From “Pieces of Kate”

Eamon Grennan

Thirteen

Her Junior High School graduation:
she’s singing alone
in front of the lot of us—

her voice soprano,
surprising, almost
a woman’s. The Our Father

in French, the new language
making her strange, out there,
full-fledged and

ready for anything. Sitting
together—her mother, her
father—we can hear

the racket of traffic
shake the main streets
of Jersey City as she sings

deliver us from evil,
and I wonder can she see me
in the dark here, years

from belief, on the edge
of tears. Doesn’t matter. She
doesn’t miss a beat, stays

in time, in tune—while into
our common silence I whisper,
Sing, love, sing your heart out!

Oystercatchers in Flight

Sea’s stony greenblue shatters to white
in a running swell under noonsky of cloudlight
where on a foamed-over cropping of rock
a band of oystercatchers faces all one way
into a nor’wester so shafts of windlight
ignite each orange beak in this abiding
tribe of black till you clap and their risen black
turns white as they veronica on wind and
then away with them (shrill-pitched as frighted
plovers only harsher more excited)
and riding the stiff wind like eager lovers straining

Eamon Grennan

2015

The Life So Short...

and larks rising out of dead grass 
	and lambs antiphonal between rocky outcrops
and the discreet one-note charm 
	of the willow warbler wishing itself 
into invisibility between sally trees 
	where desperate with its own 
single-mind intent the yellow-eyed 
	red-tail kite (still an edgy fledgling) 
prepares to put into lethal play 
	its own unforgiving art by twitching 
one nervous feather after another 
	in the precious seconds before lift-off

Eamon Grennan

2014

Memento

Scattered through the ragtaggle underbrush starting to show green shoots 
lie the dark remains of rail sleepers napping now beside the rusted-out wreck 

of a Chevy that was once sky-blue and now is nothing but shattered panels and
anonymous bits of engine in the ditch by a path that was once a railway line 

cut between small hills whose silence hasn't been broken by the rattle and 
lonesome-blown whistle of a train for fifty years and whose air hasn't filled 

for ages with my childhood's smell (set by Seapoint on the coastal line) of coal 
smoke and hot steam puffed up in great cloud

Eamon Grennan

2011

Poems

From “Pieces of Kate”

More by this poet

Oystercatchers in Flight

The Life So Short...

Memento

Poems

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From “Pieces of Kate”

More by this poet

Oystercatchers in Flight

The Life So Short...

Memento

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