Gary Allen :: Acumen

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.

Friday

The evening of your days
I remember
always
on the other side of a hospice night.
A funeral in my face,
your ghostcandled fatherlight
still laughing, bright,
white
in the winter of your age.

The world in your ember days
lit up its lights in a biblical rain.
Long and far,
the crack of the night
in that dark throbbing room ‒
showed your four-medal war arms,
your eyeballs stars.
The nightjars were still and did not stir you

when Death in his formal garden
took the bones of my grandfather,
took the hissing skin
that brimmed with disease
in all the mists of that morning,
the dawn
at the edge of his sleep
something last,
lost,
gone.
Your terminal cry I heard long.
2019 19:23 Page 52
53 May 2019
Poetry
After that, the morning hours ran on.
In a dawn darkly,
on a singing white page
at the rim of my memory,
the long wartime age
of your history
I scrawled:
your lost laugh,
your long love,
all the days of your life ‒
and never your death at all.

Laura Potts is twenty-two years old and lives in West Yorkshire. Twice-recipient of the Foyle Young Poets Award and Lieder Poet at The University of Leeds, her work has appeared in Agenda, Prole and Poetry Salzburg Review. Having worked at The Dylan Thomas Birthplace in Swansea, Laura was last year listed in The Oxford Brookes International Poetry Prize and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She also became one of The Poetry Business’ New Poets and a BBC New Voice for 2017. Laura’s first BBC radio drama aired at Christmas, and she received a commendation from The Poetry Society in 2018.

The Last Piece

You taught me all I know about jigsaws,
how to shepherd the straight edges
and sift through the tones of blues and greys,
turning them into clouds and cliffs and seats.
All those churches, somebody’s local, a cricket pavilion.

On your tray, the thatched cottage stands unfinished,
just as it’s done for the past few weeks;
the open door, roses taking shape around the eaves.
It was where you were going to live if Dad had managed
to place eight little crosses in the right eight little squares.
Not much to ask, you’d have thought
yet every week you heard an excuse you never really understood:
how West Brom’s centre forward had missed a sitter
and you knew you would have to wait another week at least.
Now you talk about heaven in much the same way.

I take your hand. Your skin feels cold and smooth
like a snake’s. And like a snake you seem to be preparing
to shed something: calm, easy, natural.
You are dying like you have lived, not wanting to make a fuss.

And the jigsaw? I suppose there is always something left undone.
Someone will never find out who killed Roger Ackroyd. (It was the
doctor.)
In sheds everywhere chisels will lose their sharpness
and brushes stiffen in pots of curdling paint.
One day I will finish it in your memory,
twirling the last piece
like the card sharp in some black and white western saloon.

Today, though, let’s just sit here holding hands,
both of us knowing that it’s nearly complete.

Gary Allen

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