Patrick Romero McCafferty

Stone Hands:
Pitcairn Island Figure

Thrashed into rock
by an old society
they reach out, fingers
splayed, to an ocean
as to a mother
and are caught
in the middle of that act
in petrified animation.

There is nothing more,
except
one melodious and incessant phrase
of birdsong and
the crater left
by the dead pulse
of a sharkskin drum.

 

Patrick Romero McCafferty is a millennial, hillwalker and student of literature. This is his first published poem. He was raised in Edinburgh and has spent a lot of time abroad, particularly in his second home of Mexico.

Fred Johnston

Nature

The antic gods of this house fled long ago
trailing the light after them.
What’s left is damaged dark, snuffling in corners,
kitchen chatter from nowhere to nowhere.

That’s the nature of a home-place left to its own
devices, a decline as soft-footed as burglary,
as eloquent as murder: a framed
Christ on a wall, ripped heart on fire,
a still from a snuff-movie.

Let’s not blaspheme: good souls slept here
beneath windowsful of wet green fields, a modest sun –
from here too there were voyages
unarmed, perilous, indecently brave
to cities of preposterous savagery

and brute conspiracies, missions of mercy
childlike and without reward. Letters came,
ink-soaked with optimism, ghost-written,
with vivid stamps worth collecting
in exotic currencies, under violent postmarks.

Fred Johnston is an Irish poet, novelist, literary critic and musician. He is the founder and current director of the Western Writers’ Centre in Galway. Johnston is author of four novels, eight collections of poetry. He was Writer-in- Residence to the Princess Grace Irish Library at Monaco. He wrote and broadcast for RTE Radio 1 a four-part series on the literary history of the West of Ireland.

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.

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