Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume One Nov-Dec 2026.
The Mercy Corner, poems by Richard W Halperin.
The Mercy Corner
A good friend in Harare.
another good friend in Tokyo.
Several are closer.
They have their lives
I have mine.
Between and in there is
space for mercy.
They have found it
as have I.
Best not to know
why it was needed.
I write this under an olive tree.
An olive tree en plein Paris.
A table and chair under it.
I think of my mother at twenty.
Slim, audacious.
In Chicago.
In her friend Frank’s sailor trousers,
her curly hair pushed way up
with big combs,
Belfast childhood out the window.
Ready to ride a horse in the park,
to crack a joke,
to make her own way,
to streak the canvas with any colour at all,
then painting as she pleased.
She didn’t know what would
happen to her good and bad.
That was also mercy.
She went on that way
for sixty more years,
then she was stopped.
So, I’ll stop.
And Yet
Araby again. I have nothing in common
with the Dublin boy who takes
a tram late one evening out to
a tented bazaar called Araby to buy
something beautiful for someone beautiful,
he too young to realise that he himself,
throughout, is beautiful. Older, he may,
I think, realise it. I run my fingers
over the pages, as I sometimes do
when I am stirred. I have no idea why
over the decades I return to Araby,
yet I do. When I began writing poetry
I said I would never call a poem
‘And yet.’ And yet . . . .
New York State
Birds, who own it.
Hudson River light, quite real.
Train tracks indistinguishable from it.
Wonderful artists and writers.
Weekend markets.
A New York State woman
Marsha Eger who chanted
in Glenstal Abbey’s library
when she thought she was alone.
Washington Irving’s house.
Mountain light, which is
not the same as Hudson River light.
The fine particularity of things.
Tutta Roma
A Canadian couple whom I know
arrived in Rome in February 2020
to find themselves in a deserted city.
The new plague.
Only Roman air, the virus in it,
and a few scurriers.
The couple did not scurry.
They stayed.
Walked everywhere.
Tutta Roma.
I have taken that walk before.
In ‘Byzantium.’
At night down Fifth Avenue
from Washington Square
to the Frick Collection,
traffic lights
blinking at nothing.
No city, only maquettes.
Cinecittà.
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin’s poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher (five collections) and by Lapwing/Ballyhalbert (twenty smaller collections). The two most recent Lapwings, June 2026, are Silk Threads and Some Walk with Stilts. The most recent Salmon, November 2025, is All the Tattered Stars: Selected & New Poems which was reviewed this summer on the 96th episode of the Irish podcast series Books for Breakfast. His poem ‘Waiting for the Piano’ will be part of the forthcoming Montreal International Poetry Competition Anthology 2026.