"Fallen Trees" by Ray Carey

Someone has written a sign beside the remaining stumps

Be careful where you’re going. And I think they’re right.

In the grounds where the interviews took place many years ago.

And the candidates were little more than acorns in jackets.

They had come to become what they became in different

Ways. One by failing and the other by succeeding. In ties

With Windsor knots to go with the lumps in their throats

They watch their accents and try to tuck their roots in.

That’s always the way things happen in life isn’t it ?

You can never quite tell the beginning from the end.

Our roots often come out whether we like it or not.

Attached to either a very soft heart or a shrivelled heart.

All I know for certain is that two women met where those great

Oaks were. The day their sons were being interviewed.

One woman had ladders in her stockings and said I think they

All get it. And the other woman said  I don’t think they all do.

Ray Carey is an Irish poet and composer. He has written musical adaptions of Boucicault and Wilde and was selected by the late Poet Laureate Paul Durcan for his Trinity Workshop Poets. He studied writing in Chico California with the novelist Clark Brown.  His most recent work has been published in Southward 47,  Innisfree Poetry Journal,  The Argyle Literary Magazine and the Meniscus Literary Journal. He was born and lives in Waterford, Ireland