Still life with Hyde Park By Dennis Moriarty

Mid day mid week and the park is peopled

by office workers and city gents

with mobile phones glued to their ears, leaches

sucking the life from their boredom.

There are ladies that lunch on salad leaves and

sparkling wine, their voices loud

and shrill as geese that strut the shore and shit

all day on the grass.

Designer dogs with designer owners, pugs and

bulldogs with heads too big

and tails too small, their ears erect and quivering

like antenna searching for

calm among the crackling static of chaos,

mothers with babies and toddlers with fathers, stay

at home parents in a play away world,

tourists with cameras like a spare appendage, clicking

and snapping still life with Hyde park.

And then there are those that come from nowhere,

street dwellers without identity,

without a voice seeking refuge from the everyday

madness of their everyday lives.

They sit here from early morning through until dusk

when they scurry away like ants

back to their hills on the streets, the lost and the lonely,

the half alive half dead and the long time forgotten.

Dennis Moriarty was born in London, England and now lives in Wales. Married with five grown up offspring Dennis likes walking the dog in the mountains, reading and writing.

In 2017 he won the Blackwater poetry competition and went to county Cork in Ireland to read his work at the international poetry festival. Dennis has had poems featured in many publications including Blue nib, Our poetry archive, Setu bilingual, The passage between and others.