Raymond Friel

Unbearably buoyant the night before My return to Blairs, I’d be brought back down To earth by Dad’s Polonius routine. He’d been there in the black and white Forties, And had to leave, he said, only because ...

Now, in the grey-skied secular Nineties, Home with a girlfriend who’s not a Catholic, I psych myself for one of our wee talks. A curt ‘she’s...

With his ‘shopping list’, my son makes us stop At choice hedges, a particular weed. He does not share my anticipation. In the long shadows, a man tends a grave With brisk affection, his jacket folded Inside out, specs high on his balding head.

The white horse, behind us on its hillside, Is summoning the nerve for a great leap. Outside St Michael’s, the...

We are the dawn sniffers, the motley few, This morning snuffling at the lateness Of the only service this side of midday. Does it still exist? Is it late enough To risk a common ground with coded quips Regarding ‘leaves’, or some such dreary mot?

The plaque inside the cedar-scented bothy Tells of how this elevated halt Was saved from nettly dereliction By Betjeman’s verses...

October.

Windfall is thin on the ground, quickly rotten. Perhaps it’s the sick summer, or a sick tree ...

My mind takes the same turns, overweight, ridiculous in trunks, arms in the air down the flume, on and on and down.

     *

Now the borders are pruned back

(the crippled peony pleading to the blue October sky)

the lost toys of summer are found, the handguns...

Evening station: two bucket seats, glasses on a handy sill.

The bristly sea half-fills the big basin of the headlands;

on lower slopes crocosmia smoulders in the coarse grass;

hydrangeas spill over the stone wall of Treneglos

(hortensia – like a blousy barmaid at the pumps).

The roofs of shops (towers of beach clutter locked in the dark)

draw the lazy eye to the sun’s minted...