Today, I’ve made the responsible choice to leave
Yesterday’s me in bed and go for a long walk.
Morning is everywhere and soon I’m drenched in it.
I know some of the faces but not all these people
Hurrying by, carrying their closed and secret lives.
Today, I’m a morning person, at one
With the schoolchildren and the businessmen
And that determined woman, perched high in her SUV.
Or this bus driver, whose bus is leaning against the pavement
With the weight of passengers. What is he thinking?
Perhaps, he is still feeling the morning heat of his wife
Or remembering Springtime in Kosovo.
I walk past the minutes rolling downhill towards Rathfarnham.
I resist the temptation to reach out and try to stop them.
Commendations for 'A Storm in Arcadia'
‘Sometimes you will find me working on the edges, / with all the love and intensity of a zealot, /a thrilling of words lighting my room’: Ron Carey states in his ars poetica, “The Trade“. Fables and legends from Abyssinia to Ireland that haunt him are woven through these lines. His prodigious imagination investigates the perception of scientists, filmmakers, and philosophers with a keen sense of wonder. In the process, his love of living, love of the world, of those dearest to him, joy in the moment, is palpable in poem after poem.
Catherine Phil MacCarthy : Winner of the Lawrence O’Shaughnessy Award for Poetry and the Yeats Thoor Ballylee International Poetry Prize.
And though there might be A Storm in Arcadia, Ron Carey’s astounding new collection elicits the magic, mystery and mischief in the extraordinary business of being. Carey’s exquisite poetry, line to line, poem to poem, reminds us that joy and a readiness to be surprised are enough “reasons to believe in the everlastingness of all things”.
Eleanor Hooker: Winner of the Michael Hartnett Award and the Markievicz Award for Poetry.
