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Prizewinner, Strokestown Poetry
Festival, 2005
and in collection With Blushes in the
Sky,
2005
Flight of the
Heron
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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