Category Archives: Old Day 20

Gill McEvoy

Day 19 and 20 of Stapowrimo I’ve made the mistake of submitting my poems in the comment box under Robbie’s prompts. Please do have a look at them and respond if you wish, and next time I’ll get it right!!

Yoga with Birds

For an hour every Thursday
I’m a cat, a dog, a mountain, a child.
While I breathe big and view the sky
through the space between my knees,
goldfinch, robin, wagtail and gull,
wrap me in their rainbow song.

 

The call

The call

ringing, echoing through my mind.
There stands my mother
in the hall of our erstwhile family home.
Elegant grey hair swept behind
the antique white telephone held to her ear,
the fingers of her other hand playing nervously
with the curling umbilical telephone cord.
Her concerned glance meets the reassuring gaze
of my father, standing beside her.
He looks much younger than my mother.
Strange, but he had been dead for years
when my mother was that age, of course.
His neatly trimmed Errol Flynn moustache
twitches, betraying some anxiety on his part, too.
RAT-A-TAT…
Open my eyes
to behold my wife, outside,
tapping on the French windows.
Her hair, ruffled by the breeze, also an elegant grey.
My God, we’re older than my parents!
She’s returned from shopping,
forgotten her keys.
Struggle up from my easy chair,
must have dozed off.
Realize the phone really is ringing.
Grab the cordless handset
kept at the ready on the arm of my chair.
“Hello..?”
“Dad!” My son, calling from the hospital.
“It’s a boy! 7 pounds 2 ounces. They’re both OK!”
Look up, smiling the marvellous news
to my wife, watching expectantly
on the other side of the glass.
And to my parents, glimpsed again,
fleetingly, further beyond.

 

Doing Time

You can check out any time but you can’t leave.
The song is a world outside
whose gates unlock but its air
is solitary, a staring at a wall;
fingers scratch out the passing of each day.

At random times the visitors appear.
They nod and smile but do not talk.
Sometimes he dreams that she is sitting there
across the table, almost holding hands.
He wants to touch her face, her neck, her hair.

She does not speak. The body is quite still.
As someone lays a flower by her side
he wakes. There will be no parole
and silence makes the sentence
incomplete