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.

Betrayal.

We are siblings of a past detonation
The fall out
From a split atom of memory.
 
Decades of unspoken words, half truths
And denial have conspired
To lengthen the distance between us.
 
After all, to acknowledge the truth,
Would be, for you,
The ultimate act of betrayal.
 
So even now, in this our nuclear winter,
We choose to remember,
To interpret the past in our different ways.
 
I with a lighter tone of darkness in my voice,
Humour with acceptance,
Laughter, acceptance without excuses.
 
For you even the act of remembering
Has grown arthritic,
Stiff with the formality of misguided loyalty.
 
I think it’s time for you to acknowledge
The truth
And perpetrate that ultimate act of betrayal.

Rippling Pools of seclusion.

In a dimly lit corner of a Soho bar
We are discovering
The musicality of water the harmony
Of a mountain stream.
A trickle at source it soon becomes the very
Definition of movement.
Elegantly flowing down the hillside until
With a quickening of the pulse
It rushes over rocks brushes past an overhang
Of branches
Coming to terms at last with its own identity
In secluded pools
Where a soft breeze ripples the flesh
Of discovery.
 
A tiny corner of rural Wales has come with us
To the big city tonight.
Organic and clean it settles like cool soothing fingers
On the feverish brow of Soho.
We sit listening strung out somewhere between
Green rolling hills
And the casual insanity of this city bar.
Without preamble
The gaping wound of a trumpet bleeds,
A saxophone soars
Like wings over urban desolation and the pianist
Drifts away in rippling pools of seclusion.