Issue 33: Martin Mooney

Radar School

Broken lantern.

Burned-out

and looted capsule,

its cosmonauts

gone walkabout.

Deserted watchtower.

*

Birdcage on its last leg,

rust and guano.

Decayed lookout, holdout,

hideout. Wire maquette

for the big bronze head

of a lost colossus.

*

The radar school rots at the end of the pier.

The trainee

harbourmasters are all dead now.

*

It casts a shadow

on the abandoned

geisterstadt

of Kolmanskop,

where a man crouched

in a sand filled house

is a fairground giant,

awed by mod cons –

telephones, flush toilets.

*

Cormorant-light.

The radar school

holds sunrise,

flame in a goblet.

The gutted fuselage

of the fire-plane

on the farthest runway.

The shopfronts

are painted to look like shopfronts.

Martin Mooney is the author of four collections of poetry – Grub (1993), Rasputin and his Children (2000), Blue Lamp Disco (2003) and The Resurrection of the Body at Killysuggen (2011) (the first from Blackstaff, the others from Lagan Press). A New and Selected is currently seeking a publisher.

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