John McKeown

 

 

 

Suburbia

 

 

Suburbia almost makes sense,

Dripping with stillness, peace

Under the rain-washed, wild, calamitous sky.

 

Seeming to reflect a deeper order,

A natural stability, my restless, unmortgageable

Over-heated temperament’s too thick to realize.

 

This is the heart of things, the good life:

A house set well back, two cars in the drive,

garden trim or self-consciously unkempt.

 

Then two semi-detachees conversing as I pass,

His golf’s improved with those new clubs...

Suburbia’s a graveyard, and these are it’s living dead

 

 

 

Waitress in Cafe Imperial, Prague

 

 

Her hair a seam of gold,

she persists, spreading silently

under the killing weight

of compressed circumstance.

 

She arranges tables, brings beer,

smiles into massed

ignorant faces, while her fingers,

ministers of her soul’s elegance

 

conduct concertos of beauty

unknown to her.

 

 

 

 

John McKeown © 2008