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).