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Howard Wright

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From Cornmarket

i
High Street glows through the haze,
the city printing itself on the smoke.
Hold it up for flaws. It soaks in the same
milky light as an unbreakable twenty.
Those entries and arcades, The Twilight Zone
where you lose an arm and a leg
to three-eyed thugs; the ‘Imbibing Emporium’
so grandly stated the original frontage
brims like a glass of stout.

ii
Swirls of starlings, a banner made
from collective instinct. Short-term memory
as a long-term goal. Gulls attack the beerguts
of taxi-touts, and politicians run about
like ducks in thunder, policies
as radical as a hole in the ground.
The culture of drink narrows
pavements and spills untamed
women into the gutter.

iii
Let shadows flock to Cavehill
and dragonflies skim Divis. Up there,
history thickens. Down here,
the unfurnished deserts are built
as redoubts against Whitewell,
Whiterock, Whiteabbey,
their petticoat outskirts slipping over
stubble fields like waves over sand
continually destroying themselves.

Howard Wright lectures in Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Ulster, Belfast. Recent poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland and Cyphers. His first collection, King of Country, is in preparation at Blackstaff Press.

Page(s) 6-7

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