Street Scene In Blue
The street we once walked paints itself
damson with a lamp lit for shadows,
where figures fade to blue under the lamp's
halo ring, fading into alleyways, into promises
of you. And then my head becomes a DVD
replaying things that were mixed with things
that might have been, intercutting close-ups
with tracking-shots of you next to me,
waiting for friends who arrive in sequence
with a soundtrack, fading from the street scene,
that would give anything for colours no brush can bring.
Under The Weather
The rain? Don't talk to me about the rain.
A slash of sequins, turning to a drilled
downpour of teeth, gnawing the windowpane,
flushing the roof, gaping the spectrum again.
And we walk the waterbulbs, watching rilled
gutterstreams upsplurge, jetsprouting the drain,
our lagoon-heads pealing into thunder.
Sometime soon, we must talk about the thunder.
Progress
They say that for years Belfast was backwards
and it's great now to see some progress.
So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes
from the earth. I guess that ambulances
will leave the dying back amidst the rubble
to be explosively healed. Given time,
one hundred thousand particles of glass
will create impossible patterns in the air
before coalescing into the clarity
of a window. Through which, a reassembled head
will look out and admire the shy young man
taking his bomb from the building and driving home.
About Alan
Alan Gillis lives in Belfast and is a lecturer at the University of Ulster. As a critic, he is the author of Irish Poetry of the 1930s (OUP, 2005) and co-editor, with Aaron Kelly, of Critical Ireland: New Essays on Literature and Culture (Four Courts Press, 2001). Somebody, Somewhere is his first collection. |