" title="Painted, spoken Raymond Friel
Clyde Square
In a raised plot in the centre of town
three monumental figures put their backs
into hauling a bronze propeller.
Daylight catches on heavyweight shoulders,
foreheads void of any semblance of thought.
Rising over them, the new shopping mall –
cloud-bearing elevation, river motifs.
It will pass, as surely as these emblems of men
will never arrive, the old lever themselves
onto buses winding back to solitude.
*
Rain falls in straight lines, like a barcode.
Around the tinted one2one warehouse
cotoneaster covers over the gaps;
a huge anchor drags on a hillock –
the dream-ship has slipped anchor and gone.
Massed daffodils sprout from the grassy humps –
sway forward like the Dublin Road End.
At Charlie Chalk’s there’s a padded pen
for tagged and red-faced children to rampage;
instructions at the door, ways of paying.
Page(s) 9
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