Poetry By Peter Adair ।Best irish poets

Peter Adair

1.      Haiku.  Inside.
six beds
in the bay
open wounds
 
curtains pulled shut
under the blanket
an invisible man
 
‘I will arise and go…’
she quotes at breakfast
scent of a peeled orange
 
pyjamas and yawns
8.30 queue for ‘medication’
wine drops at the sweetie shop
 
a bucketful
of tablets
therapy
 
the squeak of his shoes
the man who paces
the ward night and day
 
Christmas cheer for the ward
carol singers stretch their vocal cords
a slice of gooey cake
 
Christmas panto
two care works
guard his door
 
‘Jesus H Christ!  Jesus H Christ!’
(repeat twenty times)
Chinese Tom slouches towards
the dining room to be born
 
2.      Hospital Haiku.  Outside.
 
solitary blackbird
on the woodland fence
cold friend
 
blue winter sky
magpies squawk on the fence
I walk in circles
 
the first blossom
on a winter shrub
a gate opens
 
the birdman of the ward
scatters breadcrumbs
gulls, wagtails flock to his feast
 
a young girl smiles – winter blossom
 
sunlight
blue sky
walking shadow
 
cold morning walk
the garden
half shadow, half light
 
the woodland gate
is locked
the keys lost
 
a bird flies
in and out of the stairwell
the great escape
 
Poem for 2025

The antlered nurses enforced good cheer,
(they had no choice)
the carol singers – God bless them – did their best,
and no one in the ward wakes with a sore head.
So who am I to raise a dissenting voice?
I shuffle along with all the rest,
then lie back in bed and read my Trollope,
forgiving the jerk who swiped my soap,
awaiting the onslaught of a new year
with a farting neighbour all too near –
wait, as you wait for death, Yeats said,
with hope, with fear.
 

Glass

In the dayroom (I almost said dungeon)
the Christmas tree is neither prod nor papish,
its baubles and lights inviting strangers
to our all inclusive land.  But there was another
tree once.  I can still feel the prickly needles
my hand brushes from the wrapped presents…
Yet here, now, what is this other feeling
like jagged glass a neighbour once stuck
on top of his garden wall to scare us
from climbing over to shake apples down
from an old tree, to bite into forbidden fruit?

Minus 18 at Castlederg

No bricks can shut it out
as it cuts a frozen hole
through flesh and bone.
 
This witch turns oil to water
so radiators pack in
and flames icicle the grate.
 
Bundled under papers
a man dies in his sleep,
a girl slips and cracks her skull.
 
Earth’s core has lost its heat.
No grit will shift this ice
that chills the heart.
 
Redburn

i.m. Stephen Thompson
our gloved fingers grip the sledges zinging down the hill
blood thumps to a stop on the eighteenth green
 
gumboots duffels woolly hats we trudged from semis
the big estate dragged plywood anything that hisses that flies
 
here at the rim of the world crisscrossed white footprints little
Christs hang from trees the burn playing fields gravestones
 
snowlight asleep till the glutton years devour the hill
a noose tightens the snowman’s throat a giant’s axe
 
slices the trees and boys and girls run off with the hills and sky
and boys and girls all turn to slush to slush to slush
 
Off the Road
 
After the plague they seized his car,
clamped his job, house and wife;
 
his patch the pavement beside the motorway
howling its oil-charged chant
 
as he turns away from black gusts of stink,
a man in a frayed jacket with time to think,
 
who clambers through a gap in the bushes
and crawls to his lair lamented by thrushes
 
he can scarcely hear with cars screeching past
to office or home, shop or doctor,
 
and so bunks down this summer morning
caressing shrubs, swaddled in fern –
 
gorse friend, slug lover –
and dreams of cars spinning in circles
 
through the last act of an exhausted future
when the oil dries up and the wheels fly off
 
and jags and old bangers pile high in the sky
till, the last engine sputtering out,
 
an immense silence astonishes the day
and a lone blackbird celebrates nothing:
 
a billion fumeless years as a plastic bag
sticks to a branch and he listens to weeds
 
spouting through asphalt.
 
Tomb
Shrouded in moon clothes they move through my room,
heave me up and lug me down
to the capsule glowing in the street light.
I’m dumped in the Hand Sanitising Zone
where someone rolls me over and I lick a hand –
kind hand – that name-tags my wrist,
that spunges my filth.  Nailed beneath the sheets,
I eavesdrop on rows and rows of groans, sighs,
curtains clanking on chrome, sleeves
whisking in and out of dreams.
 
On a screen, an x-ray of my brain.
From the wall, a voice recites:
Fluid Balance Chart
Peripheral Cannula Record
Clean Hands Only Take A Minute
Soiled Lives Only Take A Second.
 
To the vacuum cleaner’s moan,
I wake.  Curtains open.  Light
needles my skin with a surgeon’s fingers.
A monitor bleeps flesh, not moon rock.
Bundles fumble in beds or shuffle along.
And then the clatter of the trolley,
sane cups of tea, toast melting on my tongue,
and someone – the spirit of the ward –
takes me to task to take this morning as it comes,
hold it as a chalice, unasked for, given.
And the shock of eyes, of voices, of breath,
of being here, now, risen.
 
Seven Lives
You have survived seven crashes on seven motorbikes,
ascended seven times to the ceiling
and pitied seven dying bodies beneath you.
You have astonished seven consultants who dislike being astonished,
spoken with seven angels who tried to coax you home,
preserved seven grafts of skin like relics
and, this morning, blessed seven roses with holy water
and forced out seven words that I understand:
motorbike bungalow mother garden flowers trees Philip.
 
Guts
I open my mouth.
The wrong words stumble
 
out.  I might as well
be dumb.  The sick
 
word.  But sometimes
words breathe, speak:
 
heal, scar,
kick, gut.
 
Hard words to get
your tongue around.
 
Sometimes the right
words are found.

BIO 

Peter Adair lives in Bangor, Northern Ireland.  He has won the Funeral Services Northern Ireland Poetry Competition and been shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing.  His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The Honest Ulsterman, Abridged, PN Review, Crannog, The Bangor Literary Journal and many other journals.  He was the recipient of an Arts Council bursary in 2024.  An e-pamphlet, Calling Card, is available from Amazon.  Largely because of sloth, he has not published a belated first collection,,,as yet.