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Poetry
Three Poems
WHEN THE CIRCUS CAME TO TOWN
They tethered the elephant on a plot
Of grass outside the municipal pool
Near the fairground
Where Roma on their travels stop.
I’d swum my lengths and towelled off
When I noticed her shy grey bulk
– But where hereabouts to hide? –
Rhubarb-leaf ears to fan breezes,
And rocking side to side uneasily
Like a visitor unsure of welcome.
I caught her eye and she, I felt, caught mine,
As if we had something to say
If only we could find the words.
HIGH LIFE
for Bernard O’Donoghue
Unlucky the girl who never leaves home
In order to taste the joys of exile
In a country where her pupils line up on Sunday
And each girl braids the hair
Of the girl in front of her
Until they come full circle, and the last
Braids the hair of the first;
Unlucky the girl who never leaves home
To sleep under a tin roof vultures dance on
In a compound lined with banana trees
Where her pupils gather each washday to launder
Patterned pieces of cloth
And hang them to dry in the lion-faced sun
On the scarlet hibiscus that scent their dormitory;
Unlucky the girl who never leaves home
To live on a road on the way to the interior
Near a village whose resident medicine man
Proposes she come in for a consultation
For she, at twenty-two, is childless
And seems to have chosen a sky-blue scooter
And foreign travel over the delights of a family.
ÎLE DE FRANCE
Northern skies, their sumptuous cloud,
New storms building on last night’s ash,
Suburbs grafted to a village
With a granite church, thrice-weekly market,
And Monument to the Dead
Whose names are still extant in these parts.
You are 30 km from Paris-Notre-Dame -
One of those neither-here-nor-there places.
I write this in the illusory peace
Of an evening in the not-quite-real world
Of hay rolls, combines and manure piles,
To mark our journey
Past pharmacies and time-hedged cottages
Whose shutters are still open,
Whose lamps begin to flicker on.