Featured Poetry

Ballade Of The Yellow Bungalow

Michelle’s rented kitchen smelt of dog’s paws and children’s feet,
Exiled sisters tramping pitiful sobs into cold linoleum.
October, outside, hurried gold leaves off the fresher sycamores.
Our small talk was not all about gales or her native Listowel.
I was God the navigator of Fenit and Blasket,
Of the table of awkwardness, of student nurse Michelle.
Heavy curtains, like tapestries, cloaked her squinting windows,
Her nurse friends were on day duty to jaundiced invalids.
Her primrose cup in the sink wore the faint lips of destruction.
Cold tap water dripped incessantly over the brim.
Ran down along the crack’s indentations as secretions will.
Rugged beauty and gorse realism lit Brandon on her face.
Words passed there like clouds as she frowned on my youth.
Her limbs were like the Kerry coast, spume-ridden elation.
I wanted to ease myself into her Listowel,
Her undulations of dune and short-cropped grasses.
She said she would like to be buried in the sandhills.
We parroted on with a dual sense of urgency.
Perched on the edges of old chairs. Precariously.

©Niall MacGiolla Bhuí, PhD.