Poems by 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

Heron On A Shore At Dusk.

10 pm summer dusk
Palpitations of uncertainty
Neither dark nor light
A world poised on the precipice
Of change.
Quiet but not silent there is sound
In the undergrowth.
Reflective laid back but not still
There is movement
In the shadows.
I go among the ages of trees
Canopy and trunk
Branch, twig, leaf and finally into
A clearing where sky
Morphs into water and a heron
On a scaffold of legs
Stands on the shore in deepest
Meditation.
And in that moment we are each
Undone
By the psychology of surprise.
I admonish a shiver
Swallow an involuntary grasp
Take off is vertical
A rocket dance of wings a smooth
Acceleration
Into an unscheduled flight
Leaving me alone in a clearing
Clinging to the image
Of a heron on the shore at dusk.

June Wind.

June wind is an unexpected arrival.
A brutal ill disciplined insurgence,
Mass hysteria of beech, kick back of rowan
And Ebbw Vale
A fading skyline on the county map.
Horizon is a pit full of stars
And a smudge of moon, something more
Substantial than the wind
Yet from a distance it looks so innocuous,
So unreal.
But the wind is real, it has travelled a
Vast distance to be here
Among this valley settlement, among these
Valley trees.
Stoic oak braced for whiplash, fingers of ash
Bent back to fractured origins,
Twisted anomalies of the coming night.
And the owl,
A moon smudge with stars in her eyes,
Fractious and faltering
In the acreage of chaos, the wind seismic in
The darkness,
Too heavy a burden for the owl alone
To carry.

Border Crossing.

The grass is warm still
From the heat of the afternoon
And the day's irresistible push towards
Night.
Twilight is the sky's partial dissection,
A smooth deep incision,
Light bubbling on the surface, a crow cluster
Of darkness underneath.
The air is scented with the colour of
Cut grass,
The evening close with hay bales, heavy enough
To suffocate carp in shallow pools,
Still restless wings and choke off a song
In the larynx.
This evening I too am a cluster of darkness
On the edge of light,
Clustered thoughts and deep pool reflections
Of a day
I have measured in centimetres of silence
And the coming night
I will count in the currency of stars.
After all, even solitude
Can sometimes, albeit unwittingly, cross the border
Into loneliness.

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