Cassandra Voices

Category: Poetry

  • Poetry – Elliot Moriarty

    Nicholas of Bari

    Another night fifth in a row
    unsettled but unfrozen
    thinking I get it I get it
    (I don’t, but I have skin and nerves):

    Whatever sustains someone doing what you do,
    I mean never mind the privations! that unseen hand,
    Shoulder cupped, steering towards the leper colony –
    the Big Bewk saints, the Seenitalls, Tell-you-what-I’d
    do-if-I-were-yous…
    (enthusiasts who sleep one to a room
    and who if we just roll up that sleeve
    for a couple hundred spare months)
    yes that too. If we just….

    And you break away and plod on
    As they foretell your grit will kill you.

    Well this too, a mile away: Perpetual Motion!
    Wind or tide or compressed chipboard or wherever they’re
    frisbeeing the tax breaks this current? cycle?
    into laps of pals slash creditors ABCing
    a redesigned polity, where battery tech –
    Sorry – Nology – excuseme, will…
    (impilmentated across the economy)
    Will save…

    The child in the lithium mine, fingers
    deformed, the first knuckle gone.
    Overheads, always overheads.
    But we’ll outsource to Europa
    when the talent pool is Exhausted.

    Which will take a while yet.

    Half a mile away:

    Our Vegan Monday grinners,
    Off setting off in the fake jeep,
    Eerie silence til the gas kicks in
    Over Charlemont bridge, arc of
    Our hero stolidly crossing,
    Dashboard screams, driver jolts,
    keels, (rest of car buried in phones)
    “Watch where YOU’RE going!” he starts
    To shout
    As the eyes turn
    the whole corpus twists
    toward him and through him –
    an air-conditioner chill then gone,
    no trace in the rear-view.
    He tells himself he dodged, but…
    This has been happening
    More often lately. Overtired, that’s all.
    Newstalk. And an early night tonight.

    They sleep eight hours.
    Belatedly, worry entered their guts
    once they had genetic skin in the game, but
    Ours will be fine: Business Cantonese, crypto,
    Young Scientist, fun size beers (better
    they’re in the house than eff-knows-where) and
    The Talk About…
    They sleep nine hours.
    A theatrical yawn.
    Back to the salt mine, conference call.

    I get it in the sense that I wouldn’t either,
    I think you’re right, and if I had your honed instincts
    and scalpel humour—
    But on days such as this, fifth and counting
    Surely a den of thieving fuckers is better
    than another wet gutter screaming match
    with a fifteen hour night?
    Husband your fuel and your wits. Arm yourself
    with a rock or a crunched up can
    in your goto pocket. Breathe out, finish anything you’ve left,
    stride towards the LED light.

    Don’t be late, they’ll lock you out to die.

    “you’ve made your point
    you holy few
    you’ve made your point!”

    Jesus Christ, like.

    I mean Jesus Christ, they’d fling you in
    the Liffey stamp “buried at sea” on the docket—
    Quickly – pick three: Psychiatric History, Known to Gardaí,
    Mintil Hilth™, Engagement Izzyous – which is why –
    Refusal, Reluctance, the cracks –  and again this is
    Again why – yet another – yet
    Another No Fixed Address – sponge, waste, nosh Abel
    for…For?
    Well, whether the brown liar was once his thing,
    He wasn’t using: he wins. He haunts at his pleasure.

    Remember that as ever decimating rootless scum
    was an inexpensive way to impress upon sit-in
    students down a year of Law, sneering at
    the empty Jay One cancellation threat: –
    “Australia America Canada New Zealand,
    we will see them all while you’re here minding
    Your handicapped kids, you inbred bogscum” but
    but what if – surely a contingent?:

    Cracks invisible under carpeted floors,
    The weight of Relying On You, son,
    And such a long way down.
    “We know you’ll get your act together.
    Perhaps you’re just overthinking, your—”
    Fogged vocation? or, The base fear:
    marooned and slowly draining amid the dying
    amongst the dying in between the bonesunk husks,
    our holy dying knackers dying at midday without a fuss,
    town on a weekday, going peaceful after years howling
    into their mobiles their streets those trams,
    dying for no reason, dying without ever even
    presuming to arrogate a version of what same
    Artsblock Stephen Heroes claim’s birthright
    to lose, yet perhaps too they’re just
    dying for a lungful of a dreamt cracked Rome:

    nicotine and subway vents and rumour.
    Harlem, The Bowery, The Hands That.

    Twenty years later the bootlace daredevils’
    Conspicuous Return: Lo! It Can Be Done Son, says
    the cute one, a quiet deal on a struggling licence
    (add strip lighting, carvery, Guinness mid-strentt’)
    While the others…

    Vanished Camden or Rockaway or Justfuckedoff,
    never left the tower no matter how far they fled
    from the ripped places those ripped up were next sent,
    those banished home staring at the wall of unsaid,
    sleepless over decisions unmade, failed
    stabs at intercession with mute smiling friends
    that went early on,

    back when the junk suddenly dropped from the sky
    like manna – sufficient for each day

    turns out most people don’t want to die,
    so explain it to me again.

    *Concurrent to the events depicted in noted docu-drama Rambo III, western cities were flooded with cheap Afghan heroin. Dublin – largely unfamiliar with opiates –came out of it badly.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

     

     

  • Poetry: Marc Di Saverio

    THE MAN WITH A MICRO-CHIP IN HIS RIGHT HAND

    Stopping wantless under cherry blossoms
    He hears a girl singing from the sewer,
    then harmonizes voices with some hums,
    then sings the final chorus like he knows her,
    their voices shaking red chrysanthemums –
    but now the crowds of fading stars are fewer
    and his voice grows weaker as the day glows nearer,
    as he’s alarmed by the stirrings of the bums.
    “Should I come up to see you on the street
    so in the morning light we could now meet?”
    A blossom plummets through the dewy grate.
    Before he can reply I, an old class-mate,
    pass by, asking why he’s standing here —
    “for — for cherry-trees this time of year.”

    ______________

    SONNET ON ANASTASIA

    Like Martin Luther King she had a dream,
    but lived out what the TV would prescribe.
    She’d only ever be a psych-ward queen.
    I know she might have equalized our tribe.
    I whisperingly sing so soothingly;
    Sometimes I wonder: would she still be gone
    If she had measured my worth by my love, alone?
    I could not heal her so distantly.
    Like Martin Luther King she had a dream,
    but lived out what the TV would prescribe.
    She’d only ever be a psych-ward star.
    We found her at the harbour, drowned. Her surgeon-
    markered life-time thought-line equalled one long
    wound — her legacy a traceless scar.

    THE SONNET OF A PROPHET ADDRESSING HIS OWN COUNTRY

    Canada, I came to you with my soul
    and with diamonds, and you tried to collapse them
    back into a vacuum, back into coal! —
    Canada, remove your bloody diadem!
    Canada, I came to you with answers
    to inquiries you make in your lion-wild
    dreams, where your wonder has been exiled,
    where your wishes are kites so drawn to stirs
    of the vortex of utopia, through
    whose one end I blow, as though through a trumpet,
    the prophecies you mock, despite sensing,
    deep in your soul’s centre — you freeze —
    the chance my drawn and quartered words are true,
    these testaments to my theophanies!

    ____________

     

    SONNET XVIII

    So boa-constrictor-slowly you move,
    exterminators of my humankind!
    Some hardly feel their dying and approve
    their deaths with stasis, silence; quarantined,
    they cheerlead their own Gotterdammerung
    while our exterminators now erect
    the camps where Fidelitites — the unsung
    saints, the Bride of Christ, the final sect,
    dressed from head to foot in fealty —
    will kneel before the pits; the humanoids
    will jeer them from their seeming realty,
    sore from their beast-marks – rabid with tirades.
    So boa-constrictor-slowly you kill
    those who’ll deny or receive you with full will.

     

    THE SAVIOUR ADDRESSES A DANCER AT THE JUBILEE OF THE SECOND COMING
    (for Lenora Di Saverio)

    Lone among the dancers, you mourn– despite Death’s adieu —
    my Calvary anew, behind your sunglasses?
    Woman, none stands alone so beautifully as you,

    since, has the Kingdom not Come? You say your tears are dew?
    Why now cry amid the trumpets and the brasses?!
    Lone among the dancers, you mourn, despite Death’s adieu —

    Mourn the dead Inferno-hours of the Risen Son, too?
    O won’t you jive and join in chalice-clangs?
    Woman, none stands alone so beautifully as you.

    Why should you not waltz to a flawless few
    Of Cecile’s tunes? Whiff this lilied wind that passes?
    Lone among the dancers, you mourn, despite Death’s adieu.

    I feel no sorrow; must my whippings ensue?
    Should you not see family, upon my greenest grasses?
    Woman, none stands alone so beautifully as you.

    Behold the diamonding stars! Behold your halo-hue
    supremely match the moon! To Lea! Raise your glasses!
    Lone among the dancers, you mourn, despite Death’s adieu –
    Woman, none stands alone so beautifully as you.

    __________________

    A SONNET AFTER MY WINTER SURRENDER

    O Seraph who stands on sacred airs —
    goldening the firmament with halo-
    beams – illumining my soul with
    rosary-stars, which supernova
    after your Amens — you whisperingly singing
    over me, soaring my soul like a whitening kite
    triple-tied to an infinite string…
    O Seraph who lands on burn-out back-
    yards of this downcast world, when
    will this tempest end?! “Know: I only
    seem a Seraph! I am come,
    tonight, to witness your rebirth!
    Revere the spirit inside the whiteout;
    the snow foreshadows my Kingdom on Earth!”

    _______________________

    Featured Image: James Ensor – L‘entrée du Christ à Bruxelles

  • Ownership by Navlika Ramjee

    Ownership

    You come into your own
    While words give hue and cry
    In the stillness that you own

    When you are on your own
    With solitude to pacify
    You come into your own

    And the silence is your own
    Though melodies will reply
    To the stillness that you own

    With the calm that you have grown
    You feel that you can fly
    You come into your own

    In the life that you have known
    That strives to mystify
    In the stillness that you own

    And this realm is yours alone
    As you feel the coming sigh
    You come into your own
    In the stillness that you own

  • Poem: Note From The Organisers

    Note From The Organisers

    Feel free to turn up (or not)
    wearing a full suit of armour,
    or a hat with a big feather in it
    and transparent trousers;
    or to come dressed as a future
    Bishop of Cork and Ross,
    or as the prophet Isaiah’s
    discredited older brother.

    But this march is no wild ground
    on which entrist dandelions
    or buttercups will be allowed grow.
    The Committee permits
    no placards or literature
    of a factional variety.
    Most egregious those
    with crazy words on them,
    like “people before profit”.

    So as not to put off
    those not necessarily
    in favour of people
    (nor at all against profit)
    our gathering will resemble
    less a revolution
    than a church group
    on its way somewhere
    to pray for a cure
    for rheumatism,
    or even better,
    no cure;

    so we can stand here
    in increasing discomfort,
    become such fixtures
    even well behaved
    dogs from Dun Laoghaire
    start anointing
    our legs as public conveniences. 

  • Wonder Woman: The Baudelairean Ideal

    Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) reshaped the trajectory of modern literature. In acknowledgement T.S. Eliot famously called him ‘the Father of Modernism.’

    Many monolingual English speakers might be unaware that, along with Shakespeare and Dante, Baudelaire has been instrumental to how we in the West perceive the world.

    As an example, I think back to the early nineteen-nineties when I was living in Paris and the Austrian hosiery company Wolford were launching an advertising campaign using the photography of the celebrated fashion photographer Helmut Newton. I remember being on Place Concorde, not far from the Louvre, when his iconic black and white photographs of the giantesses were illuminated in the night sky, transforming the very street into a living interior of the exterior; just as Walter Benjamin had remarked about the arcades in his remarkable study of the nineteenth century French poet. This was pure Baudelaire in the late twentieth century.

    Of course, the Baudelairean woman is a whole motif or trope in herself, and is certainly one of the principal reasons why readers, male and female, still turn to Baudelaire, as he is one of the few poets who can write about women and love in a truly remarkable way, and which still makes sense to us today.

    Take the transversion of the poem ‘Sisina’ which I have transversed as ‘Wonder Woman’ in place of the name Théroigne, which according to my Flammarion notes is a reference to Théroigne de Mericourt (1762– 1817), who was involved in the French Revolution in 1792.

    The poem makes reference to a particular incident which happened on a staircase. This same woman appears in the famous French historian Michelet’s Histoire de la Révolution Francais, and she is also found in the poet Lamartine’s Histoire des Girondins. Apparently, Baudelaire was inspired by a drawing by the artist Raffet that depicts the incident and which was published by Pommier & Pichois.

    As this historical connection is likely to be lost on contemporary readers, I have supplanted it with the reference to the movie Wonder Woman. You have to choose your battles.

    I was particularly impressed by the character in the film while watching it with my ten-year-old daughter, as I thought she made a very good role model for young girls. My choice, I believe, is in accord with the symbolism and underlining metaphor in the poem.

    Baudelaire’s reference is to another actress Elisa Neri, who played the role of Théroigne, from what I understand, in theatrical productions during Baudelaire’s day. The poet came into contact with her through his attachment to Mme Sabatier, who was to have such an impact on him.

    I am of course referencing the climax of the Marvel movie when Wonder Woman, played by Gal Gadot, confronts Ares the God of War – thus mirroring the original reference made by Baudelaire to Théroingne de Mericourt played by the actress Elisa Neri.

    I expect Baudelaire would be entirely at home in today’s world where women have taken such a prominent place. After all, are the Gal Godot’s of today not the very same women of Baudelaire’s time? Women who showed incredible strength in the face of adversity.

    Surely, it is in the role of the Amazonian that the Baudelairean Woman is most idealised, which the poem Sisina is an example of, though it certainly stands alone.

    Spleen and Ideal is full of references to Amazonian and powerful women of which Lady Macbeth is one of the crowning figures, but first here is the poem ‘Sisina’ by Baudelaire followed by my transversion into English, which I have given the title ‘Wonder Woman’.

    LIX.- SISINA

    Imaginez Diane en galant equipage,
    Parcourant les forêts ou battant les halliers,
    Cheveux et gorge au vent, s’enivrant de tapage,
    Superbe et defiant les meilleurs cavaliers!

    Avez-vous vu Théroinge, amante du carnage,
    Excitant à l’assaut un people sans souliers,
    La joue et l’oeil en feu, jouant son personnage,
    Et montant, sabre au pong, les royaux escaliers?

    Telle la Sisina! Mais la douce guerrière
    A l’àme charitable autant que meurtrière;
    Son courage, affolé de poudre et de tambours,

    Devant les suppliants sait metre bas les armes,
    Et son Coeur, ravage par la flame, a toujours,
    Pour qui s’en montre digne, un reservoir des larmes.

    Wonder Woman

    Imagine Diana and her gallant retinue
    Charging through the forests bursting through the thickets,
    Mane and throat to the wind, drunk on uproar,
    Superbly defiant the best riders!

    Have you seen Wonder Woman, lover of carnage,
    Happily defending the down-trodden,
    Cheek and eye aflame, enfevered in her role,
    Assaulting, sword and shield in hand, the staircase?

    Just like Gal Jadot! But the gentle warrior
    Is as much a charitable soul as she is a seasoned killer;
    Her courage, panicking in the explosions and drums,

    Is to know when to put aside weapons before suppliants,
    And her heart, ravaged by both fire and pain, is always,
    For those who have some dignity, also a reservoir of tears.

  • My Approach to Literary Networking

    My Approach to Literary Networking
    after Francois Villon 

    Most days I’d rather be bundled
    into the courthouse between
    two hairy policemen,
    with a highly debatable anorak
    dragged over my face, and
    blamed for killing Kirov –
    the crowd lobbing big thick
    spits and battering the van
    as I’m carted off –

    or be stopped at the Canadian border
    travelling on a makey up Polish passport,
    the remnants of a Dutch industrialist
    and what I think was his second wife settled
    unhappily in my glove compartment;

    or attend my mother-in-law’s funeral
    having been fitted with a wooden nose
    because (everybody knows)
    the other one fell off due to
    third stage syphilis;

    than ghost about the joint provoking
    nods from gabardine coats
    of great import and longevity,
    grunts of approval
    from fully clothed minor male poets.

    Feature Image: Joseph Stalin and Sergei Zhadanov at the funeral of Sergei Kirov in December, 1934 (unknown author).

  • Kevin Higgins: The Happy Song of Us

    The Happy Song of Us 

    Okay to buy your grandchild an ice-cream.
    Illegal for them to lick it.
    Fine to bake granny
    a gleaming fruit cake,
    as long as you only email her
    a high resolution photo of it.
    Okay to give your son or daughter
    a bright new football.
    Illegal for them to kick it.
    Permissible to purchase for yourself
    a new set of golf sticks or a tennis racket.
    Illegal to hit anything with them
    outside the confines of your own
    downstairs bathroom.

    You can’t have a friend around for a meal
    unless both of you have been
    fitted with gum shields.
    And should you go for a socially distanced walk
    with a lover
    butt-plugs are now mandatory.

    Every living room is its own flat-pack factory
    singing the happy song of us,
    hammering together our coffins.

     

     

  • Poetry: Fisheye by Nicholas Battey

    Fisheye

    I, smudge in the eyescape of others,
    As my trowel lodges in mulch,
    Palm-sore, snuggle the quiet bulbs
    Into the trickling earth which inhumes us,
    While these, artfully coned, only swoon
    To consecrate a humble bloom.

    The sun paints everslant shadows all day
    In this great sphere of transition
    Centring nowhere, where I witness
    Clattering jackdaws, black hands at edges of vision;
    A pigeon diving to the ancient oak
    Descants over a cloudsong.

    I work head down and I do not care
    About the crunching crowds along
    The path, children puddle-jumping,
    All actions an acting in the long
    Blind sleep of self, beneath the bronze Scots pines,
    Aplomb, adamantine

    Sentinels, setiferous fists raised to the hollow blue,
    Heedless of a conscious cry.
    Hedges patrol, keep watch on me,
    Vain and stretched in fisheye,
    Where the early frost becomes a forest of drops
    On the blinkless, lashy grass.

  • Poetry: James Harpur

    Christmas Snow

    Never came that year, and yet
    It came in other ways, remembering the Light;
    As suds frothing in the Garavogue
    Around bridge arches, a scuttled trolley;

    It fell from lamps in Henry Street
    Illuminating tracer-lines of sleet
    And shoppers gripping rods of sleek umbrellas
    As if playing giant straining fish;

    It fell as stars above the Sugar Loaf
    Lit up as cats’ eyes by the gaze
    Of a farmer standing by a gate
    Above Wicklow and its mercury lanes.

    It flickered as a candle in a window
    In the round tower of Timahoe
    But only some could see the eye of flame
    Protecting sleepers in the graveyard.

    And when the sun emerged from night
    Snow came as seagulls spiralling up
    Like bonfire ash behind a tractor chugging
    Through slantwise fields near Baltimore.

    It came as shoals of clouds held still
    In the reflecting depths of Bantry Bay
    And as three harbour swans
    Turning their backs on the Atlantic;

    And as sheets and pillowcases hung on lines
    In Waterville and Elfin
    By women biting clothes pegs, dreaming
    Of visitors arriving from the east.

    And it was found as ironed table-cloths
    And icing knifed on marzipan
    In kitchens dimming into evening
    In Desert Serges and Kilbree.

    It gleamed as circles of the host
    For worshippers in churches lit at midnight
    Amid cities ablaze like fairgrounds
    Or villages as dark as silhouettes;

    And it appeared in moon-insinuated waves
    Unrolling across Long Strand
    Rearing up like angels made of spray,
    Roaring the word in tumbling syllables

    Then sucking in their breath to whisper
    It’s christmas, christmas, christmas …

     

     The Journey East
    (Winter 2010)

    The car revving up, the three of us
    wiping mist away to find a whiter world.

    Black-ice to Clonakilty –
    cortege of cars behind a spectral hearse.

    Strings of lights in Bandon, sapphire-cold,
    and the stars are moving through the river.

    On Cork’s Victorian viaduct, a train made of snow.
    We steam below the River Lee.

    Cork city crusts behind us;
    three swans on Slatty Water; feathery ice.

    The sun’s last x-ray radiates the trees.
    Lights turn red in Castlemartyr.

    Diesel-slush road. Across the Blackwater
    Waterford has drifted white.

    Inching mile by mile – through Iceland? Greenland?
    Wexford, another country.

    Dungarvan’s glittery square:
    each shop an advent calendar window.

    Beyond the Suir bridge the dark returns …
    but angels are alighting on New Ross.

    Rosslare night; chalet on a ghostly estate.
    Sound of wind in chimney.

    Dawn ferry, sudden vibrations –
    propellers churn the sea to snow.

    The swell-swing up and down and up –
    O let the voyage finish now, and grant us solid earth.

    From Pembroke Wales unfolds in white;
    a postbox in a wall, red as a berry.

    Below the Severn bridge –
    water turned to bone!

    The Somerset Levels, crisp and even;
    the motorway accelerates the dark.

    The night re-icing the Yeovil road –
    not now, not now we’re nearly there.

    Cattistock lumped with snow;
    wood incense, curtains edged with gold.

    A house on Duck Street:
    an outdoor light – a star that’s stopped overhead.

     

    Epiphany

    For twelve days the sky had been obscured.
    The guiding patterns of the constellations
    Lost behind a mesh of haze;
    Our trackprints filled with sifting sand
    Like a softly fading sequenced memory
    Or the healing drift of doubtfulness.
    Ascending to a ridge I saw the torchfires
    Of Ctesiphon burn like streaming hair
    And taken unawares was struck
    By a sudden longing for my country, my people,
    And such a pang for all things cherished
    For the sunlit gardens of my childhood.
    Releasing tears of deep relief – or grieving –
    I heard the other two spontaneously
    Humming a song of Zarathustra
    As we made our way on down the slope
    Away from the dying vista of the future
    Towards our past, closing in.

     

    Seraphim of Sarov
    (After a conversation between Nicholas Motovilov
    and Seraphim in November 1831)

    The day was born in twilight,
    grey above the forest glade,
    the earth deepening with snow
    as snow kept falling from the sky;
    the fields pure white below the hill
    beside the River Sarovka.
    I sat on a stump opposite him;
    all I could smell was fir trees.
    ‘The only thing in life,’ he said,
    is to make ourselves a home
    to welcome the holy spirit.
    Nothing more. All else will follow.
    Our souls use words for prayer,
    but when the spirit descends
    we must stay silent …’
    I glanced at him: imagine
    staring at the centre of the sun
    and there you see someone’s face,
    lips moving, eyes expressive,
    and you hear a voice speaking,
    feel your shoulders being held
    by hands you cannot see;
    in fact you do not even see yourself,
    just a dazzling light, diffusing
    and making the glade luminous
    and the snowflakes layering the snow.
    I felt such peace in my soul;
    no words could express it.
    And such warmth.
    No words can express it.

    Feature Image of Ben Bulben, Co. Sligo, Fellipe Lopes.

  • Poetry – Edward Clarke

    Assembly

    One morning during the first week of Advent,
    _                                   When I was possessed,
    After a birthday’s dark exhilarations,
    _          By a terrible kind of nervousness,
    We saw, on stage, the judgement of our son,
    Before his class, the Egyptian pantheon.

    I was chosen, he said, to be mummified today:
    _                                    My life was cut short
    While I was out in my papyrus boat,
    _            Hunting hippos (a dangerous sport).
    Then they took the brains out of this son of ours,
    And placed his viscera, like pasta, in cardboard jars.

    As in the womb of Advent, I’d put myself
    _                                   In that small space
    In which they shut him, cured and bandaged up,
    _            And pray to God I feel the grace
    Of Christmas, afloat inside its heavily
    Expectant bustle, remote as a vessel at sea.

    And what strange afterlife shall I find there,
    _                                   On stage, when they lead
    Me out, to weigh my heart against its feather?
    _           Wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid
    In this book’s manger, roughly I perceive
    Angels, livestock, and men, the gifts you’ll leave.

     

    Image: Lighting of O’Connell Street Christmas Tree, Garda Band (1988), Dublin City Library And Archive.