Monday, September 10, 2012

Seamas Carraher- A Poem


THE DANCING MIRRORS

These dancing mirrors confess
each other blindingly
in this unfamiliar room of our bodyparts,
all echoing to the silence
in its calamity of foghorns.
We are always this lost, among strangers.
The day limps by like an extraction,
these lousy passports, like
all wordlessness,
our credentials in conversations.
Still, i called you love,
in the dust of that
late afternoon, another song nailed
on the sleeve of your suffering, like
a rail ticket, or a plea.
There are no clouds now
in the bronze and breaking of my arms.
These beams could have build a house
for you,
my love, a house in
downtown Lebanon.
If you were, as you were,
sad like a sister,
fleet of foot in your shadows.
And i would be like a drunken builder, with
an eye to rebuilding the detail of continuity,
full of facades, among
your explosions,
both mask and despair of pretence:
a master craftsman in the art of destruction.

But now, at three in the afternoon,
you have become a diplomat-into-your-clothes,
a statesperson full of intrigue
with a heart embroiled in politics.
"Fuck it all", i said,
my parts uncommon in their citizenship,
in a world shattering
each other into movieparts
and glass splinters.
For the space of my arms, with my love
liquid in bloodvessels
and its meeting at the cleft of your
abandoning,
we can wave a peaceplan
at these military migs,
fuck each other into the lucidity of sight,
our world darkening in despair,
and hear small
animals whimper
in the spring of their caring.

But you had left.
And these dancing mirrors had invaded this
scream with
politeness
and i, crude in the genetics of my class,
and full of both shrapnel and words,
had left my armaments, outside.



Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He lives and writes on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, at present.
Recent publications include poems in Dead Flowers, Pyrokinection, Dead Snakes, Carcinogenic Poetry, Naphalm & Novacain, The Camel Saloon, ditch, Bone Orchard Poetry, Istanbul Literary Review and Pemmican. Previously his work has been published in Left Curve (No. 13, 14 & 20), Compages, Poetry Ireland Review, the Anthology of Irish Poetry and the Irish Socialist (newspaper). 

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