chris 034Christopher Meehan lives in County Galway where he has attended creative writing classes and was a featured reader at the Over-The-Edge Open Reading at Galway City Library in December 2011. In 2012 he was short-listed for the Fish Poetry prize and later the Over-The Edge New Writer of the Year Competition.

Four poems by Christopher Meehan

 

 A Boy for the Horizon

That time before when you lived by the sea,

So strong but shivering,

When I could only detect the seismic shifts

Of your hearts fractured plates by looking through

The broken windows of your eyes,

 

It was like you were waiting for winter to pass,

The storms and waves pounding,

Knowing that the sun would keep its promise by

Luring the light back up the valley of

Your loves open arms.

 

Then when the crowds became too much, you locked

Away your-self doubt

And flew to the pull of circadian rhythm,

A dusk migrant, filling the town with your

Silent screams as you walked off into the

Warm orange air of July –

 

A boy for the horizon.

 

 

Necromancer

Holding court north of Moher, a path beaten through

Rock and bramble,

 

A henge of upright Solids, the picture will show

A giant boulder,

 

There is warmth through a cup in cold hands –

A slow passing shower,

 

You, me and the farmers dog watched night –

That lunar Necromancer,

 

Pull the moon up from the brow of the islands as

The sun fell away from

 

The curvature of the earth.

 

 

Shearwater (and for those lost in 9/11)

The sound of moonlit waves crashing is like

Silence to your senses.  Just as that smell

Reached down into your burrow before light

Causing your head to tilt as you pondered

The salt laden wind, imprinting through bone,

Warm blood and feathers; the stars, currents and

Natural rhythms that became your maps

Beyond the white-capped breakers.

 

Banking and gliding stiff winged, black into

White melting into the spray, wild creature

This storm is your plaything, emerging from

Its might over mirror calm hundreds of

Miles out.  With the infinite sea before and behind –

Below you the dawn sky reflected, on

This day I believe you are Gabriel

Carrying the cries of the lost across

The vast blue oceans of heaven.

 

 

Shifting Pianos

He looked like a child lost in a daydream,

His newly abandoned eyes in the ward

Where old men dribbled words around full backs

In those school finals they never played in,

While nurses sat at stations with paint that

Peeled but clung on in spite of the cuts and

Wind stirred up by the passing breath of life.

 

Outside the ones with cardio this, that and

The other bummed lights off strangers and choked

Hanging onto railings, surviving on

Defibrillators, looking like the grey

Asphyxiated chimneys that leant inwards,

Reflected in the bonnet of some surgeons

Merc, the landscape winter, the building Stasi-like.

 

No time left for watching ‘Where Eagles Dare’

On stormy Sundays, no more tea for the

Old man, his mind had gone back to shifting

Pianos in London and defunct bombs after

The war, hands numb-face knowing that the ghost

Was just an owl in the graveyard as they

Made their way home one drunken night in 45’.

 

If the river is wide then he’ll swim in the

Celestial fires, azure, pink, white

Flames, stars on the east end road, just past the

Boat-house and the last street light, holding the hands

Of his children, resting easy in the

Knowledge that they would always look up

And use the night sky to their best advantage.