David Cooke

The closest my dad ever got to poetry
was when he savoured some word
like pugilist, or the tip-toe springiness
he sensed in bob and weave,
...

There are times your dancers annihilate
the humanist in me. In that northern
Cockaigne you viewed with a realist's eye
their heartiness tramps to raucous tuning.
...

Old photos soften the lines on their creased
faces, the indelible imprint of seasons.
They are ranged before me, The Bird People,
in a phoney pose for tourists, well used
...

for my grandfather

When I first came on a visit
to your limewashed house
...

From compartment windows
they were fake, too far away
to be real. Friesians, shorthorns,
angus: painted cows
...

So long abandoned, their house and garden
lay caged in the tangle of briars. As a child
I looked for secrets, creating new lives
each visit from what they had left behind -
...

A lustreless
black, it slept all night
in a shed with the relics
...

Her hand at the door, my aunt
said quietly: He's going
then urged me in to speak.
Why? for I found him there
...

With sturdy jowls Brother Athanasius,
who back then we knew as Beef, chomped great slabs
of Virgil, which he digested for us,
struggling with the English in Brodie's cribs.
...

In a windowless room they had laid you out
in a crisp white bed of linen.
Packed tight in a huddle around you,
...

Crossing the road for a bar, we dance
through the headlights of cars.
I open the door and the cold ignites,
your face aglow as laughing
...

The heat that summer oppressed us
as day after day we travelled along
a flat unbending road; and bleak utilities
hemmed it in all that dragging section.
...

The dog-days scorch Bordeaux. Behind closed doors
at a desk he sits, charting norms through a sea
of print. As reason discovers the laws
that define the natural good, history
...

It's early evening and the TV set is on.
You lay the table and the children scream
as fraying ends of day unravel.
Through the mayhem of boxes, bricks and cars
...

I can see you sitting in the yard at Reno's
where the Mob's tight hold makes dollars spin.
You are scuffling the dust, then homing in
whenever Lester launches his solos.
...

Wrapped in the tang of the morning,
I stand at the edge of a stone quay.

Above my head a tilted sky
...

i.m. Peter McManus

On TV we were watching the soldiers
parade and saw, far away in Dublin,
...

I shuffled at the back
for years, and kept a truce
at home by looking
at others around me -
...

Their patience an absolute they had fostered
on quaint erudition, they came to dig
the unsaleable tracts at the limits
of their own late empires: their vision too big
...

Evening, and small fields
are reapportioned in shadow,
the hills smudged dully
against a residue of sky.
...