Teacher’s Prayer
Blessed are you, maidens of the one hundred and eighty afternoons
You of the cough at the first inhale
Tributes
Portrait of Kevin Barry in The Irish Times
I look at him and I say
There’s a man who’s broken
his nose once or twice
Love! His Affections Do Not That Way Tend …
… unless it was love of the bottle. Word was
he’d drunk the family farm, acre
by acre, till a neighbour took the shell
of the house for a shelter.
Slow Nights in the Bass Boat
Some nights when the fishing slows,
when the stripers
and hybrids drift through the cove like elusive thoughts,
you crank in the jig, prop the rod in the boat.
Men on Strike
Men on parade. Men
migrant Hispanic and red
necks in long hair clean
shaven the kind my
daddy bought parts from never
touching some of them
could rewire your grand
ma’s house sharing their wife’s tort
illas.
Gravel
Little children love gravel, kneeling to play in gravel,
even gravel covering dry, meaningless dust.