Live Encounters Poetry & Writing June 2026
Under the Great Beech Tree, poems by Richard W Halperin.
Under the Great Beech Tree
That is where Lord Claverton,
the title character in T.S. Eliot’s
The Elder Statesman, at the end
of the play tells his daughter
and her fiancé he has been standing.
Somewhere on the grounds
of what is either a rest home
or the in-between of this world
and the next.
What is ‘elderly’? What if eternity
and what if in-between – the real
in-between – is in fact young?
As are the parts of the Bible which
remain after one lets fall away
all that noise. The play demonstrates,
without demonstrating, that no one,
including the statesman, cares
what a statesman states. He is under
the great beech tree.
A neglected play, launched with
a perfect cast in Edinburgh in 1958,
the year after the Callas Sonnambula.
Edinburgh, which had and still has
a glow to attract such things.
Seventy years ago now, which are
still somewhere. A play written in
my lifetime. What is my lifetime?
An appointment in Samarkand or Edinburgh.
Thoughts one on a day.
Claverston, which is a little like clavier.
The Owl of Minerva
punishment, Athene says, ‘Please know
I sprang directly from the forehead of Zeus.
Mothers mean nothing to me.’
At dusk, what does Mary think? About anything?
She who had a mother, she who is a mother.
When she, some evenings, is alone.
When she is, finally, alone.
The Colour Blue
A good marriage is a perpetual conversation.
It goes on well after death.
The same for a good friendship.
In this I admit no impediments.
John Field wrote beautiful nocturnes.
They are very Irish and written
well before others took up the form
he invented. Beethoven, Brahms,
Barber, thought him a great composer
and so do I. His music heals me.
As do his interpreters, John O’Conor,
Míċéal O’Rourke, among others.
He spent two-thirds of his life
in Russia, where he was adored.
One of the older Rostovs
in War and Peace one evening
asks their harpist Dimmler to play
a transcription of a Field nocturne,
and the whole room falls into a hush,
especially among the young ones
like Natasha and her brother.
Why do I divert my poem to him?
No impediments
Three Pages
I have just read the last three pages
of ‘The Window’ in To the Lighthouse.
Mr and Mrs Ramsey alone at evening.
Moments in a good marriage.
Something I know something about,
although my wife did not knit stockings
and I did not read Balzac.
The narration is Virginia Woolf’s.
She squeezes words, as song seems
squeezed from a nightingale.
Is death such a squeeze?
Is that how the entire song gets out?
© Richard W Halperin
Richard W. Halperin is a U.S.-Irish dual national living in Paris. His poetry is published by Salmon/Cliffs of Moher and by Lapwing/Belfast & Ballyhalbert. His November 2025 collection for Salmon All the Tattered Stars: Selected & New Poems, Introduction by Joseph Woods, was one of three finalists for Best Poetry Book of the Year in the annual Poetry by the Sea Conference in Madison, Connecticut, May 2026, Rachel Hadas adjudicator. One of the New poems in the book was The Poem of the Week in The Guardian, January 19. Mr Halperin is Featured Artist in Edition VI of Tintreach: The Smashing Times Arts and Literary Journal, Sandycove, April 2026, which includes an interview about his poem ‘The Arcades Project’ which first appeared in Live Encounters Poetry & Writing in April 2025. Several of Mr Halperin’s poetry readings in Ireland are on the internet, e.g., First Wednesday, Whitehouse Bar, Limerick, January 2026; Heinrich Böll Memorial Weekend, Achill, May 2024; videos taped for University College Dublin’s Irish Poetry Reading Archive. In October of this year, his poem ‘Antigone 3’ will appear in the bilingual Carnet No5, ShannOdet Quimper-Limerick, French translation by Lionel Poiraudeau.