Anton Floyd – Moveable Feasts

Anton Floyd LE P&W April 2019

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Moveable Feasts, poems by Anton Floyd

Anton Floyd was born in Cairo, Egypt a Levantine mix of Irish, Maltese, English and French Lebanese.  Raised in the Cyprus he lived through the struggle for independence and the island remains close to his heart. Educated in Ireland, he studied English at Trinity College, Dublin and continued his postgraduate studies at University College Cork. He has lived and worked in the Eastern Mediterranean. He is now teaching in Cork city and lives in West Cork.

Poems published in The Stony Thursday Book, Ghent Review, Live Encounters, The Shot Glass Journal, Crannóg, Inisfáil Arts Journal, Contemporary Haibun on Line, Visual Verse and haiku in Shamrock and tinywords. He is a member of Irish Haiku Society. He won the IHS International Competition (2014), honourable mentions (2015 & 2018) prize winner (2016) and was runner up in the Snapshot Press Haiku Calendar 2016 Competition. A selection of haiku is included in Between the Leaves, an anthology of new haiku writing from Ireland edited by Anatoly Kudriavitsky (Arlen House, 2016). Shamrock Compilation Volume (2018).  Poems have been selected by the Limerick Writer’s Centre for the April is Poetry Month Poster Poetry Trail 2017, 2018 & 2019 and for the Kilkenny Arts Festival Fringe Poetry Trails, 2017 and 2018; the Inisheer Zibaldone Notebook (2017) and Drawing on Joyce an installation by Nickie Hayden at the Oliver Cornet Gallery, Dublin; the anthology, Teachers Who Write edited by Edward Denniston (2018).

He edited Remembrance Suite, a chapbook of sonnets by Shirin Sabri (2018) and an international anthology of poems, Point by Point (2018).
His own debut collection of poems, Falling into Place, was published in 2018 by Revival Press.


Halcyon days

Oh, those halcyon days
that uncomplicated time
when you were young
when once barefoot
you careered the slope
of a summer-green field
your hair streaming
behind you and you
blithe in the balmy air
your arms outspread
ready for flight. Time
then, made all things
lovely, simple as honeysuckle
climbing and catching light.


Russet Afternoon

This wind would comb
summer from the trees.
Branches shed leaves
into the air like spume.
This russet afternoon
they swirl about your feet.
At once it comes to mind:
there you stand, beautiful,
complete, new baptised,
Aphrodite of the Woodland!


After the Windfall

The storm has left
the flowering cherry
riven and scant. Yet
after the windfall
along a wet branch,
blackened with rain,
a necklace of raindrops
seeded with light
is sun-struck again and again.


The Daffodils

The daffodils you picked
as a child filled the house.
You called them yellow suns.

But the day you left home
I felt you as far from earth
and roots as cut flowers.

Time since can tell of love
and love’s ambition,
its healings and its hurts.

Today daffodils in the field
spark thoughts of you.
They spread everywhere.


Robins

I know they are around.
They appear at last
out of the fuchsia hedge –
birdsong made flesh.
Robins, a pair sleek
and blushed, real birds,
a valentine’s couple.
They arrive at the first sight
or sound of my digging fork
or the smell perhaps
of the fresh earth turning.
Prompted by vernal hungers,
we stand our common ground.

They perch on a low branch
or flit close to my standing boot
alert to what my tines turn up.
Their eyes are beads of jet
sharp as any sniper’s.
They pick off their targets,
share their spoils. Every now
and then I see one lift a leaf
or peel moss from a stone
and vanish, a hollow in the wall.
It plots its path, in hops
and pauses and furtive flights,
moves like a conductor’s baton!

Light and heat turn the page,
the mother book inside her head,
sets her to weaving sheep’s-wool,
moss and dead leaves
into a secret cup.
I see this robin is a feisty bird.
His beak contests any rival.
He pitches a piccolo song
protective and territorial.
I lean to my work, watch
these rites of spring take hold:
how nesting and courtship feeding
revolve around the axis of my fork.


© Anton Floyd