Angela Patten

Angela Patten was born and raised in Dublin, Ireland. She is author of five poetry collections and a prose memoir High Tea at a Low Table: Stories From An Irish Childhood. She now lives in Burlington, Vermont.

NEW WORK:

Pastiche 

A lazy old mother, a hard-working father and twelve young, one after the other: a clock. Irish Riddle
 

The snake strikes. The miners strike. The clock strikes.
What is the time – an innocent inquiry,
versus What is Time – a philosophical question.

In the garden creeping thyme climbs
over stones, carpeting the forest floor
with its fragrant purple flowers.

Some say that Aborigines sang their landscape
into being, creating mountain ranges,
waterholes and gorges from desert sands.

In Dali’s iconic painting about Time,
pocket watches melt in a barren landscape
like Camembert oozing in the sun. 

In the city an empty bus glides by,
its brightly lit interior lonely
as an Edward Hopper painting

against the darkness of the evening.
High up on the turret of a city tower
the hands of the clock are predictable

as a toy train that stops at every station
on its wooden track, always returning
like a prodigal home.

by Angela Patten (c) The Orchards Poetry Journal 2025

The Longest-Running Show

I was taking out the garbage
when I noticed the quality of light—
a frieze of gold girdling the tops
of the trees like a fancy gilt frame
that prepares the viewer’s eye 
to enter the province of the painting.

 By the time I ducked inside to find
a coat, a hat, my boots and gloves,
the gold was gone. But what I saw
were bird tracks stenciled on the snow,
a red fire hydrant wearing a white hat,
impersonating a squat Saint Nicholas.

 Each turn I took returned a new delight
magenta and vermilion of the lake
surrounded by the cut-out cardboard
mountains of a theater-in-the-round. 
And sunset waiting in the wings, all
tarted up with nowhere to go but down.

by Angela Patten (c) Connecticut River Review 2025