Hugh Lavelle has been a teacher of English for over twenty years now in London, Dublin and Galway. His first serious written work was a poem written years ago which was a paltry homage to Thomas Kinsella. He has written regularly since then- as a contributing editor for local magazines and in a commercial context for tourism and web projects. He was active on the Writing4all.ie website and his story, “An English End” was published in the Writing4all anthology, “Best of 2009”.
Lacunae
Headlong past the headmaster
Through the lanes of livelong days,
Stragglers tonguing fuchsia blooms,
Small girls in daisy chains.
Doors imploding, calm destroyed,
Dinners gulped and gone.
Scuffs on leather, trousers torn
We’d head for trees and ponds.
Sweaty ballgames until sunset-
Sprinting home with lungs on fire
Fear- when sneaking home at moonrise
And the world was never tired.
A dark September troublous came
Vile pedagogues abused and shamed.
50 marks
Seamus Heaney writes of bogland
Willie Yeats liked birds and bees.
Lewis Carroll had a stutter,
Ted Hughes listened to the breeze.
Philip Larkin liked the women
Adrienne Rich, well she did too.
Paddy Kavanagh left old Mucker
A solemn choice he came to rue.
Eavan Boland cares for mothers.
Derek Mahon is a bore.
T. S. Eliot was another
For whom verse was not a chore.
So if perchance you don’t like poesy
And literature you somehow fear
The written word may come up rosy
And better still, someone might hear!
Of No Consequence
Not nearly whole
without recognition.
A coach and horses
goes through the need
to be fulfilled.
The gaping maw of aspiration
yawns and belches forth
a foul gas
of failed potential.
Incongruity
Dead swan draped
Across the roadside boulder.
Absurd, incorrect-so wrong!
White plumage on tar?
Overhead, a three-phase powerline gloats
At the cob’s too white remains.
I move closer- wary of proximity,
Recalling childhood fears
Of strong wings and hissed aggression.
I touch his terrible whiteness-
Is death not black?
His broad back,
the cold, grey latex feet.
I lift the stiffening corpse-
Horrifically contorted
By volt and crash and cold.
Gone is the grace of life.
Broken-winged, burnt, dull-eyed.
This is an angel of death now.
An archangel after the Fall.
The Galway Review 