Poetry

 

 

Mary Noonan

Carry

To clear my head of talk, I walked the beach
and found a pebble, a cuckoo's egg,
held it and saw it was a map.

An oval stone striated with slate-grey markings,
one side bore tracings that arced and crisscrossed:
polka of narrow roads,

sandpipers darting in bleached grasses,
contours of a shoreline, the lines on my palm.
A gate opening into a small field.

The curve of the stone offered concentric swirls,
a talisman you carry to ward off the evil eye,
or the nipple of a breast.

Here it is—an amulet, runes and traces
to light and guard you, a cuckoo's egg
in the wrong nest, a gate opening

into a small field, a circle ploughed
round a lone hawthorn tree, a map
of the way between us. I carry it.

 

Perfect Day

Do you mind the day? It was
the best day of the summer—
best day of the year—the day
we had all been waiting for
since the start of time, and when
it came round I found myself walking
alone on the edge of a horse-shoe bay
on a northern beach where even
the sand was blue, shimmering
like the sea with the reflected pastels
of the sky. Families and lovers were strolling
as in treacle, their movements made slow
and fluid by the heat. Smells
of barbecued meat and sounds
of children squealing were carried
on the breeze; three horses cantered
in the shallows, their fetlocks lapped
by small waves. Swallows were diving
in the long grasses,
doing their bedtime acrobatics.

Do you mind the day? It was
the best day of the summer—
best day of the year—the day
we had all been waiting for
since the start of time, and when
it came round I found myself walking
alone on the earth's rim as the sun
slowly eased itself into the warmed-
up Atlantic and a long letting go
of breath rippled across the waves
and the dunes and across the chests
of the lovers and mothers and fathers
and boys and girls holding hands and
playing and picnicking on the beach.

 

 

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