Dean Kelly


Births Marriages, Deaths
after Dylan Thomas

An over-tray on castors,
by a hospice bed, too small to 
unfold the Connacht Tribune—

County Edition you called,
Try-bune, gone by the by,
births marriages, deaths,
suddenly too close to home.

We'd recapped the neighbours,
putting each door on the Main Street
to rights, from the top of Abbey Street
to King's Garage, a star painted 
on the gable, where you might
turn right, for the lake, anyhow.
 
No knit-clicking, or Turkish Delight,
in what would be the end,
and my final formal speech
prepared but never offered,
more said, in sitting ever with,

Poirot on the TV, loud, as you liked,
until a nurse tending to Bridie in 
room three, told us to turn it down.
Four days closer to her inevitable,
I suppose, but what if you had 
wanted to go out roaring

into that true void, rocking into the
after-here, or just jiving up the
linoleum? Not your style, I know, 
so the telly never did go back on. 



Leviathan 
for Hazel

Even before they changed
its name to plain of water,
this middle of nowhere
was the axis of rotation,
where science came to call.

The ancestor of a previous people
had built a spyglass, the greatest
the world would see, for an age.

Laurels past, the lens long since
removed to London, the ironwork
melted for Great War guns, and the
trebuchet of timber dismantled
then, for health and safety.

From a facing bench named for
Clementine on the Birr Demesne,
a little girl's brown eyes wonder,

if the universe is expanding, Daddy,
then what's beyond the spread,
could that be where heaven is?

Her curls and ponder ample swap
for all the whirlpool galaxies found there.

Still in her winter coat, she rolls down 
just-dry hills of grass, moss and clover.
 

Dean Kelly (b.1977, Galway) a graduate of ATU and University of Galway, makes paintings, photographs and poems. He has been published in Vox Galvia and Skylight 47, and his artwork in Poetry Ireland Review and Ropes. Formerly of Macnas, Kelly has also worked for many years organising exhibitions for Kenny's Bookshop and Art Gallery in Galway, where he’s also a regular exhibitor.

 
 

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