Four Poems

To the Hospice

Now the cupboards by your bed

are empty. Having packed your gear,

those who love you rub your head,

hold your arm, shout encouragements

through this comatose envelope

that weighs on you, denying air,

stifling the person who you were.

So we await the ambulance;

our goal: get your body from here

to where it can relax its grip,

certain your soul is safe and free;

and we, leaving the hospital,

hear a solitary magpie call

out of sight in some distant tree.

Leon Trainor

Roadside Lilies

for Emma Di Nardo

Alongside the highway, lilies

that St Anthony might have held

in one hand (the radiant Christ Child

in the other) with crowding trees

closed in behind them when we pass.

You’d expect to find them in low,

flat, cultivated lands but no,

they hug the forest edge where

the trees interlock like the bars

of a cage. They are simply there.

Suppose he met the Infant Christ

while travelling in a dark wood

where they no doubt gently conversed

a…