Winter Sunday
We went out until dark to walk
by the track as starlings flittered
on poles or lifted up over the park,
the trainline tautened its wires,
a caterpillar drummed – the Dart.

We wandered home to have tea
as the cat crashed in like a man
wanting his dinner and the kettle sang.
We put things out on a tray –
the house, the train, the sea, the bay.

Door
Warm after morning rain
A wedding trumpets at traffic lights
We complain
That such celebration resurrects old pain
Induces new frights –

The red brush of your hair
Has stained me like a cheap tattoo
Still I wear
The memory of how it got there
Fading, as it must do

• Ben Keatinge is a visiting research fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin and editor of Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (Cork UP, 2019). Fred Johnston's most recent collection is Rogue States (Salmon Poetry, 2019).