Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Filíocht Nua:

New Poetry

A Day in the Life

The light from Maureen's kitchen
matches the scaffold of moonlight
in ours; rushing clouds spotted
at my window conceal the moon.

*

Over the road our neighbour's
big, black one-eyed cat waits
at the office door opposite
and is duly admitted.

*

My trousers draped over the bed
look very different this morning,
as if they belong to another man—
my father's, for instance, or a brother's.

*

Unbeknownst, I bring a piece of chalk
home, like a fitter in a fabrication shop,
or in the belly of a ship, or like
a tailor who drafts the body's outline.

The Lady of the House

The birds are singing high in the trees.
Come back, my love, or never come.

The birds are singing high in the trees.
Summer is over now; autumn has come.

But the leaves haven't fallen yet
and all the trees are still green.

Come back, my love, or never come.
The birds were singing high in the trees.

I couldn't tell where. Come back, my love,
or never come. I couldn't tell where.

The lake was so still that day
the birds stopped dancing in the sky.

The shadow of the forest stayed
across the lake all day.

Come back, my love, or never come.

The Fair

It was like this.
It seemed to be every summer, late on, when the fair took over the football
ground across the road from the house I grew up in. When the football season
had ended, of course, and before the re-seeding of the pitch, battered and
mauled in the rain-soaked, windy months of use. From my bedroom window, atop a
mid-terrace of seven red bricked houses, I could see across the walls and
turnstile to the Ferris wheel and stalls and hear as plain as day the slightly
eerie strained music and watch the people traipse into the old football grounds
to try their luck—pot-shots, throwing discs, buying candy floss, riding a
miniature Dodgem car, spinning wheels of fortune. Chancing their arm. Mothers
and fathers and kids; young couples; groups of boys and girls wandering about
the place in the gathering dusk sometime in the summer of the late nineteen fifties and sixties.
A traveling fair. I didn't know how long that stand had lasted. Did it happen
there every year before the war—the Second World War? The part of Belfast of
which I speak had escaped the blitz of 1941 but nearby had not been so lucky.
Were the families and crew who worked that fair been doing so for years,
decades, generations? I suspect so. Whatever happened to them is another
mystery. By the early seventies, when I had gone, the fair hadn't appeared for
some time, but I can still see it clearly and the groups of people squeezing in
through the door into the grounds in a kind of Felliniesque evening light.
The background night is lit up with street lamps, and the amber strobes of the
descending city, not too far in the distance, and the mechanical chains and
pulleys and noise of the fair with its repetitive music and the shouts and
cries of kids and people strolling or showing off or trying their hand at
winning garish prizes that everyone knew didn't amount to much but who cared
anyway it was all a bit of fun that came around once every year when you were
least expecting it there it was the trucks pulling up and even parking on the
pavements and the fair being put up like a child's toy set like a toy train or
a farm with animals and tractors and pens. The Ferris wheel spinning away above
and over everyone, lit up it must have been, unless I'm only imagining it all
and a horse or two or a donkey and cart...