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Echoes
A beer can breaks the silence
of your presence in my head, and
echoes through the silence of an empty street.
A half-moon brightness dims the sky,
not quite as beautiful as last night, and not
so wondrous as the starry moonlights
you wondered at. What was I thinking before
the crash? It was you. You, watching
blue-black ravens over distant heathers.
Chatting to young kids, bringing pie-bald horses
to feed by the roadside. Those vivid reds
and yellows; the glitz of a campfire.
In the new silence, like the street, I hear
sounds of generations. Happy children laughing,
then some, coerced and menaced, in the act
of playing. I relive the accelerating step
jiving bravely home, in curfew time.
Broken lovers out of pace, pounding the concrete;
crying past the down and the out, seeking refuge
far from home; just a cardboard bed for the night.
Muted in moon-shade now, city houses sleep.
I walk the darkness into bright, to lose my echoes,
by dawn, I pray to sleep and dream them away,
to stop them recurring.
Angela Esmonde
No Irish Need Apply
The signs on the digs in Birmingham
Back in the days gone by
Hung in the windows and bluntly said
No Irish need apply.
My father moved from door to door
Frightened, lost and alone,
Walking the streets in the bitter cold
wishing he’d stayed back home.
Work was scarce in Ireland then
And a family had to be fed.
My father found work in Birmingham
But ,twas harder to find a bed.
As he trudged the streets on that winter night,
The full moon high in the sky.
At every house and on every door
No Irish need apply.
It was fast approaching midnight
When a friendly face he found.
A sign on the door said welcome in
It felt like holy ground.
The landlady said Sure you’re welcome here
And I’ll tell you the reason why
My father once met those same cruel signs
No Irish need apply.
Frank Greally
Final Notes
She looked out through her window
at the world she saw outside
and thought about her life which lay ahead.
She said, ‘Some day I’ll live it up
but not for just a while.
I’ve tasks to do, so I’ll do those instead.’
And so she set a pattern
for each hour that hurried by.
She barely noticed every passing day.
She said, ‘Some day I’ll live it up
but not for just a while.’
So one by one the years just slipped away.
Yet still she held on to her dreams
of all that life could give
and all the wondrous things she could attain.
She said, ‘Some day I’ll live it up
but not for just a while.’
And so she put her dreams aside again.
She planned how she would reach her goals,
she had no time to waste,
as the seasons and the years rolled swiftly on.
Until one day she realised
she hadn’t lived at all.
Her youth and dreams and wishes had all gone.
Now she huddles by a window
with a blanket on her knees,
recalling all the choices she once made.
She thinks ‘If I could start again
I’d savour life’s sweet song
that’s never ended
till the final notes have played.’
Patrick Griffin
