Poetry
Voices
That sound of voices, overground
From football pitch or running track
I don’t understand the feeling it brings
Makes me pause, listen out each time.
There are images, the leather ball
Like Joyce’s heavy bird but Gaelic
The cut and sting on legs in rain
But it’s more than these kinds of things.
If you wait awhile, reasons arrive
Of missing out, on something there
Still here, the inarticulate
Yet undescribed events of life:
The shadow stories that upstaged
The real thing, That once what was
In itself, which remains unfound.
The answer’s in your very words
I learned to think, and still believe
It’s almost so, not that profound
Once you get accustomed to it
Playing with dreams and all of that
Not only in those ways of Freud
To find a thing that was suppressed
Overwritten by some oppressor
Of rescuing a drowning self
Not as whole, but of simple things
If you require a simile
Something of the fragmentary
That once was you: A sand grain
Of identity becoming
That was arrested as it’s said
Returns you to the scenery
Of impossible remembrance.
So what is there in that haunted sound?
Something of the body, that ground
Of feeling, words, which calls you back
Like an old photograph but real
Its own, emboldened flesh and bone
‘Here I am, risen from the dead’
‘I have returned to take you home’
Are living statements I have found
With regret that no-one stopped to talk
Though a lifetime has passed it seems
Like just yesterday as they say.
And though this life continues still
Of monuments that could have been
I stand by ruins, hear the wild birds
Sing, the ravens note in passing
‘We will remember you, we will’.
I wait for greater sentience
Vainly wish for a soul enflamed
But perhaps it’s just the waiting
In itself, for what is out of reach
That meant so much to you and me.
I hear we are returned to nothing.
So attend, I hear myself repeat
To the world, in its nothingness.
AMcS 2026
