Gary Allen: Two Poems

Gary Allen

Gary Allen was born in Ballymena, Co.Antrim. He travelled and worked throughout Europe for many years before settling in Holland for a time. Recent magazine acceptances, Ambit, Antigonish Review, Edinburgh Review, London Magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Poetry Review, Stinging Fly, etc. He has published four pamphlets and five full-length collections of poetry, most recently, ‘Iscariot’s Dream,’ Agenda Editions, and, ‘The Bone House,’ Lagan Press, both 2008. He has had selections of his poetry published in many anthologies including recently, ‘The New North,’ Wake Forest University Press, North Carolina. Also a collection of short stories, ‘Introductions,’ Lagan Press, and a novel, ‘Cillin,’ Black Mountain Press.

Galileo

The full moon hung, a glass-cutting diamond
over the hard beech trees and the Pentagon

though it was still morning;

the window expanded in its rotting frame
a child’s mind

a street-map of ice
broken biscuits in the odd-bin;

the iron radiator flaked and broken
or not turned on
or perhaps too early

for the caretaker to stoke the fire furnace;

and where was everyone?
the wooden handled bell
stood upturned on the table

the row of catechism books, broken spined

the wall chart of planets
set fingertip distance from the sun

the poor women pushing prams
last night’s supper smells —

not long ago, the world was young
and promised everything:

the moment is frozen
a plastic clock
the fading moon

a child left to the care of an empty classroom

a father who shifts shit through drains,
a mother who throttles chickens
pulls apart sacs of entrails, heart, stomach

and you know, with a child’s expansion of space
with intuition
that it is death that contains everything.

The child who saw God

He didn’t exactly have a man’s face
a woman’s neither

sometimes he had the face of a boy
in a cathedral

maybe a girl
or the stone face of an astronaut

and once, for a moment
he looked like the man who pruned the hedges

around Loansend school —
this made me smile

he kept changing,
like water.

There was no halo
though he filled the room with sunlight

and when he spoke his voice came from within
drowned out the sound of respirator, monitor,

Don’t be afraid, he said
and I whispered, Of what?

Can you say my name?
but I couldn’t pronounce it

he just smiled and made a sign
then, I think, he became a white bird

for a while
caught in the window.

He knew everything
where we fished, the field of broken barns

that it was I who took the meter shilling
from the table

but he didn’t seem bothered,
then the ward was blue lights

and though he was gone
he said,

I know you hide your face from me when you pray,
and we both laughed at that.