Arthur Broomfield – Ypres

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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing Volume Four November-December 2024

Ypres, poems by Arthur Broomfield.

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Ypres

In this theatre,
where the stage lights
are broken bones
that glint in the full moon,
a girl, in a walk on part, pouts,
reaches for a man in uniform.

He, now a puff of vapour,
drifts in the smoke and dust,
props loaned from an old production.

She mingles with other men.
They unearth springtime and harvest
with picks and shovels,
make homes for themselves
where worms, who make their homes
with the bristle of their bodies,
mine the perma soil for rotting leaves.

Here, men wake to Flanders’ mud,
the songs and suns
of mortar fire and canon,
the moans of fallen comrades,

while the nascent beast,
teeth brushed, claws edged,
adds the finishing touches,
rouge and ruby red lipstick,
before the curtain rises.

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Deborah

After Edward Hopper’s ‘Hotel Room’

A woman in a camisole
sits on a bed
in a hotel room.
She’s framed in acetelyne blue
and black and yellow columns.
A luna light, that shines
from her back,
scorches her wrist.
Under the pages that cool
the beat of the knee that burns.

A travel bag, a closed case,
quiet, on the floor.

Is she the shadow
in the shade of a Palm,
come to read the writing
on the churning soap suds
that conceal a gully trap ?

Does she know a bit more
than the man who plastered
it all, or the bellhop who
abandoned her luggage.
that maybe here
the slugman will slouch
to the beer snare,
where the gully is sealed ?

Between the beam that
will torch her back,
and the promise of the
dark rug beneath her feet,
between the before of
the kindled flames,
and the after of the sterile room,
she, the dancing waves and dots
made flesh, pauses
on a flying visit to this place,
where the soul hangs
in a blank canvas
on a hand painted wall .

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© Arthur Broomfield

Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland. His current collection is At Home in Ireland : new and selected poem. Arthur is Poetry Ireland Poet Laureate of Mountmellick.