Sample Poems by Edward Byrne
Moonlight in the City
One July evening when I was eleven,
not a block from the waterfront, the day
yet hot, I waited by myself in the middle
of a vacant lot and watched as a fresh wash
of moonlight began to flow over rooftops,
and the sky beyond dust-covered billboards
just started to fill with clustered stars.
The splintered grids of far-off apartment
fire escapes glittered against their backdrop
of red brick as if lit by the flick of a switch.
In this distance, even the paired lines
of elevated train tracks, stretching like bars
along the edge of the shore, appeared
to shine, and those symmetrical rows
of windows on the warehouses below
seemed almost to glow. Warning lights
pulsed all along the span of that great
bridge over the river, as hundreds of bright
buds suddenly stippled those rippling
waters now deepening to the blue of a new
bruise. Steel supports wound around
one another into braided suspension cables
dipping toward either end and glinting
beneath that constellation still slowly
showing in the darker corridor overhead.
Already, I could see the outlines of lunar
topography, and I thought of that old
globe my grandfather had once given me
only days before he died—of how
I’d felt its raised beige shapes representing
the seven continents, and of the way
he told me he’d been to every one of them.
Somewhere in the city, summertime
sounds—the high screams of sirens
and muffled bass thumps of fireworks—
played like the muscular backup music
pumping from some local garage band.
But I stood listlessly under sharp-angled
shadows cast by street lamps, among
an urban wreckage of broken cinder blocks
and glistening shards of shattered panes,
and I listened to the wind-clank of chain-link
fencing around that grassless plot of land,
knowing that night my father was far away
again, driving deliveries along an interstate,
and my mother was sitting alone at home,
as were her neighbors, awaiting the first
broadcast of a man walking on the moon.
Waiting at a Bus Station
I. A False Warmth
Although the traffic outside is stalled by snowfall,
and home now appears as far away as those stars
we know are still slowly drifting in some distant
sky, both of us wait at this bus station, hoping
the roads will soon be cleared. And though we’ve
been here for more than four hours, the frozen
street scene we see through these windows, long
gone gray with exhaust and streaked by everyday
stains, remains the same. Snowflakes flutter
through an evening air scarred only by the thin
bare branches of those few oaks newly planted
last spring in this city’s latest urban renewal plan.
All the midtown shops have shut down for the day,
though their neon signs and bright display cases
are yet glowing through the snow with a false
warmth like those words and images on the pages
of any good book passing along to us lasting
reminders of a certain time and place, or those old
family albums found in attics, so often offering
tinted vintage photographs—sometimes blurred
by quick movements, camera lenses left out of focus—
evidence of events important in someone else’s past.
II. A Small All-Night Diner
Even the local pharmacist closed this afternoon,
leaving an emergency number in oversize scrawl
on an unrolled scroll of computer printer paper
taped like a large bandage to his storefront door.
Only that small all-night diner across the way
has stayed open, its steamy backlit pair of frosted
windows staring back at us in an opaque glare.
We ate a late lunch there, shared a booth with two
other stranded travelers—husband and wife,
strangers like us, come from the east, changing
buses for a more northern course, drinking cup
after cup of black coffee. Passing back and forth
ketchup, a salt or pepper shaker, we discussed
the storm, watched it through fogged plate glass:
the bus station on the opposite side of the avenue,
a couple apparently peering back from the terminal
lobby already growing bleary in windblown snow,
everything else outside just now becoming unclear
like the distortion one might find in a hurried
snapshot, the whole world fading away to white
as if it were nothing but a quick picture accidentally
caught forever on someone’s overexposed roll of film.
Church Burning
Nearly a year after the church burning
our memories of the damage remain,
although only in those images we have
chosen to retain: the first fire-bomb flash
that filled the air with ashes; soot
that seemed to cover everyone in the color
of mourning; clouds of brown powder
showering down as if sifted, drifting
like silt; coal-dark smoke that rose,
floating, blown slightly downwind
with its tail trailing back, curling toward
the steeple like a black banner unfurling
as it wavered overhead; and the blasted
panes of stained glass, the spire’s twin
windows, now sparkling on an asphalt
parking lot like starlight on sea water.
When we tried to enter, flames came
around the door frame, their thin flares
bending and twisting—imagine red,
long, and slender willow twigs—in what
little wind there was. We stood watch
all night, knowing no more than a torn
scrap of smoldering fabric, like faith,
might reignite everything. Although a stench
of sulfur lingered until dawn, the way
torchlight fumes sometimes may stay,
even before the scorch of morning sun
showed over those ruins, we believed
the rebuilding would begin with daylight.
Today, the charred parts are hardly visible
anymore, and while the white marble
stone in the sanctuary only darkens at dusk,
as though yet lightly coated with charcoal
dust, anyone would barely be aware there
ever had been a fire, except sometimes
on Sundays when congregation members
remember that sharp scent of singed
wood, which still mingles in with the incense.
Anniversary Visit
Tonight, my wife and I will arrive again at that inn
we first visited a decade ago. Nestled into a high rise
beside the river, its balconies stretch out, as if gliding
over the slow-flowing waters below, and in morning
their shadows will reach across to the other shore
like black boxes stacked on an Ad Reinhardt abstract.
We will walk a path that parts the garden flowers,
so orderly arranged with constellations of violet
and pink blossoms separated from others of red
and yellow. We will speak once more of that week
now long gone and about those late afternoons
when we had slept with tangled legs in a hammock
sagging under the twisting limbs of shade trees.
We will seek out those same old signposts along
an upper trail, which yet creases the hillside, leads
to that distant peak with its white curve of waterfall
jutting just above us. Through our field glasses,
the geometry of far-off farmlands will appear near
and take on shapes similar to the puzzle pieces
our son loves to fit together when we are at home.
We will look back at that cluster of cottages
from another age still filling the village in the valley,
and of course, they’ll also seem so much closer.
And then we will pretend we are ten years younger.