Poetry

Spring 2008

 

 

Greg Delanty

To Those Who Stayed

Brand us exiles, emigrants if you like.
It may make your life easier, may buttress
you, shield you, maybe even help hike
your spirits up, help you feel superior to us.

You will need it as you traverse streets
that you brag you can walk blindfold on.
But where's that shop, that bar? No one greets
you anymore; so many are dead, or, like us, gone.

Perhaps we were shrewder, wiser, more cunning.
Perhaps not. What's certain is that more
and more your city is abandoning you, forgetting
you, as if the city itself is crossing to another shore,

leaving you nothing and no one, an immigrant
in your own place, the oblivious emigrant.

 

US

The snow cap of Mount Discovery is like a white hanky,
the knots tied in four corners on the shiny dome
of a bald man at a blistering All Ireland final.
No one here knows what hurling is. A game played by the gods
when they deign to come down and enter the human body.
Ares, that most unpopular of commanders in chief,
even among his peers, is the god who has made this country his own.
Two fighter jets on display scissor the sky's blue cloth,
cut it to shreds. They fly above our house in pastoral Vermont.
People nearby cheer. We are far from home.

 

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