2 More Poems by Amy McCadden

Conversation with the Sun (a Poem for Frank)

I am tired and without any
motivation to move I said to myself
as I was hauled out of bed by the sun.
There it was, pulling away as ever
with munificent warmth ,   the strong
round thing staring as it always does in
punishing silence,     although I tried for
conversation many times.    

But up
I get and here I am, making my
hesitant deal with words.
I hear a trill in the air, and
this reminds me to thank the little white ball that
spies on you in the morning, without which
I’d have no reason to wake at all.

A Poem for Nighthawks

At the barren point, when
the promise of midnight was long since
gone, I was fumbling to pay for
stale coffee. I had long ceased to mythologize
a place like this. It was always home
when the rest of the city became
amorphous under the evening,
but there occurred an
impenetrable thought I contemplated

over mounds of sugar. I had not
given thought to the couple
across from me, who wore a similarly
inscrutable guise behind a lit
cigarette. Just as they might wonder towards
myself, I also strived to understand

to their troubles. Their expressions were
blank, and I wondered if 
they were real. Even so,
there was familiarity in their presence, and
though we arrived separately, I regarded us
as being one. Yet our minds were elsewhere,
shifting and sorting matters, with
nothing to speak of, except speaking itself.

I turned from them
and saw my outline reflected mirrored against
the outside world, which until that moment,
had ceased to exist. My thoughts, and the beautiful
couple, with their own mysteries also faded
away. It was the window, and the ink-stained
body-double watching in silent
conversation with myself, to see what might
be revealed. I drank my cold coffee, and never looked
back again.

---

Amy McCadden is a poet based in the North-East of England, dreaming of elsewhere. Read more of her work here and on her blog, https://femalewithapulse.wordpress.com/