GALWAY IN A STORM
Val Nolan
The sky black, night-black in day, and later
The wind knocking out the streetlights
On Newcastle
Hail garnishing the paving wet, bare poplars
Swaying like stick-figure foxtails upended
The rivers all run brown, the canals
And other channels too
The earth is bleeding the earth
The lough is wind-dimpled
But things are rougher by the Arch, high water
Thundering through the strait,
The city slipping another foot or two
Into the bay.
This is the front, seething atomic swell,
Great chunks of ocean hurled nightward
Crystallising jagged in the air
The cold here not an earthly cold
But fiercer, whipping the skin into
Cracked pancakes,
And leaving corings of blue ice where its fingers
Have drilled the dark…
Yet, by midnight, the storm is broken with stillness.
The sea shrugs off all interest in pursuit
And now, hurrying over the bridge, a high collar
Makes for home,
Ablative leather fatigued green by freezing rain
Flat cap low and darned with frosty thread…
He knows the wind has said what needed to be said.
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First Christmas
Sarah Carter Conklin
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Victoria, IL 1982 Steven Fox Yasukawa