Bureau
There’s a change in the weather today.
You seem not to have noticed.
As you draw the curtains the telephone rings;
voices cry like children fed the same line
over and over again. There was a change
in the things trampled on the street today
but like an engineer you believe
in a certain shaped solution.
Through the window,
from the chair I strapped myself into,
even there I could not help but notice
the line of cars iced over,
dragging one by one into the other.
Though you may not feel it,
the street is colder
and the ink in your pen is frozen.
There’s been a change in the air today
you may not have noticed;
I heard your fingernails working overtime
scratching tiny decisions on the wall.
Firefly
Last night
wandered completely
through the terminal
In the morning
some October
a sort of sunlight
slides down the building
These spaces surrounded
by effigies of love
burn a little less
Across the balconies
familiar bodies
fade into each other
Outside the window
heartbreaks
tripped on the street
faces fly in the face of another
shadows lost
in the brown glass hulk
of Alfa-Bank
and another woman waits
for her song to be sung
Late for something
lost voices
turn the corner again
These places
by 9:45
will be touched
by nothing more
than low blue flames
and the noise of afterburners
Out by the airport
a car door slammed
Wings rise in the sky
like a photograph
Someone took a walk
in the woods today
Born from concrete
and the noise of aeroplanes
It is not unusual
to be aimless in nature
Sentiment dried out
Do not remember
It will leave you breathless
leaning from the window-ledge
Today they held a parade
The long dark steps
and the big salutes
will not be interrupted
in their cursed trajectory
A new holiday
a distant celebration
Like always
the patriots have got there first
to straighten up their arms
in the middle of a hopeless march
Deep in different streets
millions of bones are rolling
into dust
and someone
took a walk in the woods today
These spaces
these creations
dragged moments of speech
across Moscow Warsaw and Kiev
Do not remember
It will leave you breathless
leaning from the window ledge
At night there are fireflies
I am not the one
who draws you here.
New Soviet Sky
The cranes slip in and out of sight and the 10th floor
hangs unhinged. There are no clouds,
just sheets of light from the Sisters
as we pull up on the bridge.
The new tower on the North, from a distance,
looks like it was built from brittle bones.
Such a skeleton to watch over us,
standing bare but blackened already
by waves of old Soviet weather.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Alan Jude Moore was born in Dublin. His poetry has been widely published in Ireland and abroad and his short fiction was twice short-listed for the Hennessy Cognac / Sunday Tribune New Irish Writing Award. A first collection of poetry, Black State Cars, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2004 and a second collection, Lost Republics, from which these three poems are taken, was published in 2008.
