Derryside Confessional

I walked high bridge at Derryside
and eyed the soldiers eyeing me.
Meant for breasts comfortably
slight in sweaters, their eyes

winged past my neutral self
and tunneled down to last night's
bivouac, tall grass matted down
under the miraculous pairing,

the hard swallow walking to camp
afterward, tough woolens tighter
on them than sheep had worn.
Ordnance doesn't count lifted skirts,

doesn't know where a hem begins
or where it ends, how dry a throat,
how wet an eye, what law becomes
inserted between soft children.

Soldiers, in field work, at love,
too soon from mother's kitchen wares
and half admonishment from sires
who once felt the stitching

become elastic in country skirts,
look down their sights at sweater's
mounds, proud legs, square teeth
lost in smiles bright as zero degrees,

bright as green stoves in cottages
whose hair is worn in braids.
Derryside is never quiet or dark;
it has fire and young appetites

and hands, the field ache of loins,
front seat disasters, doorways
locked away from simple streetlights,
the pros and cons of young energies

wondering if the touch is real,
is legal, if a mortalized sin
becomes a sure-fire hell-fire trip.
Peace has disparities, hate and love

mix all the axioms and adages,
call to waste the wasted hearts,
a field pressed for a moment of never-
ending love, an erect boy in uniform,

a girl planning her confessional,
just as the moon empties across fields,
stone walls disappear at boundaries,
a myth thinks up another gunshot.

^

Biography

Eleven years retired, Tom Sheehan operates with his partner, Larry Bucaria, Newwriters.com, helping writers find publishing space. This poem is from a manuscript, "This Rare Earth and Other Flights. He is co-editor of the sold-out "A Gathering of Memories, Saugus 1900-2000," a nostalgic and historical 452-page look at his hometown, Saugus, MA, just north of Boston. Their committee borrowed $60,000 to print the book and paid it off five weeks after receipt of books. He has work in Paumanok Review, 3amMagazine, Small Spiral Notebook, Dakota House, Stirring, Samsara, Comrades, Split Shot, Melange, Red River, Nefarious, Carnelian, New Works Review, Eclectica, Slow Trains, Clackamas Review, etc. A print novel, "Vigilantes East," has just been released by Publish America, and another, "An Accountable Death," is serialized on 3amMagazine. He has been nominated for Pushcart Prize XXVII and awarded a 2001 Silver Rose Award for Excellence in the Art of the Short Story by American Renaissance for the Twenty-first Century (ART). His short story manuscript, "A Collection of Friends," of which 25 or more pieces have been published separately, seeks a publisher.