Jarrow¹

Would want to paint them, 
those town-bright boys 
at the dead end of the track 
where it coils down away 
from church and mound 
leaving almost an island, 
as it once must have been 
when Bede set his Lucem Vitae 
lightly on the pages of 
these windcrossed mudflats. 

One thousand thirteen years 
to set that orange apparatus 
(for loading coal?) cleanly 
in the mouth of the Tyne 
and decide to abandon it,
there, beneath that regiment 
of scarred blue oil drums. 
The scene looks set for 
a study of bad times 
in the lap of old times,

dead machinery teasing the live 
hooting youths who have 
nothing to do here in their 
circus clothes, their peaked pink 
hair like traffic cones.
The more civilized the civilized, 
the more barbarian the barbarians. 
What vivid colors, though, 
like shipworks, in what 
seems to be one more picture of 

enough. A passing sparrow would 
see it, crossing from winter 
into winter—the cracked black 
skin of the tide between ripples of 
couch grass, the blue sheet of river 
rusty with ships, the cranes 
against the monks' sky, crossed by 
high pylons in their chains of power. 
Lightbearers. Lucifera. Latin would have 
named them, as the kneeling church 

outlasts them in its green patch of 
ruin. I would like to paint 
a sparrow's view—the prefabs 
(now the monks' cells) the heaps of 
sweet timber by the sawmill's warehouse 
fenced from an old blind horse 
in a field; the polished brass lamps 
along the cedar walks, a smudge of kids 
in the distance. I would, in my painting, 
be a brushstroke … Talis vita in terris …