Sunday Nights
We were up the graveyard drinking cider,
saw the old woman walk the dead chicken,
pushed all the wrong buttons, thought
David Lynch films were documentaries,
knew we’d be dead before forty,
So how the fuck am I fifty-five?
I thought everyone’s toilet froze in the winter,
we were lucky to have an indoor one,
everything is relative.
still an innate sense of difference,
a need to hide to survive.
Ten years old I pressed my face hard
to the spent-breath-misted glass
of uncle Liam’s overcrowded Cortina,
I could see the stars, I could see all
the tiny lights of the little houses,
I never wanted to reach home,
I wanted to die there and then,
partly because of what
inevitably lay ahead,
but mainly because I was
almost 20 long miles from home,
feeling so warm, so safe, so secure,
so loved, I knew life this innocent,
this good, could never last.
Previously published in The Death of Poetry, 2019
It was Summer Somewhere
The crows attacked another crow,
magpies looked on like
football fans at a match,
slugs came out at night
to eat their own killed
on the previous night,
silence was somewhere,
with peace up its sleeve,
the cacophony of brutality
filled our skies, our minds
our airwaves, love fell mute
onto deaf ears, pity landed
on pockets full of rainbows
as black as our souls.
Peadar runs Poetry Bus Press with his wife Collette and has been widely published as a poet and photographer.
His words and images have appeared in print and online including Poetry Ireland Review, The Irish Times, THE SHOp, The Stinging Fly, Abridged, Magma, Culture Matters, The Waxed Lemon,The Morning Star,Burning Bush, Ink Sweat and Tears. His debut collection, Jewel, was the best selling title on the Salmon Poetry website.