Issue 4 of Poetry Corner
Two Old Friends By Sinead Dunphy
Two old friends
Catching up.
Cold hands clutching
Warm coffee cups.
Growing apart
But clinging on
To times when
Everything was fixed
With a song.
When we were happy
To be miserable
And anything
Was possible.
Time has changed us
But not as much
As we’d like each other to think.
You’ll go there
And I’ll stay here
Watching years pass
In a blink.
But we can still have coffee,
A taste of old ways,
Wasting hours
That felt like years.
Time slows down again
As we sip.
The Bus-rider By Killian Coyngham
I pity the Bus-rider, riding back and forth, day in and day out, seemingly on every bus I've ever been on.
He sits, his face full of thought, in his world of hoary glass, with his eyes focused like lasers.
He reads sometimes, and sometimes he writes, but mostly he simply stares.
Stares into the world with a look that splits falsehoods and pretenses, and sees what there is to be seen.
Sees, and reflects, and then, as if struck all at once, begins writing with the lightning still hot in his hands.
His preoccupation is so encompassing, so intense, that I imagine he must often miss his stop, prolonging his never ending journey.
Adding another go around, in the hopes that this time, maybe, he might just snap out of it in time.
You wonder what it will be like, when he finally gets there. When he steps off and smells the air and stretches his legs.
You wonder if the destination is even all that important, to someone like him.
Someone who treats the journey as a gift, as mundane and beautiful as a breath.
Someone with seemingly infinite patience, content to live what others merely experience.
Someone who sits there, day in and day out, taunting me as I choose to ignore him, pulling my phone closer and edging myself into liminal distraction.
Someone so steady and stable that he stands as a rock, working away, a testament to my sins.
I envy the Bus-rider. And all I could be. If only the bus rider was me.