Poetry: Dennis Moriarty

Dennis Moriarty is originally from London England but has lived in South Wales UK for thirty years. Married with five children Dennis enjoys reading, writing, walking.
This year he won the Blackwater poetry group competition and read his work at the Blackwater international poetry festival in Ireland. Dennis loves all things Welsh and speaks a little bit of the Welsh language.
Dennis Moriarty

Insurgence

Three doors down a dog is barking
A sound black as a hooded crow
At the graveside mourning.
Agile decibels that rise up and scale
The backyard wall
A hacking cough, a dry intermittent howling
Joins the skirmish across borders
Into other gardens, other lives,
My own yard bulging with occupation,rattling
My windows, shredding my nerves.
And on it goes all morning that dark
Advance of sound
Until a pinched spiteful rain arrives driving
It back across borders
And into the fetid darkness of his kennel
In the yard
Where his throat cracks and his mouth
Fills with static,
The barking, the coughing, the howling
Dissolving on his tongue.


Arrival

Winter has come early to this last
Outpost of remembered youth
Autumn shades of terracotta fading
Fast
Fields set
In a plaster cast of frost and the river
Loud and demonstrative
Stumbles between rocks and roots
As if in fevered flight from an unpleasant dream
The hillside is a copse of withered sticks
And birds without song
Crow wings bending slowly in the raw
North easterly wind
Wood smoke in the valley a fleeting apparition
Reminds me
Of pungent tobacco in the heartlands of a room
We once shared
He defender of heritage and me farmer
Of the hearh
Harvesting flames from residue laughter
Winter has arrived at this last outpost
Of remembered youth
Shades of terracotta faded and gone
Autumn all bled out.

Christine In An Armchair Listening To Music.

Today she is the centrefold in the scrapbook
Of my other life.
Her hair is spun with golden threads of the
Late evening sun
In the chair she shares with her other self,
Discreetly drunk, obscenely sober.
I am twelve years a worshipful little brother
Sat on the floor watching
As she offers vinyl 45 records to the
Awaiting spindle.
And one by one they drop settling on a bed
Of those that have gone before,
An extended arm and small hand clutching
A needle
That painstakingly extracts the sound,
The clank and whirl
Of a record player, the lost sounds of
Another time.
I watch as her upper body sways to the
Beat of the music,
Eyes closed, laughter scratching the back
Of her throat.
Now I smooth the wrinkled centrefold of
Memory
Seeing her still sat there, my drunken sister
A parody of her sober self.

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