Jim Burke – Sun’s Up

P Jim Burke LE P&W Vol 2 2019

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Poems by Jim Burke

Jim Burke, lives in Limerick, Ireland, and is Co-founder with John Liddy of The Stony Thursday Book. His poems have appeared in the Shamrock Haiku Journal, the Literary Bohemian, the Crannog Poetry Journal, the Stony Thursday Book, the Revival Poetry Journal, the Shot Glass Journal, Unbroken, Skylight 47, and Live Encounters Online Magazine. He is a member of The Irish Haiku Society and is on the committee of the Limerick Writers Centre. Some of his haiku are featured in the anthology ‘Between the Leaves’ edited by Anatoly Kudryavitsky.


Sun’s Up

I listen to Jimmy
Singing Bob       Singing Woody
All the way from Austin to Lickadoon
If you get my drift

I could have lived in different times
Makes me feel pretty darned lucky
I may have many miseries
Jimmy LaFave’s voice is not one of them


The Weather in Ireland

Our run down version of light:
scatters crows into evergreen trees
flows over rooftops
empties dogs
out of farmyards and into
the dry stalls of barns.

Even flies hide beneath white window sills.
Helpless telephone wires drip.

What happens mornings when the blinds fly up?
We look to the west
past the tall bamboo
and the drenched grass and know one day
we will not look back at all of this
and laugh.


Visiting England

Roll away
on the six eighteen train
from Cambridge to Bishop’s Stortford
red eyed, after a late night
only for each other
more after more
kiss and kiss, where
the world’s made
of kisses only
foreheads pressed together
eyes kissing, eyes whispering
only kisses, kisses only
eyes after eyes only
Roll away


© Jim Burke