Rod Moran: Three Poems

Inventory

(For Chay)

My days spool out behind me,

The various landscapes trodden,

Their contours like a cartology

A map of variegated failures

Where the reefs were unexpected,

The coastal fault-lines of my soul,

Headlands of emotion, triumphs,

Plus acetylene years of love

From a woman whose pure spirit

Conjured all the constellations,

Or so it seemed to this star-gazer,

Our child born among the galaxies.

There is a richness across the terrain,

Yet, so much that is cherished recedes—

Death’s Doppler, the invoices of age—

And my days seems to rise before me,

The past like a longed-for destination,

Spooling out to a vanishing distance.

Rod Moran

Diagnosis

I complacently thought

There’s no doubt I’ll age

In an obscure back-bar,

Pondering on History

And its necro-prophets,

Their familiar promise

Of pure deliverance.

Is that why, suddenly,

I caught a deadly cancer?

Rod Moran

Excavation

The shallow grave unearthed

At a barbed-wire postcode,

History’s lethal end-point

(Ordered by an intellectual

Of the card-carrying type)—

That wretched compost

Was once an acclaimed poet.

Rod Moran