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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2023
Pause, poem by Enda Coyle-Greene.
Pause
A world transliterated sends them out
in cool insouciance
where they are caught
in the locus of this crescent moon
and its peculiar relationship
with waves;
while one stand-offish star defies the dark
the sky changes face
and a day
that will never come back prowls over
roads for which no one has a use.
I begin to see them
when I pass closed gardens
where flowers open to exhale
their benedictions
into air that’s gentled, slowed;
light-rippling, they slip
between the sleeping
driveways filled with cars
which hold cold vigils.
Others, staying shy
blow tiny, finite clouds on glass
they sit behind to meditate
on what
this pause has taught us all, older instincts
they, like bat, owl, fox, or ghost
know black-eyed.
But they everywhere this morning
in a spring that came,
as it has always come,
from winter, night, and other quiet lands.
At this hour, boneless
almost, on soft paws
they’re stealthy and, yes, like the dead,
show such little need
of us.
© Enda Coyle-Greene
Enda Coyle-Greene lives in Skerries, Co. Dublin. Her first collection, Snow Negatives, won the Patrick Kavanagh Award in 2006 and was published by the Dedalus Press in 2007. Her subsequent collections are Map of the Last (2013) and, most recently, Indigo, Electric, Baby (2020) both also from Dedalus. A co-founder and Artistic Director of Poetry at the Mills — the Fingal Poetry Festival, she received a Patrick and Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in 2020.