Glen Wilson is a multi-award winning poet from Portadown. He won the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing (2017), the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award (2018), the Trim Poetry competition (2019), and Slipstream Open Poetry competition (2021). His collection An Experience on the Tongue is available now.
Balcony door in Benitses
it would never quite close,
a thin sliver of the night
allowed to whisper in,
the manager assured us it would be fine,
held by the smallest of hooks,
less substantial than a single bra strap.
We laugh each time we remember
and we are there again,
finding out how different we are
and how we see the same scene,
figuring out each other’s modesties
(when to be bold and when to brace)
shocked at what we didn’t know
and what we knew but had forgot.
Like that dress you wore that now
only spirals out from the photograph,
bringing with it a sea front,
a line of lit torches stretching beyond
the sight line, past Gastouri, Perama
and Kanoni, towards Corfu town.
Songs through sand-worn speakers
orientate the years in that Ionian night
and you dance curved and carved
by a waxing moon.
And so I will keep coming back
to slide this door open,
to live again, tracking sand in,
tracking sand out.