Four Poems by Fred Johnston

 

ABSURD NOSTALGIA FOR A BELFAST SUNDAY

 

Where to find a Belfast Sunday –

I used to know it by the bells of St. Donard’s

And the whitewashed freeze of the outside loo

The black runny heap of coal by the yard wall

After rain; a chained-up resentment of playgrounds

 

I used to know Sunday by its absences

No kids, no gabby women in the street

The spaces that were left were deep as Sunday

Was deep and stretched like canvas over

The edge of the world into Monday -

 

A day as brazen as any other now

It’s transitioned, changed address

It’s not there stiff as rock between Saturday

On the terraces and Monday school -

It used to be Lowry, now it’s gone all Jackson Pollock

 

THAT’S ALL

 

On a clear blue night my father and I leaned on the balcony

Listening to the Singer sewing-machine prick of automatic weapons

Carry over from the far side of the city

Under Black Mountain where the council estates lived.

 

 

WEATHER

 

The radio’s rancid with weather warnings

We’re not talking

The garden is demolishing itself wind-blow by wind-blow

 

This is a fruitless, flowerless season

No good can come of it -

There are terrible things in the world; there is our silence.

 

EDITORIAL

 

My uncle waited until he was seventy

Before running off with a scrupulously respectable woman

Who lived a few doors down

Whose small front garden took a prize every year

And one more blemish pushed through our family’s skin

We sat and rearranged our lexicon

So that our conversations would never include her or him.

 

Fred Johnston was born in Belfast, Northern Ireland, in 1951. His most recent collection of poems is 'Rogue States,' (Salmon Poetry 2019.) For some years he worked in journalism and in the mid-Seventies, with Neil Jordan and Peter Sheridan, he founded the old Irish Wtiters' Co-operative (Co-Op Books.) In 2019, he received an Irish Arts Council Literary Bursary to complete a new selection of short stories. Recent work has appeared in The Spectator, STAND, The Dalhousie Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Temenos Academy Review, Dreich, among others. He lives in Galway on the West of Ireland.