Live Encounters Poetry & Writing 16th Anniversary Volume Six
November- December 2025
Spring, poems by Maurice Devitt.
Spring
We know it’s arrived, when the neighbours
clamber, bleary-eyed, from the bunkers
they’ve been living in all winter
and we have a rollcall on the street,
watch as friends declare themselves safe
from the vicissitudes of the confined
domestic bliss, take note of the unexpected
silences, the faces that are missing.
A man from the council, whose brother
I knew in school, proceeds to check our health
and fitness, interrupting his notetaking to pepper us
with news and weather highlights
he thinks we might have missed, unaware perhaps
that our wifi is at least as good as his.
He climbs back into his van, and we start
to re-acquaint ourselves, share what we watched
on Hibernation TV – moose migration,
a particular favourite – fix our gaze
on the summer months, as though we believed
every choice was ours, focus on the little tasks
that make us happy, keep us distracted,
and all the while we are thinking of the sea,
whether it has inched any closer.
The Night You Died
That afternoon I followed my usual Saturday routine:
immersed myself in the match day commentary on BBC 2,
the distinctive burr of James Alexander Gordon,
his predictive rhythm pitched perfectly
as he unveiled the results. Juggling the scores in my head,
I scurried up the stairs to your bedroom,
pouring them out to you before they were lost,
yet failing to notice you were already slipping away.
The following morning, I woke early, lay still
and noiseless in my bed, listening for the unfamiliar
sound of visitors staying over, the muffled clip
of their heels on the lino floor and the soft voice
that would peel up the stairs, call me down
to a kitchen filled with faces and few words,
just enough to tell me what I somehow already knew.
The Origins of Fame
You lived in the most mysterious house on the street:
squat and assertive, with just one wink of a window
facing on to the road, as though throwing an eye
up the sweep of newer, less distinctive houses.
Hunched around a garden of black apples and white
plums, distribution of the trees based on a puzzle
plucked from a Lewis Carroll book you had never read.
The puckered front door, wedged into the deep stucco wall,
forced even the smallest of us to stoop into the cavernous dark,
layout deliberately unfamiliar, rooms just fulfilling
the purpose of concealing other rooms, the phonogram
in the corner playing Steve Hillage on repeat, light
never bright enough to recognise ourselves, as we half-
expected a Brontë, or two, to walk through. On quiet days,
the echo of last week’s drum practice seemed to hang
in the air, the snare drum always a sharp rebuke to those of us
expecting the comfort of tea and scones, so it was perhaps
no surprise, when you arrived breathless, on the green that day
and proceeded to tell us about finding a moose’s head
in the attic. This is where the escapade began.
© 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.