Rehomed, Renamed

As part of the 2024 Summer School, Newcastle University's Writing Poetry MA students were poets-in-residence at the Great North Museum Hancock. Around the museum you can find poems written by the students during the Summer School.

The professional writing residency with the GNM:H encouraged new ways to engage with the museum’s collections, history, and modern cultural presence. It allowed the students to explore new perspectives to the way they approach writing.

Further information about the Writing Poetry MA can be found on the Newcastle University website.
Writing Poetry MA | Postgraduate | Newcastle University (ncl.ac.uk)

Centurial Stone

Centurial Stone by Catherine Sweeney

We knew the stars and steered by them
or by wind when the skies ran dark
into new landscapes, unfamiliar language
bringing box sapling, celandine, fennel,
the trapping of war, the tools of construction.

We looked on as the stonemason carved
a way-marker, a stone now loosened
from an ancient wall, a memorial of isolation,
of wind torn days, tales told around a fire~
that burned only foreign wood.

Working through six years
of jostling and jokes, six years of absence,
sons growing to men, daughters marrying,
women waiting, six years to finish,
and piece together the fragments of family.

We will speak as old men of this
link to the man on our left, our right,
and remember the days
when the 5th had divided a country,

Hadrian’s Wall

When 80 men finished a stretch of the Wall their work was recorded on a centurial stone. This poem is in response to the exhibit bearing the legend ‘The century of Julius Valentius of the Fifth Cohort’.