Under Howard Street
by Dean Jolly
I often thought as one does wonder
Lost in musings when one walks to work
What hides neath Howard Street I’d ponder
And in indulgence of my harmless quirk;
A Gas Main? Certainly! But was there more?
A Treasure Chest? No! Surely closer to the shore?
A smokers pipe? Perhaps once bought from a local store?
A secret room? But where then would you find the door?
Then workmen came armed with their blackened spades
and drills and cones and bricks and metal signs
They found no smokers pipe nor secret place
For the treasure chest was old tram lines!
Dean Jolly is a North Shields poet. He hosts live poetry events and runs the publishing imprint All Write Up North.
This verse is taken from his latest collection: Flotsam, Jetsam, Lagan and Derelict, a collection of ponderings, wanderings and observations in and around the North Tyneside Coast, including the excellent poems:
- A Town Where No Town Ought To Be
- A Tribute To Tommy Brown Encoded In Enigma (with directions for decryption)
- Our Harvest Is From The Deep
No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
Photograph: Lee Stoneman
No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.
Jane Harvey
From ‘The Castle of Tynemouth. A Tale’ (1806)
