Poetry Gordon Ferris

BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE: GORDON FERRIS

Gordon Ferris was born and raised in Finglas, a North West suburb of Dublin. In the early eighties, he moved to Donegal where he has lived ever since. He started writing in 2014 and has had many short stories and poems in publications including Hidden Channel, A New Ulster, The Galway Review, Impspired Magazine, and Lothlorien Poetry Journal. He has also won prizes in the summer 2020 HITA Creative Writing Competition for his poem ‘Mother’, and won the winter competition for his poem ‘The Silence’. Gordon was awarded a Poetry Town Bursary by Poetry Ireland.

You Walk

You Walk In silence Head lowered To avoid any searching glance

Fingers fidget You look at the ground as if you can't see where you walk

You push an imaginary Strand of hair Out of your eyes

You shake when someone speaks to you And nervously answer breathe in deeply And go on your way.

(Gordon Ferris)

I can't tell you anything about

I can't tell you anything about the way you display your truths the sound you make so convincing, so right

it's in the way you explain things my lack of words to speak my thoughts it's just my lack of nerve to utter those defiant words my lack makes me cower in your presence.

I can't tell you anything about how voices sing on moonlight breeze how shadows dance on the backyard wall how dug up memories make our neck hair freeze

I can't tell you anything about when the wicket takes all we have I take the troubled track Because our loved ones are all we have left.

(Gordon Ferris)

the worst thing about this war

the worst thing about this war is how the people look like you and I how we can look at the sky and not fear what's falling on us how they all can leave except for men of fighting age

did they once think It couldn't happen to them,

the way we think it will never happen to us

would you volunteer to take arms and possibly die for your country

let your child become an orphan let your soulmate go on alone

will these times bring forth more legends

or is it just to be more loss of the innocents will more heroes be borne or blood lost on the battlefield to fill the coffers of suited men who presses the buttons and treat us all as pawns in their parlour games.

I look at pictures of a world gone

of loved ones living in my heart

in darkest times

I call upon them when all begins to fade (Gordon Ferris)