'Sailortown Xi' Poem by Marty McKenna

he breathes a life of rhyme into me,
all his salty days. brings back fond
of my drinking in his kind. a tide of
joy in me as a new generation of gulls

scatter over a lough i'm imagining,
not remembering. i am living a now
in hard grafted poems, his keen eye
now my history, a psycho geography

for us. in a blink of ink he gives us early
urban soul and in remembering we have
gold. i hope he knows that feeling of
living as significantly as a painting.

his pen as true as a compass, poems
a solid tug boat of all his words shown.

first published by 'writing in the real world'
appears in the pamphlet 'seven sonnets for sailortown'