Gary Allen
First Love
In my house, chairs stood against the windows:
I sweated in fear of the man
with a pillow-case over his head.
The night I walked you home,
lads smoking in the shadows
at the gates of the Parochial House -
Go no farther love, you whispered:
a fool youth, in my rut I would have kissed
you under the famine wall.
And my father sprung up
from the locks he was mending
pressing the blade of a screwdriver to my throat,
his eyes burning like Abraham’s.
Love changes nothing, you said,
not even bales of shorn hair,
hillocks of broken teeth.
Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co. Antrim. He has published four collections of poetry, the most recent of which is Making Waves. A fifth collection, Languages, is to be published in April 2002 by Flambard/Black Mountain.
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