Liffey reflections (Marcella Boccia)

The river wears the city’s face,a trembling mask of light and shadow,gold spilling from bridges like old prayers,the hush of December pressed against the tide.Somewhere, a gull cries, thin as regret,its wings slicing the sky open—a wound of blue, slow to close.Dublin exhales in cigarette ghosts,its breath curling around lost names.I watch my own face break in the water,rippled, undone—a story the current refuses to keep.Here, even reflections let go.The river moves, careless, certain,carrying the weight of yesterday’s echoes,while I stand on its edge,learning the art of vanishing.

The man with red beard (Marcella Boccia)

He stands at the edge of the world,coat heavy with the scent of salt and sorrow,his beard a flame against the drowning dusk,his eyes, two coins for the ferryman.The sea knows his name—spits it back in broken Gaelic,a curse, a prayer, a half-lost songthreaded through the teeth of the wind.Once, there was love,warm as whiskey in a cracked glass,but love is a thing that drifts,a gull swallowed by the tide.He lights a cigarette with hands like winter,the ember trembling, a tiny sun—and in that flicker, I see it all:the years, the ghosts, the last goodbyefolded into the lines of his palm.The night swallows him whole.Only the ash remains.

December in Dublin (Marcella Boccia)

The Liffey moves like an old hymn,slow, thick with the weight of winter.Mist hangs in the bones of the city,soft as breath on a lover’s throat.Grafton Street glows in the amber hush,gold light pooling in puddles of night.Shop windows blink like tired eyes,tinsel-framed and full of want.A girl in a red coat spins in the rain,arms open to the hush of December,while a busker sings of exile,his voice rough as salt on stone.Somewhere, a church bell falters—midnight swallowing the chime.I stand in the doorway of yesterday,watching ghosts blur in the glass.And the city, still drunk on last year’s grief,wraps herself in the silence of snow.

The harp and the raven (Marcella Boccia)

The harp sleeps in the hollow of the wind,its strings bruised by the fingers of rain.Night leans in, hush-heavy,a priest at the door of a dying man.The raven watches from the bones of an oak,ink-feathered, bright-eyed,a spill of shadow against the hush of moonlight.It knows the shape of silence,the weight of an unsung note.Once, a song lived here,spun from breath and trembling hands,but the player is dust now,his voice a whisper lost in the bog.Still, the wind plucks at the strings,pulling ghosts from the belly of wood,and the raven, black prophet, listens—knowing that some songsare never meant to end.

A pint for the dead (Marcella Boccia)

The stout settles slow, dark as a sermon,a black sea holding its breath.Foam clings to the rim like last words,soft, white-lipped, dissolving.The bar hums—low, lonesome—a murmur of pint-glass elegies,hands curled around the weight of forgetting,knuckles knocking against absence.Someone laughs, loud, then gone,a wick snuffed out mid-flame.Outside, the river carries its dead quiet,a slow procession of shadows and silt.I raise the glass to no one,to the ghosts stitched in the seams of my coat,to the name I once carved in a rain-drowned bench,to the hands I let go before the tide turned.The first sip is a requiem, bitter and warm.The last, a door closing.

Rain on Grafton Street (Marcella Boccia)

The cobblestones glisten like bitten glass,silver-tongued under the hush of rain.Footsteps dissolve into the murmur of ghosts,soft echoes swallowed by puddles of light.A busker hums something half-remembered,his chords unraveling into the wet dusk,as the city exhales—a slow, smoke-laced sigh between the drops.Neon drips from the bones of old shopfronts,liquor-bright and flickering,while lovers lean into the wind,honey-lit in the amber of streetlamps,their whispers drowning in the hush.I stand still, spine against stone,watching the river of strangers flow past,each face a story I'll never read,each glance a door left half-open.The rain runs down my wrists,cold as confession,soft as the hands I no longer hold.

The last drop of tea (Marcella Boccia)

Steam waltzes, slow, in the dying light,amber ghosts coiling in a china grave.My hands, thin as sins, hold the heat,soft palms scalded by something almost gone.The rain is a metronome—soft, then savage, then silence.Outside, the wind tugs at the ribs of the world,but here, in this hush, time lingers,a drunkard swaying at the edge of forgetting.Was it jasmine? Or memory?The bitter breath of something unsaidrests at the rim of the cup,where lips once lingered, hesitant—where love was brewed, then left to cool.The last drop, dark and unrepentant,trembles, then vanishes.A small death. A swallowed moon.And I sit, staring at the empty,as if it might whisper back.