Some Other Names

by James Stafford

The car: the grey Cambridge
Washed at the canal
At Goldenbridge
Its hubcaps mirroring
The kerbs
Then the verges
Across the Curragh
(Petrol at Maryborough)

Some other names
Not on signs
You see
All the same
Their patterns spoken:
The gates hung with ribbons
The bridge with its road gone
The work of my cousins
The reason forgotten

Will we take this turn
Not that one, the shorter one
Where the grass runs down
The road made of stones?

Reproduced with kind permission of the author. This poem was composed in workshops led by Victoria Kennefick at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in November 2023.