The North-South divide - in verse
 The new symbols of North and South, the Angel and the yet-to-be-built Horse |
Football, weather, food and life in general. Nearly all subjects have been covered in the endless banter between northerners and southerners.
But on Monday in Kings Cross, London - a location which for rail travellers is the gateway to the North - the regional differences are being explored in verse.
Poets from either side of the divide - and some who have crossed it - are holding a recital in which they will be expressing their love or loathing for one side or another.
Kit Wright, who lives in the East End, and Liverpudlian Paul Farley will be among them. Here is one example from each of them. If you'd like to write your own poem on the North or South then use the form at the bottom of the page.
AN INTERIOR
They ask why I still bother coming back.
London must be great this time of year.
I'm not listening. My eyes have found
the draining-board, its dull mineral shine,
the spice rack, still exactly how I left it,
knives, a Vermeer vinyl table-mat.
How many hours did I spend watching
the woman pouring milk into a bowl
that never fills? I never tired of it.
Vision persists, doesn't admit the breaks
the artist must have taken, leg-stretching
alongside a canal twitching with sky
not unlike the leaden one outside;
or just leant on the door jamb, looking out
onto a courtyard, smoking a pipe
before going in, to sleep on his excitement.
ODE TO DIDCOT POWER STATION
What vasty thighs outspread to give thee birth,
DIDCOT, thou marvel of the plain?
Colossal funnels of the steamship EARTH,
Thy consummate immensity
Enshrines the rare propensity
Of fumes to form eternal acid rain!
While, in their pious hosts, Romano-Celtic ghosts
Are knelt to worship thy
All-belching amphorae,
And shadows of thy sacrificial breathing fill the sky!
DIDCOT, thou bugger!
Thou teaser of the mind
And recollection-tugger! Thee I find
To replicate the days when I was small
What time my mother, sweet and kind,
The fragrant Friar's Balsam did infuse.
She therewithal
A towel placed upon my head
And loving care did use
That pulmonary perils might not wake me with the dead.
DIDCOT! To one more
Soft eidolon thou steam'st ope mem'ry's door ...
For in thy hanging shrouds I view return
Far other blue-grey clouds;
My father's pipe-smoke I in thee discern,
Companion true,
That followed him all days
And ways he ventured through this singing maze,
To take that turn
All entrants in their bafflement and grace may not eschew.
What links of tenderness are forged by thee,
DIDCOT, thou ever-burning core!
Insensate lover of the loves that flee!
Thou glade of past felicity,
Thy sap of electricity
Complicit in our veins for evermore!
Struggling anent the storm, thy children ghost the form
Of all our quickenings may ever be ...
DIDCOT, thy billows pour,
Connatural, contiguous, familial as the sea!
The North and South poetry event is at 1900 GMT on Monday, 16 February, at Kings Place, Kings Cross, north London
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