Cassandra Voices

Category: Poetry

  • Poetry – Haley Hodges

    Make of me, too, a microcosm

    Make of me, too, a microcosm—
    Merger, marry, manifest
    As the bridegroom, as the stone-melted
    Heart. Move but do not remove me, for monsters
    Maraud in madness here, and we meet
    Mettle to mettle about the place. But you—
    Magnificent as mystery, as morning, you
    Are mooring the ship of me, mastering the maze
    Of my malaise to run like marrow through bronze
    Bones, an unmappable river overlapping the
    Mayhem. You mumble or hum of Spring-things,
    May-things made for me, mighty and bright
    As midnight meteor, final as eucatastrophe
    Mounting in stillness. You dip Ursa Major
    Into the pail with a wink milky as motherhood:
    Come meadow, come minnow, come maple
    And mink, come drink, (you say) come marvel!
    Our blue marble maiden—mess though she may be—
    Her majesty is mineral-deep! Minstrels sing it and mages
    Know it. Myriad music still marks her mind, her memory,
    Music of mending and meaning, naming and being—
    Music of mackerel meandering, matter and mass,
    Metaphysical music marching from moment to minute
    To minute and back in a palindrome line, meticulous
    And light as a match, hatchling fresh. You say much more,
    All unmeasurable, and to the unending moment of you I say:
    Make of me, too, a magic.

  • SIDE EFFECT

    SIDE EFFECT

    So few cars on our Manhattan street
    Pigeons leaving nests that swirl between
    Highrise ledges, fearless land to eat
    Any mid-street grain or scrap they glean.

    Told to stay at home most acquiesce.
    Now we learn how unbeknownst we spare
    Our New York as we’re emitting less
    Long-lived greenhouse gases in the air.

    Same in Paris, London, Madrid, Rome.
    If our frenzied whirl restarts, when pressed
    To create more jobs and we leave home,
    Will we foul then worse our global nest?

    Covid fear amends our habitat –
    Nature’s own backhanded caveat.

    Micheal O’Siadhail’s The Five Quintets was published in 2018, he now lives in New York.

    Image: Constantino Idini

  • The Musical Duel of Apollo and Pan

    Pan’s Song

    Your rule has lapsed Apollo, all narrative is dead,
    You said true form is timeless, but they chose me instead,
    My pipe has no rhythm, but is easy on the ear,
    A great tumult rise in ecstasy, precisely as you feared,
    It’s true you had your time,
    But as samples, your’s is mine,
    The young are running in the wood,
    Arm and arm, as they should,
    That measure gave no pleasure,
    And with rhyme we divine,
    The inkwell has run dry,
    Dance along with your lyre.

    Lyre lyre lyre lyre lyre lyre lyre

    Why endeavour to fix what is beyond repair?
    The dancer knows it, but does not despair.
    Such concepts as justice permit, the mighty to inflict,
    Pain and suffering, so desist, with your rule of the fist!

    Virtue hardly nurtures,
    Such beauty as you speak.
    We must dance Now,
    Not ask ourselves How.
    Nature is our calling,
    All cities are appalling;
    Let us grow our hair,
    To show we don’t care,
    For our time on earth is short,
    Let us shed blood as we ought,
    Laugh, love and lustre,
    Not your cerebral bluster,
    Intuition is my mission, and tradition,
    I have no time for your addition;
    I trust in the Earth,
    And embrace the dirt.

    Apollo’s Song

    I now appeal to all who wish to learn,
    The crafts which make of life a pleasurable span,
    Or seek refuge from the beasts of prey,
    In glistening cities of men who sing my name,
    And communicate in tongues glorious refrain,
    As without laws to curb the passion’s rule,
    Their lives are spent in dreadful misery;
    Instead I pray they last the course and take,
    Such lessons only I may give as these.

    Oh Pan you fool your passions rule your wits;
    The muck of earth becomes a curse to those,
    Who call civilisation their home.
    To Pythagoras I brought my gift the lyre,
    And from my precious instrument there came,
    A lesson mathematical giving,
    To all who wished to build, precious insight;
    Even the stars above obeyed my rule.

    And yet I shed these tears as well you see,
    For man is not a worthy pupil still,
    He lies and cheats and shapes belief to suit,
    Vainglorious aims, intrigues and stratagems;
    His wiles would make a god despair;
    A time of expertise is passed indeed,
    And shallow intellects run wild and mock,
    The light of knowledge that I handed down.

    And Pan you should recall the contest when,
    Old Timulus adjudged my song above,
    Your playful lute. Alone was Midas struck,
    He swooned with crass desire and came unstuck,
    And grew a pair of ass’s ears to show,
    To those who may assume your song superior,
    A fate unkind for foolish thoughts as these;
    To all I urge be careful what you wish.

    Feature Image: Jacob Jordaens: Apollo as Victor over Pan (1637).

  • Poetry: Alex Winter

    AREOPAGITE

    The cloud moves, low, across the landscape,
    leaving a slick of rainwater on the backs of cows.
    It passes through the mind of a priest
    and into the eyes of a fourteen year old girl.
    It is a pestilence.  A curse upon the territory.

    In the villages they are rasping for bread.
    No chickens hobble through the shit-strewn lanes.
    Damp is a curse which slowly infiltrates
    clothes, rafters, firewood, children’s skin.
    The crops are sunk. The sheep are full of worms.

    You dole out sermons on disintegration.
    An aged woman is driven from her home
    and burnt to cinders on a makeshift pyre.
    The chancel windows cast brightness inward,
    towards the stunted candles of the choir.

     

    THE RAM IN THE THICKET

    It was a boutique hotel in the Dolomiti
    and each door could be locked from inside by a golden key
    and each key was hung with a sculpted animal.
    Hummingbird, hedgehog, fox or snake.
    The hotel offered a view across the lake.

    My room was cramped.  Pushed up against the table
    was a bookcase which was nearly waist high.
    In it stood a copy of Fear and Trembling.
    The pale lettering along the spine reminded me
    of the ubiquity of schizoid features.

    I took it with me to the loo.
    Outside the rain was spitting.
    The lake surface was thatched with miniature waves.

    As I read about Isaac being tied down by his dad,
    I heard an angel bellowing from heaven,
    “Abraham, ease off, untie the boy.”

    There was a denouement, there on the mountain.
    The angel came down. The angel flew.
    A sharpness in my intestines.

     

    PLAN FOR THE FUTURE

    I’ve worked it out and we’re going to be just fine.
    Your job will pay for mango and mine for baby wipes.
    My heart throbs dyspeptically when I think of our son.
    Where is he now? Does he wear leather and carry a scar?
    I’m less than a man.  I don’t even know how to drive.
    On the other hand I’ve worked out how to arrive on time.
    I was sobbing all morning as my heart went out –
    unlike the flames on Grenfell, which raged until lunch.
    Inside the staircases, lift shafts, flats, nothing withstood.
    Tears became gas.  Screams caught fire and burned.
    Everything that wasn’t blame became ersatz.
    It’s hard to stay focused.  Our dreams are so grotty.
    And the housekeeper creaks on the upstairs floor.
    I picture her stroking her long Hispanic body,
    which opens, closes, then empties itself completely.

     

    SICKERT

    My arm across your body.
    These fingers ending in a brush.

    How the light falls on my shirtsleeve,
    causing the outline to crackle.

    In the background a green overcoat
    hangs from a glass

    partly obscuring your neck and shoulder.
    It’s mine.  I’m clothing you.

    You turn steadily toward me,
    like a satellite dish

    hacked into
    by enemy agents.

    What, I wonder, do you withhold?
    And how do I prise you open?

     

    HIATUS

    Death coiled in one lung.
    (Don’t cough!)
    Like a tilted ampersand
    in a bed of alveoli.
    Breathe gently.

    A skull beside an inkwell.
    Not quite an ‘objet’,
    but artfully positioned.
    We look back.
    Tick… tick…

    Primo goes to it.
    Mounts the handrail.
    96.5cm.  For a short man,
    navel height.
    To fall he has to climb.

  • Poetry – Fintan O’Higgins

    Natural History Museum, Dublin 

    Necrophorus investigator bears
    The dead and follows in their footsteps. Moths,
    Beetles – anaspis maculata: stained,
    Unshielded – big names, small lives; thoughts
    Made real, embodied in machines. The spare
    Crater of earth, when all earth’s blood has drained,
    Will hold its arc and torque, all else being lost.

    The hinges in fleas’ legs, then, or the fascia
    Of armoured woodlice, or the spastic spring
    That spins itself in helical countertwists
    Of muscle in shark or frog: the coil of nature,
    Barely substantial, sustains and persists
    In solid flesh, in every blooming thing;
    In neural galaxies, in our behaviour,

    In helter-skelter shells, and seeds and petals;
    In honeycombs, in choufleur romanescu,
    In hips and waists and golden ratios,
    In ratios contrived of other metals;
    In pentads, heptads, hexagonal sections;
    In blurts of pulsing, liquid shapes or gaseous,
    In every shape in every fruit in Tesco.

    The Victorian whorl of iron, wrought or cast
    Tendrils, poised above a chessboard plot
    Staked out in dominion’s rectilinear pitches
    Like America in barbed wire; or the glass
    Holding still and fast those deep-sea creatures
    Part  water and part number, and those insects
    Obedient in angles, lines, and dots,
    Curlicue in generation’s syntax.

    If necessary shapes, not beautiful
    (Beauty being willed, exalting submission),
    Atomic and autistic, are fragmented
    Blasted, involved, in fraction not in fission;
    Then names are feathery fascinators, spells
    Whose quivering thrum resounds upon the lips
    Cross-hatches nooks in pathways where demented
    Buzzings may refer to but do not tell
    The true ring of the neurocalypse:

    The veil of nerve, the net with which the moon
    Drags heaving tides in black full swag of night,
    The filter distilling thought from spinal twitch
    The measured tension climbing to attune
    Itself to the Fall, constructing absence which
    Strobes from stencil to template, stasis and flight
    Taut as a tent, and black and high as pitch:

    The stillness in the flutter of fern fronds,
    The still of distant waters’ frothing crust,
    The clench and follow of a striking lance
    (Not real ones, though; these days there’s no such thing)
    The uninflected bow, the arc, the string
    Invisible but present in stone or bronze
    The heel of Philoctetes poised in dust
    The tension in the stone of David’s sling.

    That heroes are absences, in corridors
    Leading to chambers where no gods are housed,
    Makes words of footfalls echoing on the floors
    Creaking on wood or clacking on stone tiles
    Pronouncing sentences and syllables
    Along a winding torchlit pagan course
    Where leisurely visitors curiously browse
    And wryly nod with educated smiles;

    And turn and ask if there’s a coffee place,
    Declining middleclass children working class sugar
    And glance but do not meet the dusty eye
    Of long dead bird, or butterfly, or cougar.
    But with the trail of syllables and scents
    Drop iterations of the shapes that figure,
    As whirligigs and maelstroms live and die,
    A small eternity of absolute stasis

  • Poems for Holy Week

    Poetry editor Edward Clarke selects poems from Paul Curran, Billy O Hanluain, Haley Hodges Schmid, Ned Denny and his own work to mark Holy Week.

     

    A corona Sonnet

    With no less haste than the crisis deserves,

    All faces one mask of consternation,

    We’ve learnt, through conversing in spikes and curves,

    This virus respects no race or nation.

    Virgil could not have foreseen the Tiber

    Would fill so fast with the fallen of Rome,

    Hospitals built with sinew and fibre,

    Children in hiding, on their own, at home.

    His toll’s still rising, but Death, if he could,

    Would make no attempt to keep numbers down;

    Warm April predicates wearing no hood,

    His scythe keenly sharpened shines like his crown.

    Unfasten quick this dead pathogen’s trick

    Lest lists of the late outnumber the quick. 

    April 4th, 2020

    Paul Curran was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1975. He holds a degree in English Language and Literature from the University of Oxford and a Masters Degree from the Royal Central School of Speech & Drama. He has worked widely as a professional actor. His Only Sonnet loosely follows the pattern of the seasons, comprised of 100+ ‘alternative’ sonnets; Repeat Fees and its 80 sonnets and longer poems was published in July 2017.

     

    Stock Pile On Hope

    Walk down the bare,
    trembling aisles of your
    self. Everything dispensible
    is now after its Best Before.
    Pass by the Two for One indulgences
    of fear and doubt. Shelves stripped
    of the superfluous. The tattered packaging
    of novelties that amused us
    fade behind their
    spent Use By dates. Remembered now
    as infatuations bought to distract us.
    Is it time to close shop?
    Turn out the lights?
    Time for the din and dirge of shutters?
    We are open twenty four hours
    and we must never close.
    No matter the Feast Day.
    The Plague or The Hour.
    Turn toward that aisle within,
    so often passed in the hurry
    of what seemed to matter
    there you will find the plenty that
    always was and will be.
    Load your cart, fill your bags,
    weigh your trolley down.
    Stock pile on hope!

    Billy O Hanluain works as a language teacher in Dublin. His work has appeared in The Village and The Passage Between. He frequently reads at open mic nights across the city and has contributed to RTE’S Arts Tonight and Arena. He is a DJ with a special passion for Jazz. He lives in Kimmage, Dublin.

    The Ape in the Meme

    Like those who crouch in a bird-catcher’s hide,
    _             He has put up and part-designed
    A shiny means of destruction online,
    Whose checkout page is set and open wide
    _             As all blind graves must look for business.
    And so he means to capture browsers and listeners
    _                            Like birds in a wicker cage:
    That ape who ate his stockpile in the meme,
    _                                           Or famous adage,
    Who licks his unclean lips and can’t be seen.

    He has become fat and sleek, yeah, he’s smoothed
    _             Out all anxieties we had
    About his bad business: he prospers at
    The expense of all of us who are sweet-toothed.
    _             A devastating and wondrous thing
    Is committed in our land and we all sing
    _                            Blindly its praises. No prophet
    Even prophesises and almost every poet,
    _                                           To no one’s profit,
    Tells tales of a life, but not as you’d know it.

    What will be the end of it? Just now,
    _             At the limits of the eye, just off
    The shore of the ear, that ancient boundary of
    The world, the world can’t pass, no matter how
    _             Hard it smashes its waves into it,
    Or coaxes endlessly: just there, I intuit
    _                            You are rowed out with your answer,
    And stand before the multitude on a sea
    _                                           Of radiant stanzas
    For those with eyes to hear and ears to see.

     

    Edward Clarke’s latest collection of poems, A Book of Psalms, has just been published by Paraclete Press. He is poetry editor of Cassandra Voices.

     

    ‘See now the bewildered Christ’

    See now the bewildered Christ
    In the empty streets of Jerusalem;
    The surefooted clip clop of donkey and colt
    Accentuated by this brimming vacancy,
    By this our iron-held breath.
    We are inside reading the news;
    We are stacked in buildings, racked
    With urban exodus and suddenly beset
    By the fragrance of country miles.
    Need bares her teeth at need—
    No hosanna can emerge, no palm
    Softens the anxious cobblestones.
    Christ passes unhailed through our midst
    With eyes downcast for love.

     

    Haley Hodges Schmid came from her native America to England in 2017 to pursue introductory theological study at the University of Oxford’s Wycliffe Hall. A musician by training, she is drawn to the intersection of theology and the arts and eager to explore themes like redemption, joy, and sacredness in her writing

     

    Iron Age

    When jail shines like a blue marble in space
    and masks of fear eat into the face
    and new strains of deceit are going around
    and the dead demand to be more tightly bound
    and they scramble nine jets at the sight of a dove
    and drive in the nails yet call it love
    and cameras watch live Eden’s knoll
    and separation is the protocol
    and the long war wears the look of peace
    and Medusa stares from a million TVs
    and the cure is seeded with wasp-eyed death
    and all I can trust is my own wise breath
    and misinformation’s the name for the Word
    and they tell the biggest lies this chained world’s heard
    and commit the greatest fraud hell’s ever seen
    and say the withered tree is green

    when a dragon is about to be crowned
    and streets are empty save for the drowned
    and the wolf has the lamb’s best interest at heart
    and to stay alive you stay apart
    and an hourly dose of dread sets the tone
    and the sun itself’s been turned to stone
    and the hungry ghost of the moon descends
    and the axle of the heavens bends
    and the stars disappear through chinks in a rock
    and the hands go haywire on every clock
    and a black horse rides upon manback
    and you still think you’re not under attack
    and they turn the key to “keep us safe” from the Lord
    and at certain times we all applaud
    and death is getting desperate and iron old

    a bird will sing dawn wield your gold

     

    Ned Denny’s collection Unearthly Toys was awarded the 2019 Seamus Heaney Prize. B (After Dante), a version of the Divine Comedy, will be published by Carcanet this autumn.

  • Poetry – Radu Vancu

    Master of children’s small fingers
    & of the indestructible hair of girls
    & of the transparent shields of the gendarmes –

    today I saw videos of children with broken heads
    & fingers broken, I saw girls dragged by their shiny
    & indestructible hair by gendarmes with shields transparent

    as your indestructible light, I saw
    indestructible teeth broken, indestructible bodies
    shattered, I saw the blood made by you

    splattering in the world made by you
    & there was still so much beauty in it
    & it is exactly this that mashes me.

    Any amount of beauty mashes me.
    An indestructible beauty in a world blown into pieces –
    your cynicism is divine, indeed.

    I saw a dog licking the bleeding face
    of his mistress, collapsed under the boots of the gendarmes,
    careless to their blows which also crushed his ribs.

    He wagged so happily his tail
    when she raised her grazed hand & patted him,
    there was so much indestructible light around him,

    for him the evil only passed accidentally through the world.
    A cop with a high visor, a blond & pure child,
    came running & hit her again.

    Master, I sometimes tell myself you only passed accidentally
    through the history of the world you made, just as we pass
    only accidentally through the poems we write.

    And that it is of your indestructible & luminous beauty
    that the hardest transparent shields are made.
    And that the happiest of us are wagging our tails,

    licking the bleeding faces of our loved ones. Mashed
    under the boots of the seraphim rapid intervention units.
    Terrorized by the anti-terrorist units of the angels.

    Who to endure so much beauty
    – and until when
    – and why.

    You unbelievably gentle master, if I wouldn’t feel sometimes
    your harsh tongue licking my bleeding brain,
    if I wouldn’t see your furry tail sometimes

    wagging happily – everything would be easier
    & more unbearable. Don’t worry, we’re talking here
    between indestructibles.

    Listen to this poem in the original Romanian below.

  • Prescription: Isolation

    Prescription: Isolation

    No man is an island?
    Go to your room.

    Sweat for three days
    through your clothes, and gaze
    at the sky idling
    through its wardrobe.

    Wait, while species-wide delirium
    registers tremors in the earth’s heart.

    Dream, with Ravel, of the radio’s
    skirling fantasies, one ear awake
    to the bells tolling over Italy.

    Angels stand guard outside your door,
    and in the afternoon bring tea, hot,
    and cuts of melon, cold
    and sweet as spring.

    Tomorrow, you will get dressed,
    push yellow periwinkles and green sea-glass
    across the world of your desk,
    and be glad. Call home.

    So stilled, our hurtling souls
    forget themselves, and remember.

    Image from Quarantine by Patricio Cassinoni.

    www.instagram.com/patriciocassinoni

    https://www.patriciocassinoni.com/

  • Coronavirus – a Poem

    My life’s ambition is to write a poem
    For you to quiver in ecstasy,
    Transcending the storms that have become
    For us a weakly reminder
    That all is not as it should be
    For a generation to come
    All out of shape without
    Any need for eugenics,
    Or medical scapegoats,
    As my face takes on a comical twist,
    And the log fires send out particles,
    And governments negotiate continued support measures,
    While the weathermen occlude
    The longer stretch in the evenings,
    But I won’t cough,
    Lest it gives away the position,
    And we enter the sublime
    Reverence for irrelevance.
    It’s word play OK?
    Designed in their own way.
    I can’t wait for the pattern,
    Or the pull of Saturn.
    Enough, enough, enough,
    Your voice is increasingly rough,
    Hand us over a last puff.

  • Poetry – Kathleen Scott Goldingay

    The Lamps of the Virgins
    from Bearers of the Broken Vessel

    At dawn, weaving through hills,
    go Daughters of Jerusalem in white,
    faces illumed by the flames
    of their lamps.
    They sing a song about lovers,
    become a string of dancing lights.

    At dawn, before babes awakened
    and bawled to take suckle,
    their mothers lit fires
    and filled the girl’s lamps.
    “Where are you going?”
    asks a sister too young for a lamp.
    “To remember, to remember,
    the daughter of Jep-thah.”

    “Why are you crying?”
    “The daughter of Jep-thah
    ran dancing,
    shaking her tambourine.
    She was the first
    to greet her father,
    returning victorious in battle.”

    “But why are you weeping?”
    “We go to the hills like she did,
    with our friends.
    We go for one who is soon
    to kiss her father goodbye
    and leave to be married.”

    Jep-thah, whose mother
    was without blessing,
    had not trusted Yahweh
    to hand to him his victory.
    He had sworn an oath:
    in return for winning my battle,
    I will give Yahweh a gift-
    the first soul
    who runs out from my house-
    as a burnt offering, whole.

    The daughter of Jep-thah
    ran dancing,
    shaking her tambourine.
    She was the first
    to greet her father,
    returning victorious in battle.

    Jep-thah tore his cloak
    and fell to the ground.
    “I love you, my daughter.”
    She knelt,
    put a kiss on his forehead,
    “I love you, my Abba.”

    On hearing what Yahweh
    was promised,
    Jep-thah’s daughter did not flee.
    She avowed,
    “Here I am, Yahweh, I’m yours!”

    But first, with her friends,
    she climbed up in the hills
    to grieve,
    singing, “My love will not perish
    in flames.”
    She would never know the tug
    from the cry of a babe.

    At dawn, a soldier’s widow weeps,
    looks out her latticed window.
    She sees the flickering lamps
    dance on the hill and remembers.
    She puts a kiss on her babe’s
    waking warm cheekand sings to her daughter
    of Yahweh.

    Feature Image: William Blake, Wise And Foolish Virgins, 1826, Metropolitan Museum, New York.