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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.
Copyright © 2025 by Martin Mooney, all rights reserved. This text may be used and shared in accordance with the fair-use provisions of Copyright law. Archiving, redistribution, or republication of this text on other terms, in any medium, requires the notification of the journal and consent of the author
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