Cassandra Voices

Category: Poetry

  • Poem: ‘The Vagabond’

    The Vagabond
    J.M. Synge, 1871-1909

    To comprehend, regard the brutal wilderness to hand.
    More than most, the burrow-broken vagabonds
    recall the living tune. In remoter reaches
    of the Wicklow hills, they live where a sodden soul
    could barely pass, and look out all the year on unimpeded
    barriers of heath. In every season, heavy sleets of freezing water
    descend interminably, so the roof-thatch drips a colour
    peaty-blue, and the cottage-floors are sinking,
    boggy in the wet. The wide skies rock in hellish
    storminess: by dawn the ragged larches that endure
    are bent and twisted, bowing bleakly to the rim
    where sunlight somehow rises in the summer.
    Down the beggar-glens the churning wind, as well,
    comes whirling with a river-roar that time
    to time will lessen, of a sudden, giving way
    to hush – enough, that is, to sow a tension
    in the listening body, neck and limbs, of anyone
    who waits, crouching with an ear ajar
    for the mournful cries of country-dogs
    that prowl among the crags. The elder-folk
    who keep and carry on the memory, the quenchable
    tradition, of risen insurrection, raising fire in the guts,
    are dwindling today, a disappearing army, blown afar –
    though here and there, disguised among the lonely
    and the low, I’ve met them as I passed along,
    and gathered up their words. To see these Irish men
    and Irish women sunken, unrepenting, their leather-
    skin and ageing eyes ablaze again, condemned for good
    not to the viscerating gibbet, but to the slow obscurity
    of dying-out, forgotten but by dreamers and the fey –
    it’s been enough to wring me with the pang of isolation,
    an echo of that dumb, determining distemper, impossible
    to heal, of unredeemed deracination… a share, perhaps,
    of the desolation mixed in every region of the land
    with the waterfalling beauty of experience itself, the luminous
    cascade we all have known, elusive, controvertible, but actual
    and active to the penetrating mind. I raise my hungry fist
    in health – to the ferocity and wonder of the world.

    Image: © Daniele Idini

  • Poem: ‘And Not Your Garments’

    And Not Your Garments

    Lord, Lord this my heart full

    of secrets, seeds I know
    you did not send—Lord, I

    cannot rend.

    If I am choked, therefore,

    by weeds,

    I will not ask
    for a mended garden, I

    won’t beg your holy pardon
    at scythe’s end.

    These were difficult to bury,
    so little loam left in me. You,

    perfect,            alone
    apprehend.

     

    Feature Image: De intrige, (James Ensor, 1890); collection: Koninklijk Museum voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen

  • Poem: ‘All is Number’

    All is Number

    If the late afternoon light is beautiful
    but God’s not behind it
    then my mind is just classifying;

    if the late afternoon light is beautiful
    and God designed it,
    it’s a blessing and a deep unknowable well:

    light seems a word beyond metaphor —
    a wave and a particle
    neither wave nor particle,

    energy cast out of the sun,
    passed through a vacuum —
    so vast in its power

    the plump earth greens luminous
    and humans agree terms to barter for
    what’s there which lies shimmering
    and only calculable.

  • Poem: ‘Faerie Fire’ by Rye Jaffe

    Faerie Fire

    From forests, fields and fens, fair folk are found,
    where witchery winds with the wailing wind,
    dug deep down dreams drooled by departed drowned,
    as painfully professed by powers pinned.
    In iron, imps immersed incur ill eye,
    manacled to mortal machinations,
    while led by living lights, our lost lives lie
    sunk ‘neath stars of shoreless sublimation.
    Hence, happiness haunts high in harrowed hells
    as eldritch escorts eagerly enthrall,
    with conjured chains to clasp close cloistered cells
    run red by romance rebuffing recall.
    And nevermore need namesakes now be known,
    to those tied tight unto this twilight throne.


    Feature Image: The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania by Joseph Noel Paton (1849)

  • Poem: St. Patrick’s Day 2024

    St. Patrick’s Day 2024

    My dream takes me to the White House
    where Kelly green fountain streams
    spit red globules, ricochet on the pristine lawns.
    Dirty skies sit low, a brazen breeze propels
    smell of sizzling flesh to the oval office
    stage where emerald men show cause
    bear not the crystal bowl of shamrock, Mr President
    but a clay jar of sinews stewed in the tears of Gaza.

    I wake to the daymare of a festival episode
    stars of our sod line out to stroke your cloak, Mr President
    detonate the oval space with leprechaun lyric.
    Like a gaping silence of Connemara stone
    what remains unsaid
    scars my heart.


    Feature Image: President Joe Biden participates in a bilateral meeting with Taoiseach of Ireland Leo Varadkar, Friday, March 17, 2023, in the Oval Office of the White House. (Official White House Photo by Adam Schultz)

  • Poem: ‘Year of The’ by Haley Hodges

    Year of The

    Restless at the kitchen table, year of our Lord
    twenty twenty-four, year my words marched
    backward into my mouth and forward only
    when forgotten, year of the idiotic Stanley tumbler,
    year of the subtle but far reaching machinations of
    neo-Marxism depending on who you ask, year of
    our lady of fuck around and find out, year of pundits,
    year of Doja Cat, year of royal family tabloid drama, year of
    literal and figurative warfare, bloodlust year, year of desire
    year of frustrated desire, year of gradually excruciating
    guided identification of desires, year of my father
    unable to discuss that which is not the village
    council, year of the child, the laughing year of the wailing
    child, the domestic year, the exotic year, the year
    of everything turning to poetry, the year of poetry
    turning to nothing, the year of your turning to
    everything, the year of totality, the lost and found
    year, the year of the late bloom of the heart’s silent
    madness, year of attending to various screens, year
    of continual scrolling, the unchurched year, the year
    of tallying ecclesial Latin absorbed by the body, the
    pleni sunt coeli et terra gloria tua year, the irreverent
    year, the year of tabula rasa and later perceptions
    of time, the year of the timely year, the seasonal
    year, the calendar year, the yearly restlessness
    at the kitchen table year of annual infinity
    the year of the erotic diminuendo, the yearless
    pleasured year of self, the wanton year, the may be
    out after hours year, the year of slow staircase
    ascents, the year of our Lord not yet come
    again, the year lavished on a boy, the year wasted
    on a man, the unmanned barely manageable
    one-woman year of kitchen table restlessness,
    the year of being trapped in a word document
    the year of being trapped in a word


    Feature Image: Vlada Karipovich

  • Hymn XI: Marc Di Saverio

    HYMN XI

    Yeshua, O Yeshua, legions
    of demons are dying to drive
    the Holy Spirit from many of us
    living in this wilderness.
    The more we turn our lives
    to your desires, the more the legions
    try to snuff our fires.  We pray
    the Holy Trinity
    Bermuda Triangulates
    the Adversary’s  fiends,
    even for one day and night,
    since we need sleep,
    since we need sleep,
    we who strain ourselves so
    joyously for you — you whose
    glory is our driving force.

    AMEN

    Image: Marc Di Saverio

  • Poem: Take me to Éire

    Take me to Éire

    Please take me to Erin
    For I am twenty-seven;
    Reassurance I am in my prime
    Dwindle in the idle time.
    So take me to Erin when I am ready,
    When the everywhere that I have been
    Weighs like waves upon me.
    Let me meet her in the pause of night,
    When the dawn is burning
    And a murder takes its flight,
    And I, no longer yearning
    For the grassy seats of kings,
    Endless paths of peat and song,
    Rest my life upon the wind,
    And in an Otherworldly blaze, pass on.

    Feature Image: Lough Glenade, County Leitrim.

  • Poetry: Putriyana Asmarani

    The Leap

    Down, down the stairs to the five pillars of pronounced architecture,
    Five entrances into the forgotten yore, a bridge gutter, the rippling gore.
    4.     3. 8. 3. 0. days passed, wind hushed, sins unconfessed, ‘Tis bridge’s structure.
    There, there the Plaintive Cuckoo lamented immortal spirit marred and impaired;
    Walked forward, stepped towards a mortal she, it breached time, it whispered—
    –                                                                                 “Come sleep and take a leap.”

    Deep into the Night’s Plutonian mist, she fell asleep; the gutter’s mud gushed,
    The floor she laid was bare, moldy, musty, the midnight sound rebounded;
    Waterbrug te Boeloelawang bij 1904, the spirit preached and preached…preached.
    The mortal woke a shapeless wake, a form unforming, between two worlds—same place.
    Remember no nepenthe but an absolution after a penance, night fell, she rose.                            –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “Come take a leap.”

    Startled in a quietude passivity, her placid bust, barren soul, she spoke
    In aeolian gust, “Angel,” said she, the spirit sushed. “Thou art death inescapable,
    Walk I in the depth of night, whole-heartedly hopped myself on to thy’s canoe.”
    “Hush Dear One, death is mine, life is all yours,” the spirit said, “For the past is mine,
    The present is yours. For I’m a bread crumb, spared left to confess, now is the time—
    –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “Now take a leap.”

    The water washed crime scene in the gutter’s lane, but never the grief, the sins.
    The sugar cane and paddies trees, plantations, farms, industries— the Netherlands Indies;
    Told thee the mortal, that unsang yore from a bridge which pillars were made of bones,
    So the water could travel far reaching the belly of  De Rijke, Groskam & Co, the firms.
    “Time is a lonely silent maiden,” said the mortal she, “For sons she traded, sugar she gets.”
    –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “Leap more.”

    “In my bosom’s core, agony is catching. I speak no syllable but ones with sores;
    Three souls, five souls a week, few were pregnant, deep in impenetrable bushes
    Of sugar cane, the angels took infants with no names, and the mothers,
    The sons, the fathers mistook their presences in common farm labor struggles,
    They mistook death as regular pains. Chop…chop the sounds of their axes.”
    –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “They’ll leap.”

    “The current in the gutter grows higher, the seraphim, never they take souls;
    Just like an epidemic when summer ends, hundred souls a day, in Java—
    Hundred souls a day—or even more. “‘Tis the grace and glory in East Indies,”
    The Governor-General’s hymn echoed across the seven seas;
    Shall he know, some quite wandering souls refuse to rest in peace.”
    –                                                                                     Quoth she, “Glory won’t leap.”

    “Eternally, eternally, I have all the leisure to suffer,” murmured the spirit to she.
    “Deaths, like a flock of cranes pass by this very bridge, marching to the
    Dilated moon shine. I know some—I employed some—I killed many;
    He who dipped his forehead to the earth’s chest, begging, calling me Master, the
    Other he who traded his daughter to please the thirst of mine—thirst of mine. –                                                                                 Quoth the spirit, “That leap of mine.”

    “Tell me, what thy lowly name is on the yore, rippling gore, the gutter’s fame?”
    Asked she, “Though pale, singing dirges blue, breathing the breath of a grave’s fume,
    Though bearing the pains all mankind—victims bore, thou art a bearer of a lore,
    I sleep and leap—and leap more, down to your essence’s core, events’ shore.
    Swore Thee no angel but the one who stores—I am no dead man’s chore.-                                                                                 Quoth she, “I leap no more.”

    Grim and gaunt the spirit beguiled, it was—he was—master of her kind.
    “I made myself heard and loud,” answered the spirit, “The unseen is unheard;
    No more, the unseen have confessed. I am the Governor-General, the butcher,
    A master a brief once and a sinner for evermore, in eternal tempest tossed
    And clogged, under the five pillars of forgotten yore, a manslaughter;
    –                                                                                     Quoth the spirit, “That leap of mine.”

                                                                                                   

    *This poem is inspired by the construction of Waterbrug te Boeloelawang bij Malang, East Java, Indonesia, 1904.

  • Poetry: Peter O’Malley

    The Only Time Our Adult Hands Touched

    I was 29, he was 72
    We were building up a stone wall
    That a Hereford bullock knocked
    When trying to leap over

    Our hands went for the same stone
    Then both pulled back
    I was embarrassed
    That’s how he raised me

    He said after 7 hours
    ‘Ah we will leave the rest till tomorrow’
    I was shocked
    It was the first time in my life
    I heard him say such treasonous words

    In the car on the way home
    I realised that some day, within my lifetime
    He was going to die on me
    Leaving me unable to hold anything in my hands
    Except cold dead stones

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini