Village Life
Walking out this morning
I noticed that every house
on the street was quiet,
curtains drawn,
and the only sound I could hear
was a dog barking,
as if at the memory of a piano
playing in another room.
A chalk drawing on the path
could have been a crime scene,
or the noodled thoughts
of a city planner,
though the pebble-filled polish tin,
kicked to the kerb,
suggested the final spar
of last night’s hopscotch.
A man, whose identical twin
I vaguely knew from bingo in the hall,
asked why I was in such a hurry
on a morning when the leaves
were bright and bountiful
and every cat that crossed his path
was black. I thought to myself
the only thing missing is rain.
A past winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland and Poems for Patience competitions, Maurice published his debut collection, Growing Up in Colour, with Doire Press in 2018.
Curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site, his Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. His second collection, Some of These Stories are True, was published by Doire Press in 2023.
Black Nore Review 