Anthony Wade, London-born, raised by a deserted migrant Irish mother; knew poverty and prejudice. Education brought university and a profession. Worked in The Netherlands before a medical disability brought him Home close to where he had spent childhood summers. A Forward Prize nominee active in the local writers’ group. Poetry published in print in Ireland, across Britain, the USA, and Canada.

Changing City Streets

On the streets of my younger life,
always people talking, words swirling,
lonely words caught if splashing louder,
severed phrases like falling twigs catching,
the insensible discourse of strangers passing,
the sounds of human life, streets of life or strife,
of eyes meeting or shifting, of greeting or caution.

And falling from opened windows above
mechanical streams of music pooling in ears,
voices singing loud of love or loss and leaving,

briefly owned in the passing sharing,
singers whose names, even faces, known
but forever strangers one could never meet.

Today, on these older streets,
streaming strangers passing, silent,
heads lowered, eyes unseen, unseeing,
virtually communing with others far off,

and above, windows shut silent on low life
skittering and scrattering in dust-deep,
dark, deep-web-captured spaces
where human life had played.
just let it be,
without pain.

Discards

Early morning,
air as still as glass,
a solitary leaf slowly spirals,
falling to lie upon the hard ground,
abandoned, unremarked,
the litter of a country lane.

Not far away
bodies closely wrapped
against the night cold
lie upon the hard ground,
abandoned, unremarked,
the litter of a city street.

Still Reliving When

All too late .
they had erected .
about her sterile walls .
of isolation, and stolen .
the sea’s sighing breath ,
and the irrepressible .
slurp of the wind .
slaking.
its thirst
as it skims
the fretting surface,
closed out the chattering
in the tangly thorn, that black
barn of birds, whose sharp nails
snag small wool from thin lambs,
and fastened upon her dark devices
that just slowed her going at the call.
Silently seeing those many older days
when they skipped like children through
the rustling of another falling Autumn,
and sang with the rising sun of Spring
flooding their over-brimming hearts,
she knew nothing remained to her
only a long
lonely weeping
unshared with his
grieving life without.