Some things never change
Before I went to school one day
I hid it under the bed,
forgot about it for years.
Then, when I met you,
something triggered so I dusted it off,
placed it in the centre of the kitchen table.
You hardly noticed – just something
you would learn to take for granted –
and over time it became a fixture,
to be moved when friends came around
and we needed extra room,
until one day I forgot to put it back
and, after a short period adjusting
to revisions in colour and space,
it faded into the background,
a permanent position on the sideboard
beside the clock. The week after you left
I placed it on the fireplace in the bedroom,
directly in my eyeline, while I lay propped
in the discrete light of my telephone screen.
Maurice Devitt is winner of the 2015 Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition, and has been runner-up or shortlisted in Listowel, Cuirt, Patrick Kavanagh, Interpreter’s House and Cork Literary Review. He is curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site, chairperson of the Hibernian Writers’ Group and has recently published his debut collection Growing Up in Colour with Doire Press.