Andy Croft

Extracts from Sticky

Not So
in memoriam Julia Darling

The rules are fixed. We can’t compete with you.
  Before we start we know the final score.
Of course you win. The powerful always do.
  You are the offside goal, the final straw.
No doubt you like to think you’re really hard,
  Tooled up with cluster bomb and DU shell;
All we possess is mortal love and art
  While you with poison, war and sickness dwell.
But look at you – old morgue-faced charnel-breath,
  Still trying to play the vampire when we know
You’re just a hammy Hammer-horror show.
  Poor you. It’s living that is hard, not death.
And Julia’s art and love will both survive
Her being dead, by being so alive.

Faith: Southwell Minster

When the Ironsides stabled their horses in here
  They were acting upon the belief
That the cry of the Lord could be heard more clear
  In straw than in scriptured gold leaf.
Though a temple is built
Of stained-glass and gilt
Its foundations are laid in the levelling fear
  That all faiths, in the end, come to grief.

Hope: Southwell Races

In the anapaest thunder of sinew and nerve,
  There’s a magic more strong than the bet
That will earn us a fortune if only we serve
  At the altar of muscle and sweat.
But though everyone wants
To imagine just once
That our fortune is earned, that it’s what we deserve,
  We all know we deserve what we get.

Charity: Southwell Workhouse

If you follow this straight, narrow pathway it leads
  To a mansion with only one door.
Here Love profited greatly by meeting the needs
  Of Society, Money and Law.
Though it beareth all things
True charity springs
From the knowledge that nobody ever succeeds
  In escaping the house of the poor.

Andy Croft © 2009
Flambard Press © 2009

Rotunda

The woman lights another tapered prayer,
  Whose weeping wax now gutters in the gloom,
  A ritual task which only can illume
A world of superstition and despair.
  Above us, in the bright empyrean blue,
The frieze of flaky prophets on the ceiling
Is laced with holes, as if the heaves were peeling
  To let the pagan night beneath show through.

Behind each fading fresco lies the next,
  Precise as tree-rings, measuring the ages
Of human hope and terror, like a text
  Still legible beneath the parchment pages’
Faint palimpsest. As if such monkish art
Could ever warm this heartless world’s cold heart.

Red Ellen
‘Middlesbrough is a book of illustrations to Karl Marx’ - Ellen Wilkinson, 1924

She stares out from the pages of New Dawn
  As though the future needs to be out-faced,
  Her flaming red-flag tresses to her waist
Among the endless fields of unripe corn.
They christened her Red Ellen, Little Nell,
  Miss Perky, Fiery Atom, Little Minx,
  As if to say this cold, old world still thinks
All fiery reds are burning brands from hell.

  In Jarrow and in Middlesbrough today
The flames of change are embers in the grate,
Cold fires of ash and dust that illustrate
  How much we all prefer the colour grey,
Still too distracted by the colour red
To see the fire that’s waiting to be fed.

A Question of History

The Lambton Worm is stirring in the mud,
  In Stanhope fairies dance in mushroom rings,
The Brancepeth Brawn’s been sighted in the wood,
  The A1 Angel flaps its rusty wings,
Peg Powler wakes beneath the River Trees,
  The tide is coming in at Morpeth town,
The Monkey’s swinging through the Headland
  trees,
The Cauld Lad’s turned the whole world upside
  down.

At Stainmore, Eric Bloodaxe swings his axe,
  In Stanwick, Cartimandua still reigns,
The ghosts of pits and docks and railway tracks,
  Of furnaces and shipyards shake their chains.
It’s said that History’s stirring in the North.
What kind it is, we’ll see November Fourth.

Andy Croft © 2009
Flambard Press © 2009