Gary Allen

The letter.

And soon the trees will be bare again
and someone will bring a letter –
for that was when a letter was important
not just a buzz in your pocket
or a badly digitised classical tune

and you could see the letter coming from some distance
off
leaving you time to imagine or fret

so, what was in the letter?
I don’t know, but it could be a summons or a confession
or a relative who is already dead
a gesture of love or ending
stretched between opening and reading

if your world should suddenly collapse between finger 
and thumb
there would be an eternity

and the footsore messenger on the causeway
and the rain breaking open the sky
and the sad trees beginning to sway and moan
postmarked Amsterdam or Berlin.

Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co.Antrim. He was born into a large working-class family, received a basic education in primary and secondary schools, before going to college, where he studied mechanical engineering. Many of his poems are written about Europe, focusing on the poor, the misaligned, the victims (usually women) in society, often charged with a sexual connotation. Other poems use metaphors for ‘the troubles’ in Northern Ireland, the cruelty, viciousness, randomness of two opposed positions that destroy the lives and the society around them, making him one of the most important and distinctive poets in Ireland of his generation.

Yoav J. Tenembaum

Sadness Has a Way

Sadness has a way of appearing
In different forms,
Of sounding its words
In different tones,
And when its voice
Seems to disappear,
All of a sudden
Its volume rises
Like a sudden wind
Blowing across
The corner
Of a street.

To begin with,
Sadness
Is the hurricane
That wreaks havoc.

Then, as the hours
And days
Slowly elapse,
Sadness,
Like a baby,
Takes a nap,
On and off,
Sleeping and crying
In turn,
Confounding my heart,
Misleading it
Each time
That It falls asleep
That It won’t wake up
Again.

Yoav Tenembaum was born in Argentina. He now lives in Israel where he lectures at Tel Aviv University. He pursued his academic studies in Britain, at Cambridge and Oxford Universities. He was the winner of the 59th Haiku Festival 2005, organized by the Basho Memorial Museum in Japan and has had poems in various journals. A collection of his poems, Unwrap Me, was published in the US in 2010.

 

Briege Duffaud

Urban Guilt

A woman of my age
hunkered by railings near the Halifax,
her smile a plea, tormenting as a baby’s wail:
do not ignore me! I ignored her as you do,
crossed the road and caught the 281.
For if I gave a coin, would I be giving to a woman of my
age
or to some gang of thieves?

Stopped at the lights I saw
her thin discouraged shoulders: a woman of my age
fly-tipped against railings on that
freezing February day.

If she was with a gang and failed
to meet their target, would they punish her?
A woman of my age in many cultures is a useless thing:
beat her, even kill?
I thought, tomorrow I will give a pound for what’s a pound
or even two to a woman of my age
in England?

She wasn’t there next day;
I told myself her family
kept her warm at home
minding grandchildren, out of that shrivelling wind.

Briege Duffaud is Northern Irish but most of her adult life has been spent in England and France. She has worked as a freelance journalist before publishing two novels and a short story collection. She has been writing poetry since 2016. She lives in South-West London.

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