Back Streets

I take myself out of the dereliction, feeling unsafe in the squalid world of the half-life

I retire to the Japanese coffee shop and art gallery, where jazz music plays soulful

I look back on my photographs of Beckett, and that wild phantom of a man whose name evades me right now

Yet twenty five years past I saw his ghostly portraits, back then I thought, as I think now, there is the man who captured the troubled soul

The French jazz singer seemingly achieves only that half-way point of angst, in her search for today’s equilibrium

From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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Straight Lines; Obtuse Angles

Old rectangles came into my life today, in walls with windows, in hallways with stairs, in tall tales of Pythagoras on the road to Donegal

Thin slots, reminiscent of the rill constructed in another’s garden’, with log, with neoprene, with sand and water on the road to Nowhere

Alarm bells in square boxes guard the heavy wooded doors, elsewhere John Singer Sergeant is kept from public view, although if I recall he was on the road to Venice

From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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Up On High

The old wall, with mock Georgian sachet windows, the new gardens, with painted crimson supports for the glass panelled, highly elevated walkway

Would that I find my soul twixt the window and the girder, would that I give my heart to you, without the fear of its own murder

The old public house, with a bed of straw and quilt, the never-ending lake which compels the father to leave his unwed daughters

Would that I find my mind, between the public house and the lake, would that I give mankind to you, without the fear, for my own heaven’s sake

From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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Paul Henry’s Connemara Village

I would take this wooden seat to look upon, at the Cottages of Connemara, I would read that the brush strokes elude to a rural life, at the foot of the mountains

I would write, as you looked on, while I tried to satisfy my intellect; yes I would claim for Frances Danby to also be the Earl of Derby, the painter of Vesuvius Rising

I would think Paul Henry could be Cezanne, each day to sit with coloured shower, each day to sit with shades of french grass, as if the meditation unceasingly continues

I would desire the gift to be able to explain to you, of moments passing that reflect hollow, and enormous, on the moors that passed, as if the partaking of the all of love

I would post the postcard’s words, of all those people years, pulled and strung together, as the rosary beads on the older woman’s chair

From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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Doppelgänger

I saw you down O’Connell Street, first to cross the pedestrian crossing

Still, still after all these years, still in a rush, you didn’t see me, or did you

Is that why you moved so swiftly, away from my piercing eyes

I had been talking, in the Palace Bar, to that Tom Carney, the lawyer farmer

He said I had caught it, you know, the regret, he said I had caught it, with the repetition

From Christopher Sanderson's Ireland Poems
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