Stanzas: Monthly Chapbooks June 2015 (Concrete Nature) | Page 6

Summer (In a Hundred Thousand Parts)
Rob Carlile
This city offered me the air for my first breath,
in Autumn, in the delivery room of the bons hospital
like it has to a hundred thousand others.
I accepted it without thought.
I was young and impulsive.
Cork’s Autumn air, half a season brewing,
filters out the colour of the city.
Winter is forever next, worry is suspended in the air
each breath tries to convince you
that fear stops things catching you off guard.
The summer air is different.
In the summer the city reveals
its one hundred thousand parts
all dressed for the Summer,
modeling the liveliest quarters
of their wardrobes
Beautiful and revealing,
appealing to the best and worst in us.
A season of smiles and sunglasses,
blackout blinds for the windows to the soul,
an attractive way to deal with too much,
because nothing is more tempting than
the forbidden to the rebel county.
Curiosity thrives in a university town,
and sensitivity thrives around beauty,
So the city has selected
for the curious and the sensitive,
and sunglasses and smiles in the sunlight in the city
Are why the senstive
have to fall in love so often.
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