Three Poems By Colin Dardis

 

Sunrise at Bridge

This memory is mine, mine, mine alone,
undiluted by other eyes
and contrary perceptions,
the rare passing motorist unable
to fathom such beauty through their windscreen.

5a.m., and the world so alive
in the summer light,
the residents’ sleep allowing me
to chisel out a private niche of Belfast
as I stand at the apex of the bridge;

orange popcorn clouds
Paul Henry could be proud of,
the Lagan shimmering like a débutante’s necklace
lovingly wrapped around the city’s neck;

and I, the solitary admirer
in this secret gallery.
 
 
Postcard

The autumn of your kisses has fallen,
curled leaves browning in the orbital pan
as the year stretches out memories
beyond the lustre of the event.

Your diamonds are becoming hazy
between the glistening clouds
that promise the redemption of rain.

Yet perhaps I’ll keep a postcard
embossed with your transient sun
to spur the memory into greater times.
 
 
Please Return This Poem

If lost, please return this poem
to the initial thought that spurred it,
the big bang moment
of one synapse igniting
a forest of the brain,
fuelled by the oxygen of beauty,
humanity's greatest inspiration.

If lost, return this poem
to a patch of Ireland
resting by the motorway of creation,
away from industrial exhausts
and mankind measured in fiscal terms,
back to the moment of tranquillity
that gave forth its seed
to germinate in art's heavy bosom.

If lost, return this poem
to the soul's waiting room
in hope that beauty is found again,
replicated by divine practices
so that the beholder may press
his inked offspring to the world.

Three Poems By Patrick Dorrian 

 

Peace wall


Black carapaced, the taxis
crawl slowly, sifting the 
Wall's decaying images
before excreting eager tourists,
who sidle to wall base,
indeliable markers in hand,
to leave their mark.
Then their fingers trail
abandoned names and
discarded comments,
souvenirs of previous decomposers.
They tut and mutter platitudes,
"How awful it is, the need for this wall!"
(As if we didn't know!)
As they luxuriate 
in vicarious angst and pain.
All the while, the guide
unpicks our history into bite
sized chunks, more easily
digested than truth.
There are no locals here
on this sterile strip.
No tears, no prayers, even the pain
has been diluted, sanitized,
given a makeover. Our past has been
made over into the care of others.
Safe now, safe as bricks and mortar.
 
Lest we Remember

Dresden. Oradour. Lidice and Shatilla.
Herd them up, these foreign names.
Corral them in Churches and ail yards;
starve them to exhaustion in camps;
shoot them where they lie in the dirt;
bury them communally, anonymously,
in un marked graves.

Take their names, and
cut them, experimentally,
so that each letter can be cast
to oblivion via the winds.
Do not commit to memory.
Cut no memorial stones
for tourists to examine
in squares and plazas.
Keep no relics of their works
lest we remember, who did what.

(Note from Author Patrick)
The four names of places register four war crimes. The allies killed between 200,000 and 500,000 people in Dresden over a 36 hour period of continuous bombing in 1945. The Nazis wiped out the viilages of Oradur sur glane in France and Lidice in Cecheslovakia as reprisals during WW2. Shatilla was a refugee camp in the Lebanon in which Christian Militia working for Israel killed more than 200 men, women and children in a one night orgy of violence.



 
Life, Strife

"It's all in the timing," she said,
"From cooking to making love,
there's a process, a sequence per deed."
She watched herself, in love

with the image, of herself talking down
to this poor, fool of a man.
My forehead wrinkled in a frown.
A mother's frustration. No one can

stand in the way of a woman's progress.
Mere me, here, standing piteously,
eyes scavenging, greedily for egress
for salvation from this verbal orchidectomy.

Then in my inner ear,
me dead da, droll, as was his fame,
recalls the the famous phrase,
"You get the balls, you get the blame!"
 

 Three Poems by David Agnew

La Petite Mort

On the back seat of a car, in a secluded clearing,
with the theme song from ‘Local Hero’
playing on the stereo, two people
couple with such intensity
that for a moment the forest falls still;

the woodpecker pauses in his drumming,
wood-nymphs cover their eyes
and their ears with their wings,
and a robin, nearest to the scene,
begins to doubt his own ability.

Meantime, a sparrowhawk,
searching for other prey, looks down in wonder,
wonders if, for those two people,
life will ever be the same again, then swoops
to change the life of a coal tit for ever.

Empty Room

The room is empty now,
signs of recent occupation;
tangled sheets, a pair
of knickers by the bed,
a hint of lust still
lingers in the air,

smoke from partially
stubbed cigarette
coils its way
towards the ceiling,
beside the bed, still looking on,
a brown, bedraggled, teddy bear.

 

Purple

I remember the first time I saw purple,
although when I pointed it out to you
you said it was blue. Then you pointed
out to me the colours in a rainbow,
except where you saw blue I saw green.

Purple speaks with a deep-throated,
warm, years-of-smoking sort of sexy growl,
and sings the blues in dark, smokey bars
where the sunlight never penetrates;

like it never penetrates
to the inside of my thigh
where remains a purple bruise;
the legacy you left me with
when you departed.