Two poems
BY David O’Meara
Café in Bodrum
Season’s end. The seaside patio
is scuttled with upturned chairs.
Piped-in pop tunes crackle out
mid-song as the call to prayer begins.
Flags sigh in the silence, lift
and drop—a crescent, a star,
a crescent, a star—as a cat yawns,
scratches its ear, squinting
from the cool earth in a terracotta pot.
Ribbons of the laid-back cooling tide
stroke the harbour wall, levelled out
and listless as tourists’ thoughts,
which are nowhere and everywhere.
Down market lanes, scooters
ferry hot pide and hoick dry coughs
of grey exhaust over the interlocking stones.
No future can be delivered
so effortlessly, despite party slogans
clipped to each lamppost and awning
for the last stretch of the coming election,
though History’s narrowed eye
might pause to blink
over a cloud of froth on a cappuccino
or these yacht-masts jabbing the azure.
Mausolus is too far to care, his
pestled tomb once a Seventh Wonder.
Now a few fluted column drums
and troughs for drainage
preserve the age, but only
the mind can still descend
these outlines of stairways to pass
through imagined thresholds
into some deserted notion of repose.
We keep our backs to it, as if
for leverage, and meet
the heat of the sun on our faces.
The Old Year
I wake, blink, stretch and take
in the light, birds like stitches in the rubbed-denim sky
above the wide white lawn of winter.
Is this morning?
I dress. I wrap the chill in my flesh
against the layers of snow, fashion the rough naked ape
for another debut, blow a few kisses as swansong.
Is this going?
It’s hard. That fevered count downward
to the first kiss of twelve, staggered in a wave of bubbly
and olive pits, everyone slurring the question
where did I go?
I’m back. New. Here to take another crack
at this thing, toss myself into the year, like a lake
and wait to see if the wake forms a ring. Ripples. Widens.
Breaks against something.
