Martin Dolan

 

Official Greetings


The cards sidle in singly,
in pairs - restrained, official
bonhomie in approved form
the clean and careful noting
of a generic season.

See here a star, any star
and here a fir tree reduced
to lines and coloured angles.
This latest shows a landscape
unpeopled, temperate.

There is the pile for sending,
flat and arid as the rest
designed to avoid offence.
Now hand and pen vacillate
over a personal touch.


The Old Game


i

Your blades slice through my words
even as I write them;
the thin strips that are left
will not rejoin themselves.

ii.

What I have written here
can cover anything:
a heart beating out time,
the sullen grey of rock.

iii.

Not even a steel mind
can resist what you show me:
the heft of rock in hand
the weight of breaking.
 


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