NWW Issue 9 Spring and Summer 2018

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NORTH WEST WORDS SPRING / SUMMER 2018 ISSUE 9 Finally, they would spend the Sunday afternoon writing. They worked carefully in order to leave the world and each other a diary. Both wrote simultaneously such that on parting each retained a copy in the others hand. Some day, both Mary and Hugh understood, one would return to this room alone to mourn the other, stolen through age, death or dementia. This diary recounted the wanderings of their imaginations, their meetings, their thoughts and the joys they had found. It would remain and would comfort the one left behind. This was their life insurance. Eventually who ever outlived the other would place this book in the shelves of the University library. Hugh had already created its ISBN, reference and title. They agreed to name the book ‘Joy’, and to list the authors as unknown. This book would remain deliberately off the syllabus. They would position it among anthropological studies made during the mid to late nineteenth century in a patch of peace that sat between the Crimean and World War One. Hugh looked now to Mary, he loved her in every sense. Outside the world was a bitter cold while here in their cocoon the pair managed to shelter in their own republic. Mary gazed back and they both laughed knowing their bodies had grown old, their clothing was well dated, but their minds, when they met, where spring. Hugh held Mary and kissed the top of her tiny head, her widow’s bun grey and tight. They then made love so softly that angels may have appeared. And from this place, early on a Monday morning, they each returned to their lives, so unremarkable they became invisible. As Hugh boarded the train back to Derry he looked at the rounded casing of the security camera that announced surveillance and simultaneously obscured the cameras aim. He laughed and he wondered why Bentham had left us this offspring of the Panopticon instead of his happiness principle. He checked his own happiness calculus and found it to be overflowing and he reminded himself to look at Spinoza again. Spinoza, Mary would love that. Paul Moore 48
NORTH WEST WORDS SPRING / SUMMER 2018 ISSUE 9 Reflection on Francis Bacon’s Three Studies for a Self-Portrait If we were frightened we hid it well; ratcheting out of control just enough and no more. The drunk, the boor, the perfect charmer. We played them all right up to the hilt. You welcomed the lash, the fist, the yielding. Submitting to death, rebirth, death again. And I, in my wild and headstrong way, sought my own oblivions to shield my young and fragile heart. Now, in the overlap of our reflections, we come face-to face and gaze at each other’s tender beauty. Teresa Godfrey 49
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NWW Issue 9 Spring and Summer 2018

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