Ben Keatinge
The Airport Road
With the treatment over
I drove in a tunnel
towards the airport road –
the terrible frailty of parting.
A distant terminal
another road to town
I grip my phone –
the sudden jolt from home.
Homecoming
Back home now in Ireland
my past’s a future which has disappeared
meandering fleeing lost
I search the road near Štip looking for Manastir.
Ben Keatinge is a Visiting Research Fellow at the School of English, Trinity College Dublin. He is editor of Making Integral: Critical Essays on Richard Murphy (2019) and his poems have been published, most recently, in The Dalhousie Review, Reading Ireland and anthologised in Local Wonders: Poems of Our Immediate Surrounds.
Briefly Write 