My name is Podrigotumma and when I was 18 I moved to Dublin and lived there for five years.

And late one night, a friend said to me, here at Janiceen I was playing a midnight gig at the Olympia in Dublin City Centre tonight to want to go.

I've got two tickets. I was delighted, I love Janiceen.

So we went and next year it'll be 30 years since that happened.

And whenever I walked by that street, that particular place where I saw Janiceen, I have a little moment of remembering that gig, that night, that music, that brilliance.

Never again would bird song be the same by Rowan Ricardo Phillips.

Eight floors below our wide open window as early summer sang to early dawn and no breeze blew, a car crouched idling under a red traffic light that had spent most of the night with nothing inside but the rare boss or cab.

I only knew the car was there by the boom of its stereo, that sodden sound stirring me from deep sleep.

Her face facing mine, my face lost in hers. We'd slept like the lines of a villainelle, a part, together woven into one.

Then I rose and went to the window. How, for some reason, the mind can't seem to rest until it's seen what it's heard and defines it.

And I looked out and down, but the car by then had already pulled away no sight of it but for its dragon tail of base.

I still wonder if this really happened, if it matters in the greater scheme of things, is a poem the wonder or the matter.

A little later we started our day, coffee, the paper, a shower. She asked as we Sunday relaxed if I'd slept well. She asked me what I was humming. I stopped.

Months passed, then years, and I still have that song in my head like a bee swarm burrowing through the skull and finding there in my old self, which now feels as though it once knew and loved the city more in that rare heavenly moment.

And that it and I were one, just as Wu Tang is here forever cracked the dawn and swirving swallows raptured in old dirty's voice.

Yeah, old dirty bastard, aka Dirt McGart, aka Asan Unique, ODB the specialist, the dead one.

So this poem by Rowan Ricardo Phillips is in part a love poem and in part a poem about a city and a poem about poetry as well as a poem about literature and music and lament.

There's so many things all wrapped into the easy narrative of it. There's so much hidden within it it unfolds into itself. So he's woken nearing dawn time because what had been a pretty quiet street all night is suddenly aroused with noise because there's a car that's gone through that's been blasting some music.

And it describes that the car has gone leaving a dragon tail of music behind the lyrics of the song that remained with him for years after it seems the lyrics are Wu Tang is here forever.

And it's somehow linked to Robert Frost as well because the title never again would bird song be the same is a Robert Frost poem and you see swallows toward the end of the poem as the car has gone through he's imagining or remembering swallows swarving swallows raptured in old dirty's voice.

It's a memory of a place of an apartment of a city of loving a city and the poem doesn't define exactly what city it is.

It's an experience of solitude in the city although not complete solitude he's looking out a window and there's somebody else in the bed who doesn't seem to have woken.

...