Gordon Ferris was born and raised in Finglas, a North West suburb of Dublin. In the early eighties, he moved to Donegal where he has lived ever since. He started writing in 2014 and has had many short stories and poems in publications including Hidden Channel, A New Ulster, The Galway Review, Impspired Magazine, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. He has also won prizes in the summer 2020 HITA Creative Writing Competition for his poem ‘Mother’, and won the winter competition for his poem ‘The Silence’. Poetry Ireland awarded Gordon a Poetry Town Bursary in 2021.
I can’t tell you anything about
I can’t tell you anything about
the way you display your truths
the sound you make
so convincing, so right
it’s in the way you explain things
my lack of words to speak my thoughts
it’s just my lack of nerve
to utter those defiant words
my lack makes me cower in your presence.
I can’t tell you anything about
how voices sing on moonlight breeze
how shadows dance on the backyard wall
how dug up memories make our neck hair freeze
I can’t tell you anything about
when the wicket takes all we have
I take the troubled track
Because our loved ones
are all we have left.
The worst thing about this war
the worst thing about this war is how the people
look like you and I
how we can look at the sky
and not fear what’s falling on us
how they all can leave
except for men of fighting age
did they once think It couldn’t
happen to them,
the way we think
it will never happen to us
would you volunteer to take arms
and possibly die for your country
let your child become an orphan
let your soulmate go on alone
will these times
bring forth more legends
or is it to be
more loss of the innocents
will more heroes be borne
or blood lost on the battlefield
to fill the coffers of suited men
who presses the buttons
and treat us all as pawns in their parlour games.
I look at the pictures
of a world gone
of loved ones
living in my heart
in darkest times
I call upon them
when all begins to fade
The Galway Review 