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An Elusive Summer by Maurice Devitt


You ask me how I recognise

the first sky of summer:

I don’t know, I use the term

to satisfy an obsession  

with detecting the season’s start.

Each day we explain it away, 

whether because of an errant shower

that flashes through in late afternoon

or a wind, measured as more than a puff

on the Beaufort Scale. By September

the waiting will be over and we will know

that summer has passed, hot, sunny days,

already forgotten, another victim

of hazy childhood memories.  


---

A past winner of the Trocaire/Poetry Ireland and Poems for Patience competitions, he published his debut collection, ‘Growing Up in Colour’, with Doire Press in 2018.

His poems have been nominated for Pushcart, Forward and Best of the Net prizes and his Pushcart-nominated poem, ‘The Lion Tamer Dreams of Office Work’, was the title poem of an anthology published by Hibernian Writers in 2015. He is curator of the Irish Centre for Poetry Studies site.

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