Because I Was in Love Here

Because I Was in Live here


It is Monday morning, and I am a poet in the city of poets,
trying to make something of the solemn
flash of gulls over Abbey Street.

It is Monday morning, and I am a wanderer in the city of wanderers
set at Liffey mouth by wanderers off the slim,
snake-headed ships half a million mornings ago.

I have been on the street an hour and have conversed
with two Chinese, two Irish and one of my own
countrymen, and that is right.

Maybe I long to see a Georgian city under gaslight,
the women in black shawls and the men still
handsome under their scruff and scars and resentment.

But that is gone, and the blue busses pass, and the
Chinese girl tries to tell me how to buy a ticket for the
thing-on-the-rails neither of us remembers how to name.

It is Monday morning and its time to explain why the gray stones
slough off words, and the fling of the bridges, echoes.
Something hidden. Strong.

Stronger than the fence of Celtic bronze that shuddered
Caesar’s armies. Something underground. Here’s what I think:
Because I was in love here, and it came to nothing.