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

The Watched

The wind sings her softly plucking

her feathers

As if they are the strings of a sad

Harp weeping.

Hers is the musicality of movement

The half seen

Half imagined tilting of the wings

The lyrical poetry of flight.

Occupying the space between two

Mountain peaks

And the glacial water of my eyes

I watch her

Spilling her colour bending her body

To the shape of a cloud.

Her breast strings tremble

My mind spins

And her tail forks my head open

As she becomes the watcher and I

The closely observed.

My eyes the drained lake of the watched.

***

The Business Of Mourning

Death has dressed you today

In your mass on Sunday finest suit.

I stand on the fringes of your passing

Gathering my thoughts

Assembling the words of one final line

Of defiance.

Advancing I can see your penny weary eyes

Are closed

Yet still I bow down under the expectation

Of your stare,

A look a thousand words or more cannot

Adequately describe.

In your left hand you clutch a crucifix shrouded

In the rosary beads

You kissed each night at closing time.

A small fan

Turns it's cold prayer on the sterile silence

And I wonder,

Shall I embarrass you in front of your god

One last time?

Shall I? Shall I? Yes, I think I will and I advance

Creeping nearer

And nearer and nearer until only deaths 

Rank breath

Comes between us and I lean in, anointing 

Your forehead with kiss.

And for the first time, the last time, you neither

Flinch nor try to turn away.

I walk to the door somehow expecting you

To follow

But you are already gone. Our business here

Is complete.

***

Eden’s Last Temptation

I work these August harvest lanes of hedgerows

Plump and laden with blackberries,

The bloodshot eyes of god detailing each

New revelation.

Ripe and juicy, oozing temptation, I come upon

Bruised bramble lips

My fingers tracing the origins of sin.

I reach in

Determined to pluck and plunder but the hedgerow

Recoils scratching 

Like a wild cat in defence of her young.

I yelp withdrawing my hand,

Stigmata spreading and setting its stain. 

Undeterred I thrust back in

To that wondrous garden of the mind where I find

Two ripe engorged berry nipples

That I squeeze and pinch until they bleed 

And my tongue laps,

Sucking and slurping the late summer nectar

Of crimson flesh.

Eden’s last temptation.

******

Setu, September 2020