LOVE
A glance
And meeting of the eyes.
Coded messages
With sparkle and glitter
Stars in the night sky.
One of life’s mysteries
Two hearts
Beating together
Synchronised in harmony.
Soma Weera, Middleton St George

THEIR OWN WORST ENEMY
What on earth are the church
commissioners doing?
Giving us all this hassle
Trying to sell the Zurbaran paintings
And threatening the sale of Auckland
Castle.
They’ve hung there since 1756
They are a North-East treasure
Along with the castle in its magnificent
setting
They’ve given countless people
endless pleasure.
These paintings are part of our
heritage
Why they want to sell, no one has a
notion
They’re a supposed £15m value
To the Church, a mere drop in the ocean.
Bishop Richard Trevor bought them
To more widely reflect his views
Of bringing religions more closely
together
Surely that’s still one of life’s big issues.
So The Northern Echo exposed the
plot
That was hatched behind everyone’s
back
Quite rightly printed the facts, ran
opinion polls
And temporarily knocked their plans off
track.
Which hadn’t been open to discussion
For they’d employed devious tactics
and secrecy
Had they succeeded it would have
been another nail
In the coffin of our fragile tourist industry.
True we’ve Raby Castle and the Bowes
Museum
High Force’s mighty falls
Areas of outstanding natural beauty
But the Zurbaran belong on Auckland
Castle’s walls.
Had they been in some museum or
cathedral
In the south of the country
The commissioners wouldn’t have
dreamt
Of flogging off the Bishop’s legacy.
E D Bowen, Darlington

ICE AGE
“Global warming,” the boffins shout
Of this phenomenon, I have my doubt
With torrential rain causing overflow
Then real hard frosts with lots of snow
I relate this to my theory, so profound
That what goes around, comes around
And could, in fact, be the very first
stage
To the beginning of another Ice Age
Icicles dangling from roofs and trees
Is it not the start of a new big freeze?
William Bohannon, Durham