The Irish Literary Times

Deceptions

Eamon Grennan

Mornings when I put the necessary sunblock on
it’s always summer: sweet and greasy, a smell
of summer saturates the air, although frost
bones over the bathroom window and it’s winter
in the bony trees outside, early-morning headlights
flickering through the solid black of branches

and larks rising out of dead grass
and lambs antiphonal between rocky outcrops
and the discreet one-note charm
of the willow warbler wishing itself
into invisibility between sally trees
where desperate with its own
single-mind intent th...