Homing
A stranger now
in a strange land,
this street my feet had pattered
through all the years that mattered:
in between the ghosts
of fallen heroes,
the smoke of burnt-out fires
monuments to the ruins
of dreams and desires
past facades masking
tattered insides;
all the laughing, skipping, dancing,
hauling, falling length of it
a street baptised in people’s lives.
A little street,
in a little town,
at the wave-washed edge
of the world.
Come and find me
where wailing walls
of moss-rolled stone
slowly yielding to a
centuried crusade
cling with smoke of long-gone
bog-fires now forever
married with the drifting
sea-mist lifting over
impossibly green fields
clutching ancient secrets
drop sharply off
to pitching shale
where swarming gulls rise
with the lagging tide
running the gusts
plunging with the lulls
to swoop and pull
a glistening haul
under the flagging watch
of a water-locked tower
marking the ethereal line
between sky and sea
and spectral hills loom
long past muted islands
still harbouring
a ship-wrecked shore
Come and find me
in the dying light
where a cormorant calls unanswered
shallow over his own ghost
Singularity
For Buzz
Staring back through that magnificent desolation
to this devilled blue globe, one dome suspended in light,
the other obscured by the shadow of where you stood;
immersed as you were in light particles
from long-dead stars, did you wonder
at our seemingly eternal journey,
cycling over and over from light
to dark to light? Reflecting on Earth:
seeing ‘home’ for the first time in that vast
perspective at once vivid and spectral; this silenced beauty
turning slowly over its own desolate truth:
the enormity of its one persisting challenge—
to somehow find our allied humanity
—a singular planetary alignment
as subtly elusive as one
perfect surface reflection.
As great and bungled.
As necessary as the light
we feed on, as desperate
to repel the dark, over and
over to separate and break us
apart from the spectre of some alternative reality,
time folded in on itself, suspending us in an-
other perpetual virtual truth
and the hovering ghosts of
what could have been.
Homing’ and ‘Come and find me’ were first published in ‘where the lost things go’ poetry collection (Salmon Poetry 2017). ‘Singularity’ was first published in the ‘Giant Steps’ anthology (Recent Work Press 2019).
Award-winning, Sydney-based Irish poet/writer, Anne Casey is author of two collections published by Salmon Poetry – where the lost things go and out of emptied cups. A journalist, magazine editor, legal author and media communications director for 30 years, her work is widely published internationally, ranking in leading national newspaper, The Irish Times' Most Read. Anne has won/shortlisted for poetry prizes in Ireland, Northern Ireland, the UK, the USA, Canada, Hong Kong and Australia, and serves on numerous literary advisory boards. anne-casey.com