Kevin McManus is an award winning writer from Carrigallen in Leitrim.
He has published six novels so far and hopes to publish a short story and poetry anthology this year.

Shadows falling upon the island

I
A heavy swell spilled over the blackstone as he took a cold morning breath,
sounds of the sea battering against the headland,
constant twilight with air thick with sea fog.
Overhead a grey sky, shadows falling on the island,
pockets of azure blue peeking out like a shy child in a crowded room of strangers,
brown rushes next to the house dancing in the sea breeze,
soft brown earth sank under heavy black boots as he crossed the ground.

II
Curlews glided high, their movements free and easy,
upwards towards a near perfect heaven,
singing their shrill song of summers lost and wasted,
he too would cry upon the air like a bitter calling to days of yore when he was too young to care or realise the precious importance of time.

III

In a city of millions he had felt alone and lost,
on the island he nurtured a sense of belonging to the earth and the trees that surrounded him,
standing upon a rock on an outcrop that jutted out to sea like a signpost to a new land,
beside him the sea swirled, a sea that buried a thousand tragedies deep within its cold and dark waters.
Keeping his own pain and loss covered within his own murky spaces.
Avoiding the dredging of the depths,
to leave the past with the past,
Living alone on the edge of the island.
He endured and enjoyed the quiet isolation