This Week's Poem of the Day
CONTINUITY
The wind sails leaves around the house like late notices
for the
garden’s deterioration. Turn a blind eye.
RTE longwave announces
gigs in familiar venues,
I like the presenter’s comfortable thoughts
of tonight
and the day after, until, that is, he introduces
The
Holy Land by the Bothy Band then veers
into advertising a poetry
broadsheet and a silver plate,
before attacking quote the crimson
tides
and purple mountains end quote someone (who?)
might waste
their money on instead in Woolworth’s.
There’s a snatch of a
shipping forecast and
I’m unloading the dishwasher when I hear a new
voice,
which strands me by announcing, ‘This is The Archive Hour.
And that was The Long Note 30 years ago today’
out of earshot as I
am of the autumn sun and rain
which the radio forecast, too, on
this hour that’s gone
south with its silver plate, its piano and
bodhran,
where, in Woolworth’s, a crimson tide progresses
beneath a purple mountain and someone hums a reel:
he knows the
start of it but puts a question mark
against the title: it’s ‘The
Holy Ground’ but he doesn’t join the dots.
He has places to go.
There will be time again for names and dates,
for taking it all
down, for credits, for footnotes.
— John McAuliffe, A Midgie (Smith/Doorstop, 2010)
The Poetry Business receives financial assistance from Arts Council England.
