Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2026
The Intricacies of Friendship, poems by Maurice Devitt.
The Intricacies of Friendship
Have you ever tried to write a poem
about a friend, capturing your times
together, how you met and how
the friendship survived? There is always
the fear of it not being enough,
or simply too much. Faces of other friends
gather at the window, wondering
why it isn’t them. The echo of childhood
when you found it so easy to pick
your best friend and so easy to lose them.
Maybe there are too many reasons
not to write the poem, but it is always
worth the time to mine the little gems
that make friends special,
even if you only keep them to yourself.
The Perfidy of Storms
I’m cocooned in the upstairs study
trying to write about the wind
gusting fitfully outside. No pattern
to the rattle of the windows
or the effortless trickle of the rain
snailing into every crevice. Water
is pooling on the flat roof, soaking
patiently into the felt. Nobody
knows when or where the first leak
will appear, basins and buckets placed
judiciously to attract the drips, while
the words dribble from my pen, as if
they knew there is no point trying
to capture what the wind will later deny.
Tomorrow the trees may be still, the paths
dry, while we await the next incursion.
The Unsettled Past
Maybe tomorrow will prove
that all the things I seem to remember
never happened and the life that I lived
was never mine. It’s so simple
to recall the days counting down,
blurred by the memory of constant rain,
the easy happiness of childhood
and the tangled agendas of growing up.
For so long, nothing I really wanted
to happen, did happen and my dreams were
a confusion of things I had never known,
streets and people just a little off centre,
as if I had landed in a world that was
only vaguely familiar, yet everybody
looked at me as if they knew me.
© Maurice Devitt
A past winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland and Poems for Patience competitions, he published his debut collection, ‘Growing Up in Colour’, with Doire Press in 2018. Curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site, his Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. His second collection, ‘Some of These Stories are True’, was published by Doire Press in 2023.
You’re getting philosophical Maurice. I like all of them. The unsettled past my favourite I think
“yet everybody
looked at me as if they knew me.”
Powerful insight Maurice, great poetry that makes you think ….as always