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Prizewinner, Strokestown Poetry Festival, 2005

and in collection With Blushes in the Sky, 2005

Flight of the Heron

 

1. Evening

 

Gainly, magnificent, the heron stands

A menhir on the water's edge.

Its granite eye anticipates

The red, red dusk while overhead

The silhouetted starlings flutter

Like soot escaping from a bonfire.

 

2. Dusk

 

The town is a tidal memory

Wafting its way slowly upstream

Fanning out over silt and mud

To the bullrush, where the heron dreams

Of nightfall sudden as a shower,

Darkness total as forever.

 

3. Night

 

A tired man chants his tired prayer

The one about 'respect for difference'

Or how a lifetime's search for peace

Turns into a decade long lament,

For chances lost between the fences

Outside the heron wakes; tenses.

 

4. Dream

 

In memoriam, I skitter stones across

The beach at Glenigivnew bay

Bright as sweets they pop the surface

Then ripple towards America.

I sense my father's sweatered spectre

Applaud the action 'Again...better.'

 

5. Dawn

 

She stalks the heron in charcoal strokes

Approving of the Japanese lines

The classic lean sublimity

On a canvas of morning sunshine;

Suddenly soars, a pure arc dipping

Seaward, the sound of one wing flapping.

 

Michael Conaghan

 

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 Michael Conaghan photo

e-mail Michael

Michael at The Bear Review (and see Writing / Growl)

and in the shop ...
collections -
"A Map of Johny Casey"
and
"With Blushes in the Sky",
Lapwing Publications

 


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