a cul-de-sac of poems

A FENCED IN POEM

I’m digging for a soul

Without god

In this wild existential

Garden.

I step away from

a sentimental path

and find light in dark

a truth in my truth.

The wind blows

Everything west

the world looks like

a Donegal landscape.

HALF A SESTINA
for Stephanie

How can i write a sestina for you
six stanzas of six lines concluding death
killing yourself in a three- line envoy
I, who doesn't know the time of day
when the lines of your life were diverted
to lie low in the blue-stoned soil.

Reliving grief, my hands delve in the soil
moulding a clay figurine of you.
Retracing the black paths that diverts
my gaze away from sunset to death.
A photograph of you on your wedding day
your smile did not convey loves envoy.

Was it back then that the messenger
whispered phlegmed words that soiled
you soul to fall early to your funeral day?
did a touch reach out and abuse you
fondling filthy caresses to die
out there on the back roads where diverted

diversions took you
round and round
to fall foul of the dead end?

THE RED COAT

During times of universal deceit, 

telling the truth becomes 
a revolutionary act. 

                      George Orwell

I was ten or twelve

when my father

told me to burn

a good red coat.

This was Belfast

In the early

seventies so

I done what

I was told

but

to this day it

has always

niggled me why

I had to burn

that coat.

My father is dead

and my sister

who was wearing

the coat

she killed

herself

and I think

this is why.

This was 

the coat

that carried 

the gun

that killed 

the man?