Poem of the week: The dead are selfish

They keep to themselves,
no soft breath on our necks,
no shadowy form by a window.

Sometimes they hide in our dreams
like a face deep in a foggy mirror
or a faded watercolour.

A butterfly in the kitchen,
a robin by the back door,
grief makes us desperate.

We pluck weeds from their graves,
humped from our weighty backpacks
of 'could haves' and 'should haves',

Holding Her Breath: A different take on the campus novel

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Edward de Bono obituary: Lateral thinker who proposed Marmite as solution to Arab-Israeli conflict

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The First Irish Cities: An Eighteenth-Century Transformation – A tale of 10 towns

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The last of the dragomans: Andrew Ryan, a Cork man in Constaninople

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while above our heads
starlight comes tumbling
through the vast indifference of eternity.

Gerard Hanberry is currently working on his fifth poetry collection. He also writes non-fiction