Bio
Brian Kirk is a poet and writer from Dublin, Ireland. His first poetry collection 'After The Fall' was published by Salmon Poetry in 2017. His poem "Birthday" won the Listowel Writers' Week Irish Poem of the Year at the An Post Irish Book Awards 2018. He was awarded a bursary from the Arts Council of Ireland in 2020 to write and film a sequence of formal poems on the Covid 19 pandemic. His short fiction chapbook 'It's Not Me, It's You' won the Southword Fiction Chapbook competition and was published in 2019 by Southword Editions. He blogs at www.briankirkwriter.com.
Brian Kirk
Night Brooding 2
No wonder people stare at fires and brood,
on winter nights there's nothing else to do.
The dark is like a belly that needs food
and flames nourish the mind while they subdue
the senses, soothing, easing to the soul.
Blanketed in contentment, thoughts turn to
people, places from the past, a keyhole
view of times you believed you'd left behind.
An image forms, burns brighter than the coal
in the grate, before story can unwind,
unspool, retell itself in a fresh way,
till memory, self and story's undermined,
reduced to whispered nothings, just hearsay,
diffusing like the smoke from your ashtray.