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.