Modern Love

by Patrick Wright 

you post pictures of funny-walking seagulls
and crumb-loving pigeons. from a distance
I imagine a mother and child, clambering 
over rocks, eating crêpes, paddling waist-high. 

as lifeguards supervise, your message arrives 
on ‘the uncanniness of arcade machines,
a run-down town, a rag-and-bone tumbleweed 
place, a bustle of back streets, antique shops …’

meanwhile, my device is streaming blue skies,
terns perched on promenade lights, a laughing 
sailor: come laugh with Jolly Jack. I reply: 
‘I hope to never meet him under moonlight.’

you heart this line. you’re far, while I’m at a 
loose end. you text as you trudge up the steps, 
put the fun in the funicular, sign-off with emojis 
and gifs, nothing but a screen of hieroglyphics.

Patrick Wright has a poetry collection, Full Sight of Her (Black Spring), which was nominated for the John Pollard Prize. His poems have appeared in Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Southword, Poetry Salzburg, Agenda, Wasafiri, and London Magazine.