Poetry

Paternoster

We hop on at ground level and ascend
hand in hand
all the way to the eighteenth
to play in the clouds
and look out to Neepsend.
Like someone threading the rosary
going round on the Hail Mary's.
At the fourteenth to sixteenth
I went past, hair all Vaselined,
to all mussed up.
We turn at the top
as if moving on a blueprint.
On the way down like a morning
in a pit shaft
where language changes from home.
You step out at the mezzanine
leaving me to keep sinking
past ground to basement
with a split decision, where to get off.

Karl Riordan