Seamas Carraher- A Poem

WORK 3

Mention now these

in their unredeemable stares

who swear with their sweat

worked long and harder

as cold as ice cut fog

into their chests

for these precious minutes

nailed like Hegel’s mask on

the cover of a book,

how we slaved and saved

each of these oddments.

You, who would give everything

but the meditation of ruin

leaving your ghost

to God

and your children to damp clay.

A book, a mothtorn cloth

of Engels facing a vase of dead

flowers

rich in their assorted ruin

as if such trivia in the

unmentionable heart of our

insignificance

could wake history

a minute too soon,

believing in the quiet and

careless desperation

of dying men

(that it had all mattered):

a light pulled from its opaque

source

as also this, our antithesis

in these cheap and gaudy images

for us

who are all men labouring

with their own despair.



Séamas Carraher was born in Dalkey, Ireland in 1956. He lives on the Ballyogan estate, south of Dublin city, near the Dublin-Wicklow mountains, at present.