A Poem a Day (733): 3 Poems from an Irish pub in Brussels

 
Stricken summer
 
She spoke, she moved, she eloped.
It was a stricken summer stripped of steel.
 
Knock out, step back, repent sideways.
Hear the gasp of glass shatter skywards.
Smoke clouds rise as epitaph, smart, depart,
limit their echoes into spoken words.
 
We cannot disparage what we don’t understand.
Cards of hearts assemble, spread, and fall,
stand the time in a simple house towering.
It won’t break unless you crack it so.
 
Here we are, and love won’t gather here.
Lend your ears and watch him cry out loud.
 
A joke won’t wake him out of himself
or change his time of departure.
Set a date and drag him out of his coffin.
 
We are all stood in the waiting room here,
loitering for some fool to stamp our wrist
or take us on a journey out of ourselves
where the hourglass won’t ever freeze again.
 
 
 
Guinness tortoise (from a poster on the wall)
 
A tortoise wears a Guinness crown,
carries time on his back to distant climes,
counts the dates of the calendar slow,
tells fortunes on his many-sided shell,
shiny octagons that blink in the night
to show the path to every indifferent stranger.
We wait his coming in this steely pitch.
 
He takes his time, this endurance, no easy ride.
Come hail or storm, he gets there in the end.
She dances in fiery signatures stolen
from strangers she tried to connect with once,
for we are all built of straw in owing time.
We ride with invisibility balancing our shadow,
not measuring the cost of forgetting we are here.
The tortoise waits at the darkest hour.
He’ll still be there, no matter how long you take.
 
 

Circular paths
 
Words seer the back of a plate ever spinning,
unstoppable. A world fallen off its wheels.
A trickster, card dealer, a mind in motion
knows when to cast adulation on the wind.
Don’t pause. Don’t thumb a lift.
Liken gratitude to a broken spur.
It’s a hopeless light that seeks a retract.
Footsteps mirror in stripped windows bleak,
a maze scribbled in a kaleidoscope of black.
 
You strip your clothes down to the basics,
keep going like a jumbled, rumbling stone.
Distance wakes, keeps itself anonymous,
not knowing what to say for every occasion.
Clueless, it steadies itself in silent inaction.
With nowhere to go you stand still.
The field won’t wait, but do you really care?
If it cared it would walk a straight line to you.
A roundabout route circles wildly until the bitter end.

Copyright Vickie Johnstone, September 4, 2025