTRONG

FOLLOW THE SUN

FOLLOW THE SUN

Follow the Sun is a new project for this year's Heritage Open Days (September 8th to 11th 2016) to mark the bicentenary of George Stephenson's sundial at Dial Cottage, Killingworth.

Northern Voices Community Projects, with the support of North Tyneside Council, is encouraging local writers, artists, musicians and schoolchildren to come up with poems, songs, stories and artwork to celebrate the sundial. A booklet of the written material and artwork, together with an historical background, will be launched on September 9th in Killingworth with readings of poems and stories and performances of the songs.

Please send your contributions to NVCP:  k.armstrong643@btinternet.com

THOMAS SPENCE (1750-1814) - THE HIVE OF LIBERTY

(AFTER THE NAME OF THOMAS SPENCE’S BOOKSHOP AT 8 LITTLE TURNSTILE, HIGH HOLBORN)

I am a small and humble man,

my body frail and broken.

I strive to do the best I can.

I spend my life on tokens.

I traipse through Holborn all alone,

hawking crazy notions.

I am the lonely people’s friend.

I live on schemes and potions.

For, in my heart and in my mind,

ideas swarm right through me.

Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,

my words just flow like wine,

my words just flow like wine.

I am a teeming worker bee.

My dignity is working.

My restless thoughts swell like the sea.

My fantasies I’m stoking.

There is a rebel inside me,

a sting about to strike.

I hawk my works around the street.

I put the world to rights.

For, in my heart and in my mind,

ideas swarm right through me.

Yes, in this Hive of Liberty,

my words just flow like wine,

my words just flow like wine.

KEITH ARMSTRONG

'In England such concepts as justice, liberty and objective truth are still believed in.' (George Orwell)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3IMy-h2re3g

Thomas Spence was born in Newcastle in 1750. Spence was the leading English revolutionary of his day, with an unbudgeable commitment to individual and press freedom and the common ownership of the land.

His tracts, such as The Rights of Man (Spence was, perhaps, the first to use the phrase) and The Rights of Infants, along with his utopian visions of 'Crusonia' and 'Spensonia', were the most far-reaching radical statements of the period. Spence was born in poverty and died the same way, after long periods of imprisonment, in 1814. 

FOLK SONG FOR THOMAS SPENCE (1750-1814)

Down by the old Quayside,
I heard a young man cry,
among the nets and ships he made his way.
As the keelboats buzzed along,
he sang a seagull’s song;
he cried out for the Rights of you and me.

Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,
he gave up all his life
just to be free.
Up and down the cobbled Side,
struggling on through the Broad Chare,
he shouted out his wares
for you and me.

Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,
he was a man the likes you rarely see.
With a pamphlet in his hand,
and a poem at his command,
he haunts the Quayside still
and his words sing.

His folks they both were Scots,
sold socks and fishing nets,
through the Fog on the Tyne they plied their trade.
In this theatre of life,
the crying and the strife,
they tried to be decent and be strong.

Oh lads, that man was Thomas Spence,
he gave up all his life
just to be free.
Up and down the cobbled Side,
struggling on through the Broad Chare,
he shouted out his wares
for you and me.

Oh lads, you should have seen him gan,
he was a man the likes you rarely see.
With a pamphlet in his hand,
and a poem at his command,
he haunts the Quayside still
and his words sing.


KEITH ARMSTRONG




(from the music-theatre piece ‘Pig’s Meat’ written for Bruvvers Theatre Company)