thepoets

This poem by David O’Meara from his collection The Vicinity conveys the message of people aging as the physical structures around them age. This poem, to me, is about the passage of time and also about preserving things - memories, and actual physical places of historical and childhood significance.

There are wonderful lines in this poem like:

Posters for ska and punk bands overlap on exits
boarded-up with plywood, where weeks

are counted off with cracks from a staple gun.

… a line like this makes me think of T.S. Eliot’s, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”

In this poem, O’Meara talks of the abandoned movie-house’s window:

- there’s
the rubbed rheumy eye of a window, still intact,
that blinks when a cloud blots the sun.

This poem speaks about holding onto some things from the past that were part of our life. It is a poem that speaks beautifully about the joy to be found in the ordinary.

David O’Meara also has a collection of poems in a book entitled Storm still (1999, McGill-Queen’s University Press).

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