Guest Poems

Raising the Spirit

Always such an unsettling time of year,
Christmas with its fake joviality departed, though
seasonal lights still blink from nearby gardens and
abandoned Christmas trees lie forlornly at
the roadside, drenched by the incessant rain.
Meanwhile the new year waits impatiently in the wings.
Who can say what it will bring, though we wish all
those whose lives we touch the best of everything,
knowing full well it’s not in our hands to dispense
such wondrous bounties.

Lost in thought, drink in hand, I stare through
the rain-speckled window at the silent street below,
the trees seemingly lifeless, and the buildings
too, as the evening gradually descends like an
unwanted guest who has arrived too soon.

Suddenly ablaze, the streetlights opposite stain
the pavement with their amber beams as the wind
picks up. There are shadows everywhere.

Patiently we must wait for the year’s agenda to unfold,
for daylight to return, for leaves to silently explode from
the bereft trees, for wars to cease, for smiles to reign.
Then we can charge our glasses again.

Aftermath

We’d gone to Dublin in search of art
and found William Orpen
dispatched to record the Great War, all those boys

in muck and mire across French countryside
the gallery full of pink, land and sky in pastel shades,
not the colours you expect of brutal conflict.

Bodies abandoned, trenches and dugouts
desert of craters, stumps of buildings
remains of Thiepval, La Boisselle.

A prehistoric burial mound, pale gold in summer light
barbed-wired, tunnelled, mortared.
Mud, baked white, cleansed by sun,

bones scoured by wind and frost, skulls
detached from backbones, feet
scattered among cornflowers.

The final painting an altered landscape,
scrubbed by nature
wounds cleansed by sun and rain.

Later shoals of tiny white butterflies
would come to cloud a faultless sky
above the wonder of poppies.