Michael Farry – Rescuing Don Quixote

Farry LE P&W Vol 2 Nov-Dec 2025

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Two
November- December 2025

Rescuing Don Quixote, poems by Michael Farry.


Rescuing Don Quixote

The last knight of Europe looked me in the eye
lean and foolish on the stalls of Malvern—
those rusting cast-off acres, the residue
of progress—his sword stolen, his servant fled.
I had no option but to pay the ransom
promise to rearm him, supply a valet,

to display him in a place of honour.
I’ve studied chivalry, read the romances
and seen enough of worn-out nags to know
the story’s faulty, the ending fatal.
Sometimes you just grab what’s splayed before you
even if it’s foreign and overpriced

so I paid the man and took the wooden piece.
My sidekick cynic mocked my innocence,
queried my forging skills, asked what my children
would say, where on my overburdened shelves
I could display him. I’ll find room I told him,
above the row of European novels

I’ve still to read, Mann, Undset and Conrad.
Yes, there were other useless treasures there
had we the time—that railway sign our fathers
would have cherished, too heavy for the train,
the stained glass panel, angel poised to help,
too pious for today. We leave so much

behind, the time short, our energy low.
But where in this vast paddock is my
trusty car? We walk, aisle by aisle, for hours,
then find it by its number plate, drive off
along a straggling road towards the distant
blue hills, the cider farm, the festival,

the last knight of Europe safe in bubble wrap.


Cut Throat Lane, Ledbury

 Its swashbuckling name entices you like
a silver cross on a white neck or
the splash of accidental blood
Then narrows as the lush hedges close like
the gloom swallowing a galleon in
a winter’s evening dying daylight
Mocking your ignorance and gullibility like
the photo of an infamous ancestor
a mirror reflecting the unnoticed
And what keeps you going is terror like
the whisperings in the night time
the black spot in the summer garden
Until you do reach the main road like
a raindrop finding a friendly stream
a tributary welcoming extinction.
Back home, the name demands attention like
a family legend you can’t forget or
an old sports injury which still nags.

Men in Suits

The men in suits are lost

outside the windswept porch
beleaguered by hail and guilt
waiting to be assigned their stations,
front or back, left or right
to bear the casket’s dead-weight

in the corners of the function room
floundering in noose-tight ties
checking their lists, punch lines
their not-so-funny-now tales
of youthful misdemeanours

along late-night gravelled aisles
unsteady, half blind,
shirts loose, shoes muddied,
searching for stones above coloured pebbles
their names and dates, alphas to omegas,

rehearsing apologies, excuses
even prayers, like drunken muttered retorts
to insults hurled across a public lounge
or like, in a single room, the unburdening
of half a century’s heartache

They find no answer, no accord
in church, hotel or silent graveyard.


© Michael Farry

Michael Farry’s latest poetry collection, his fourth, An Apology for our Survival was published by Revival Press, Limerick in 2024. A historian as well as a poet, he has published widely on the history of the Irish war of independence and civil war in Sligo. He lives in Co Meath, Ireland.

 

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