Cradle-Song (live)
Patrick Donnelly reading “Cradle-Song” live at the University of Maine Farmington, November 15, 2007.
Patrick Donnelly
Homeland (live)
Patrick Donnelly reading “Homeland” live at the University of Maine Farmington, November 15, 2007.
Patrick Donnelly audience Q&A at UMaine Farmington
Patrick Donnelly answering audience questions live at the University of Maine Farmington, November 15, 2007.
Prayer at the Opera
I had already been weeping quietly for half an hour at the Academy of Music by the time Ulysses finally made it home disguised as a beggar. He was begging for his son to recognize him, to know him, and the boy longed to, but a whole kingdom hung on this, and he was afraid […]
Pool
The fat man with purple sores all over his legs is looking at me, and I am elaborately not looking at him, as we wait for children to clear the pool and laps to begin. Shall I call the lifeguard? I’m afraid of the fat man with his almost-open sores I don’t tell her, and […]
White Shirt
Nothing the poet at the podium has read is as achieved as his shirt, which is white, so white a white its very shadows are Antarctic, a pronouncement of magnificent power, able to make immaculate a few yards of cloth in this dirty world, if only for a morning, before he sweats at the pits […]
The Sign at Window One
reads: THE CLOCK IS TICKING. What brings my red Irish face among the blackest of black faces, crêpe to crow, applicants waiting in lines that snake to the street, even the guards and low-level functionaries one paycheck from the street themselves, who move languidly from office to office, or hunch, two or three at […]