Ciaran and Drogheda’s bittersweet affair
DROGHEDA
I enjoy hearing English people pronounce you.
Their stiff upper lips tread awkwardly around your rough edges but you are all soft inside, not that you’d ever admit it.
ROLLING like a river out of my mouth,
WE don’t always get on, do we?
SOMETIMES you’re the unhurried ghost
whose rapping on the door of dormant distance
echoes into dreams whispering me
awake,
BUT mostly you’re a foggy kitchen window, dishes patient for morning, a TV playing to empty seats in the one room
because we are together in the other.
YOU are Saint Anthony pleas,
a sense of forgetting something more valuable than keys,
of misplacing the messy Ordnance Survey of my jigsaw memory because you are wholly independent of how I piece you together.
THE portrait of your landscape is incomplete
without all the perspectives, but hey, beauty and beholder and all that.
MIDDLE child of Ireland,
the fecklessness of your spirit is a lowbudget TV drama.
Yes, that one.
YOU reserve all the rights to take the piss out of yourself, and, like me, you are trying to discover who gave you the stars,
who showed you the moon.
Ciaran Hodgers