PATRICK DORRIAN

PATRICK DORRIAN

WHILST WAITING AT A RED LIGHT AT THE ALBERT CLOCK

The irony was not lost,

I'm at a red light

Where once the ladies worked,

Retailing their bodies

To the passing trade of sailors,

Anchoring for a while at Dubarry's

And local men cruising the kerbs.

Long gone from observation,

Replaced by slaves from other spheres

As Belfast's Dockland moved downstream

And gentrification set in with plazas

And street art. James Larkin

On the Custom House Steps

In declamatory pose forever now

Urging a revolution of United workers,

All still wobbly.

Still stopped a new irony beckons,

We've stopped our strife,

Maybe till the green light shows

But for now it's halted.

Handshakes are still problematic,

Something the French do with grace

Upon meeting. While here some meet

And refuse to greet, no open hand outstretched.

Believing the Other is klute

And holding a knife out of sight.

So the thirty seconds pass and red

Gives way to orange, waiting to change

To green. No movement after all.

This is still the slow hour.

HAZELWOOD BEACH

When we were children,

Way back in the fifties, when

Holidays were the non school days

And not domestic nor foreign stays,

Sunny Sundays, after mass, in Summer

My family and some friends would dander

Into Belfast, loaded with the poor picnic

And board the Trolleybus and escape

From the slum streets for a while.

At Whitehouse we'd walk under the railway

And make our way to Hazelwood Beach.

There among the detritus of broken

Concrete bunkers, relics of the past war,

We'd decamp, towels on the flat pieces,

Towels on the sand, and a fire pit,

One had to have tea at a picnic.

When changed we dashed to the waves,

Mostly wavelets to be honest,

Everyone splashed, everyone wet.

In retrospect, we never noticed how cold the sea was;

Nor the pollution in the Lough.

The water was a turgid mix, sewage untreated,

Effluent from the various dockside industries

All swept to sea for nature to cope with.

And, we never looked back to see

The yellow pallor of the Belfast air,

Hiding the hatred soon to erupt.

OUT OF TOUCH

The hissing silence of deafness,

Descends, a cone of aloneness,

Like listening to the remnants

Of the Big Bang, waiting for ET.

At least I still had my fingers

And my eyes could still read,

So that when the mobile vibrated

I had contact, an outlet.

Alas, no mobile, c'est Mort,

Drowned in the drunk's direct line.

The yawning maw of the Great White Telephone

Gathered a clumsy fumble;

Lesson, never carry one's phone into the toilet.

It's too difficult to multitask,

Tugging flies and holding phones,

The lack of an extra hand

Sent my contacts to sleep with the fishes.

The hissing silence of deaf

Sits about my head, I'm like a pet

Just newly returned from the vet,

Neutered and unable to bite the stitches.

PATRICK DORRIAN

PATRICK DORRIAN is a retired schoolteacher, now in his middle sixties. He is married to Frances and is the father of three adult children. Patrick has lived in Belfast for his whole life, with the exception of a two year sojourn in London. Writing poetry is a hobby first started as a means of stress relief. He has had some poems published in E magazines in the last five years.