Poem for the Day: the echo of Chamber Music

Painting by Wan Ju Wei
Painting by Wan Ju Wei

FROM Revival publishing house, under Limerick Writers’ Centre, Bridget Wallace issued her collection ‘Shadow Horses’ this year. There’s some mighty stuff in it from a woman who lives in a travelled, political, sensuous world.

Limerick born, Wallace has a PhD in English Literature and teaches in Open University. She facilitates creative writing programmes and art for adults with intellectual disability.

 

Chamber Music

An echo passed me on the stairs./ I thought it was my cradle melody/ climbing to its native place;

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that chamber where a single note/ at concert pitch/ pulsed once along the walls/ where echoes slip through cracks/ as easily as my identity;

fading to coda/ like the woman who on Friday nights/ for the sake of company/ believed in ghosts.

In my hallway/ someone is deftly fingering adagaios/ They come to rest/ outside this antechamber/ where my music lies in wait/ but no one enters/ not even furtively.

But then I overheard a note/ previously undiscovered/ it lay in wait for lovers/ and for me.

——————–

That deft “fingering of adagios” is picked up all the way in the metronomic crisp of Wallace’s prose. The imagery is poignant, loneliness declared and no fudge here in the acknowledgement of want. Romance is not extinguished but expressed, this music eloquent.

Some portion of her life has passed; there is more.

 

by Rose Rushe

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