Dennis Moriarty is fifty-six years old and originates from London. He has lived in South Wales for over thirty years. Married with five grown-up children and grandchildren, Dennis enjoys reading, writing and walking the Welsh countryside. He has been published in The Rye Whiskey Review, Setu Bilingual, Spillwords, The Blue Nib, Our Poetry Archive, and numerous anthologies In 2017 he won the Blackwater poetry competition and has read his work at festivals and gatherings around the UK and Ireland.

A Moment Of Clarity In A Winter Wood

I can sense this moment is coming of age
As she enters the darkness
Through the blue bright certainty of
My eyes.
Cold, breathless night, the stars flickering
Like candles
In the arthritic appendages of this
Winter wood.
I watch her come upon herself in the
Besom tops,
Sweeping the sleep from her eyes as the moon
Takes hold and prospers.
A sculpture carved from ice, her breath searching
For new avenues of escape,
I watch her rise up on wings of frost
Shaking off
Dandruff flakes of snow from her feathers,
Movement without sound,
A deepening, thickening austerity setting
It's stain into the fabric of the wood.
And long after I have archived my thoughts,
Filled the page with these words,
I will remember her for her cold breathless beauty
And the single moment of clarity she gave me.

Song Of The Soil

Shrugging off sleep it emerges from mid winter slumber
Coughing, opening it’s eyes
Illuminating the grey heavy gloomy afternoon.
Staggers, stumbles,
Lurching from side to side clinging precariously
To the green brown slab of hillside
Emitting a low throttle throb of anxiety.
Finding firmer ground it sets it’s all weather, all terrain
Boots on greener turf,
Shoulders back, eyes front it strides out across
The hillside pasture
Singing in the slightly rasping, slightly breathless
Voice of a smoker,
The song reassuringly organic, overwhelmingly rural.
From the road below
We watch it’s red relentless approach as it consumes
The distance between us.
Silent, still as two wild animals caught in the glare
Of the approaching headlights,
The past, our future, the present morphing into one
Single blurred existence
That sees us free falling through the hypnotic regression
Of a tractor’s song.

African Safari In A City Park

The sun glared like a giant yellow eye flexing
It’s optic nerve
In that summer blistered city park
Where my father sat on a bench tamping his pipe
 
And my younger sister and I were rampant
In the shrubbery,
Two inner city children on Safari in faraway
Wildest Africa.
 
The ground beneath our feet trembled with
A stampede of elephants,
The air reverberated with the roar of lions,
The glint and flash of big cat eyes
 
And a giraffe of elms towering above us.
We dressed in the foliage and wore it
 Like camouflage as we trecked and tracked
Across the dusty day.
 
Then afternoon morphed into evening and my father
Sent up smoke signals
And we emerged into the park through a gap
In the Rhododendrons
 
And there he stood aromatic and suited
In the ticking furnace of the day.
And across the knobbly shores of the Thames
The blood tide at sunset turned.