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, a member of the local writers’ group. Poetry published in print in Ireland, across Britain, Spain, the USA, and Canada.

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Lost And Found

Without seeing I sensed
the scale of her love tilting,
and without thinking just knew
that when the nest grew childless
she would choose to step away alone
along a different€ fork in our long road
but Death decided to lay
its arid finger on our future
and, when we had run the race
of treatments and trials and charlatans,
when we had buried Hope, and must wait
while Death’s minions winnowed life
out of her body becoming a husk,
my love nursed her
in our children’s home
until their work was done,
leaving grief holding me close
where in its dark embrace
love’s expressive beauty
lay coldly entombed
in a yet undiscovered
chamber of the heart,
forever sealed shut.

And then you stepped
into my stumbling path
and love burst forth
in rapturous song
spilling a stream of joy
on which we deliriously sail.

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Sweet Sorrow

In the dark of the year closing
the memory is always sharp
of Mam, forever faithful,
standing mirrored in
the black window
cracked to let
the new in,
the old year out,
looking blindly beyond,
a ritual glass of sherry
slackly held,
tasting only the salts
of bitter sorrow,
slow tears spilling,
fuelling the unquenched flame
of the young true love left behind
when wrenched away to a new land,
eventually there to find blessed union
but soon left, abandoned with child,
a lone migrant mother cast adrift,
forever to pine, constant grief
watering the ever-fresh
blooms of a love
long a grave
she alone
could tend.

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Those ‘Good Old’ Days

It stopped me,
a dull, busy clanking of metal
approaching, though slowly
in the dark-grey, soot-flecked fog,
a shroud that night had spread softly
upon London’s city streets,

then a low rumbling of trucks,
and a light growing bright
as a policeman emerged
shining a large lamp down at the kerb
along which I had been finding my way,
with another lamp held behind
shining back to guide
a creeping line of heavy vehicles
laden with tall metal milk-heavy churns
for the plant beside the aircraft factory
with its rail tracks upon which a rail car
with an anti-aircraft gun mounted
could still sometimes be seen passing.

When the noise dwindled into the fog
this eight-year old set off again for school,
fixedly watching the kerb,
all that was visible in the smog,
the poisonous gift of heating
every house with shiny black coal,
my slow steps unguided
by even a small torch.