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 eventually 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, in India, Spain, the USA, and Canada, and also online.
A Different Rain
Cakes and casual coffees conversationally consumed
in the warmth behind grey-streaked, rain-blurry glass,
to unregarded radio music in a flimsy shop
where formerly a fruitful and exotic kitchen garden
had lain safely secluded behind a great stone wall
defiantly encircling the commandingly big house
whose foreign fiat during slow, resentful ascendant years
of repression ran beyond even the eye’s seeing,
until civil strife came, and some house burnings flared,
and that time-distressed wall now encloses rain-bowed trees,
dripping bushes, and sodden trays of huddling plants limp
under slow tears leaking from a lowering sky that once
piteously wept to soak the sack-covered shoulders
of untold generations of pauperised labourers,
backs bent for just one fine family.
Night Bleeds
Again I fall
into the despairing dark
of the cavernous dream
where I am calling
after my grandchild, the first,
seen last when her father decided
he had no room for her
in his promised new life,
and then another led her mother away,
for which no blame,
but the child was lost to us.
I tell that the pain
has been secured somewhere dark,
is just scar tissue sometimes itching,
but this is a deep wound,
and in my unguarded nights
it bleeds forever.
Silent Words
Though I can’t recall the last one
I’ll never forget the first proper present
I bought you for Mother’s Day,
a cheap small china brooch of an open rose,
shop bought out of my first weekend job,
and while in the following years
I bought you others, bigger,
far more costly,
that was always the best
for you wore it every year on that day
and that told me you loved me
and you accepted I loved you,
and that was beyond price
when words of love
were not our currency and presents
carried our silent words of love,
with doing and giving and being there,
until the late diagnosis brought
your unavoidable early death,
and me a lifetime of silence.
Storm Rising
The placid blue of the lake is distorted
into divergent grey shades, swelling
as the wind strengthens off the Sound,
and outstretched seagulls soar inland
to hover on the rising wind high above
erratically waving treetops, and below,
from their pillaging grounds in the urban east,
dark crows beat earnestly towards an early roost
and a secure anchorage against the storm
due to peak shortly after a sunset
not to be seen this day
as the sky grows gloomy
ahead of the blackness
from which rain will lash
against shuddering windows,
batter upon resisting roofs,
the wind howling in derision,
another long night to be endured by
the many lonely souls scattered among us.
The Weight of “We”
The workshop was led by a prize-winning poet
who gave some praise to my poem
born of anger at the distressing discovery
recently unearthed in Tuam,
a town of which I had only read
and which, having been born and reared
across the water, whose accent I had acquired
to hide in plain sight from the prejudiced there
and hadn’t lost on recently coming Home
to the land of my birth-given citizenship,
of my parents and grandparents and flung family,
I had unwittingly pronounced phonetically,
and on turning away the leader threw
over a departing shoulder,
“We say …”,
and gave the local pronunciation of the town,
and to the responding smirking of the group
I heard the “bell-beat of …. clamorous wings”
wheeling above,
and my heart was sore
to find my disdainful own
had flocked, and flown away,
stranding me on a stony shore.
The Galway Review 