Joe McCavana lives in County Antrim.

His poetry and short fiction have been published in The Honest Ulsterman, Crossways Literary Magazine and The Bangor Literary Magazine.

His play Pooksie will be published in the 2024 inaugural issue of The Belfast Review.

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The Maidens

Caught in a shaft of sunlight,
on a canvas stretched from the foot
of Ballygally Head
to the fingertip of Islandmagee,
a pair of aerobatic gulls
illuminate full albedo.
While the single eye
of the Maidens lighthouse
sleeps.

In their element!
They swing, swivel and
dive then rise and
(why wouldn’t you?)
do it all again and again,
while the shadows
of the skittering little clouds
waterski across the white tips
below.

And having had their fill
of high jinks and of Herring
they head off to the north
and the basalt cliffs,
shrinking as they go,
blinking on and off
between the shafts of light
and the clouded grey,
like two little flying lighthouses
whose elements suddenly
expire.

But tonight,
as seagulls dream of flying fish
that feast on feathered flesh,
and the sunlight has shifted across the globe,
the Maidens’ eye will be open wide,
and bright as any moon or star
search out and mingle with her own.
Photon greeting photon,
particle and wave,
across the North Channel,
up through the Sea of Moyle
and down to the Irish Sea,
a ceili in the elements
under the Milky Way.

---

Seabound

Sometimes we just need to go,
so you and I follow in our own footsteps,
dander down to the sea
and along a familiar shore.

I wondered why we do:
what is it in us that’s pulled to be here?
Is tugged like the tides are by the moon
so that we too return, time after time?

Like thon furrowed stream
that meets the sand and deltas its way
to the sea, in rivulets that run
in open-armed return to the motherlode.

Well, you said, once upon a time,
a long, long, time ago on a distant shore,
something emerged from the seas
and took baby-steps on primordial land.

It’s an amniotic pull that tugs us here
when we come back each time:
when we leave the sea only to return,
just like the homecoming stream.

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Nature’s Way

A Blackbird came a-calling
here today
as I was sitting still
on the garden seat.
I was lost in thought,
weighing words,
when a black illumination
flashed before me.

I found myself
transfixed
by a yellow-ringed eye,
enamoured with
the velvet-feathered sheen.

It flagged it’s tail,
put on a bold display,
then hoked and poked
about for a juicy treat.
And every now and then,
just to be sure,
it clocked me in a yellow ring
though I had turned
to composing it
a poem.

Then underneath my
golden Cypress tree
the Blackbird settled down,
seemingly content to chill
in a shady nook
where I could admire it,
and it could keep an eye
on me.

Nature sometimes
gets you in a way
that’s quiet like a mountain
by Hiroshige.

A blackbird came a-calling
here today,
as beauty sometimes
comes.