December 2007  - 5th anniversary issue l Poetry

TERENCE DOYLE

The Shaman of John's Hill

Here,

Here where pithy blurs to a head

Where swivelling chairs steaming rise

the motor propelled looks

cast pernicious grey, even hate.

Here where the road meets sense datum.

Where women’s perfumes fire calumny

iterated in steel, in lead dirt painted.

By and by the ovum circles

by and by plain spoken.

I must have met you in a coffee dock or shop

Brushing coats in strategic lustre in the Viennese air.

The lights of December hung under doorways

Sickly coughs in tiny hands muffled and I went on

the death in lay bys scattered over hillsides

Here where rufous chimneys salvage the joy

The city slick in her wet turbine

by and by.           

El Savior

In Sienna's Piazza

A grappling roar

Thunder beneath the red clay

The coloured hand from birth catches the waveband

I'm lost in cloisters, graveyards and transepts

Primed like statues

I remember like a present

My last un-fore known thought

'Horse destroyed, bookmaker sought'

Blessing the braided horsehair incense and smoke

A grappling roar

Unrestrained enters the feet now

No special effects

That’s what they'll look for

Losing, losing feeling.

TIME

Civilizations of us condensing

falling like flowing streams

to the shoreline to the deep pools

of our motion staked out in the ocean

they will arise unknown again

fabled since the flood we surface from

our dream the sleeper awoken

twisting the stars into daylight

by evening our shadows broken

the nightsky frees us to home

light relaying our fullness of time

the moon like a searchlight finds us

in sequence the clouds interfere

the bearer of our being

I shall rise with the sun

New again.

Feedback

Terence Doyle

3 l 5 l 4

Creative writing & graphics © 2007 The writers and artists. All rights reserved.