Monday, February 11, 2019

The Boy Who Watched For Apparitions





  Goodnight to the twin moons
  stretched along the railway tracks
  outside Roscommon.
  My night-time window halved
  with those trains rushing across the glass,
  strips of film filled with their own lives:
  adventurers and bon-vivants,
  whose strings of lights recreated as they passed
  the grassy slope, the elder bushes,
  the buffer with the hole in the side;
  strangers oblivious to such little worlds
  and to the boy who watched for apparitions
  from his bedroom window.
  And in a moment they were gone,
  leaving the darkness darker and the boy listening,
  trying to gauge where the sounds 
  finally disappeared into the wind.

 
  What lay beyond that window-world ?
 
  The station to the right,
  the white gates to the left,
  and then..........
 

  Now I remember those film strips
  sailing through that pitch emptiness; 
  sometimes they were only ruffed impressions
  when the window was full of pouring rain.
  I remember how my imagination filled like a can
  when all that was left was the headlight's beam
 over the trees of Bully's Acre.
  And there is often disappointment in these poems;
  the disappointment of that place beyond
  where the rhythms of trains were reclaimed by the wind.

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