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.
