Cassandra Voices

Category: Poetry

  • Poem: Fragments of a Litany

    Fragments of a Litany
    Gaza, 2023-24
    Grieve with the butchered gods of love
    for Layan al-Baz, the young, the strong,
    her soft arms cut by shrapnel,
    her wounded leg a stump.

    May the world record unquietly
    the wordless eyes of Abdul,

    of Kenza, and Karam – who buried
    their mothers in a barren yard.

    And remember the nameless orphan, too:
    removed from the rubble of a screaming ward  –

    blood in the mouth, her vision blurred.
    Sow seeds, oh poem, for the baby, Salma,

    and her shock-haired sister, Alma, twin,
    mewling by the roadside when the brutal rains abate.

    Feature Image: Aftermath of an Israeli airstrike on the El-Remal area of Gaza City, October 9, 2023

  • Poem – ‘Psalm’

    Psalm

    The light and the wind on the water these wild winter days are breath of it
    The cardinal sun below cumulus flaring up skybeams a pulse
    Gathers the gloom but high in the east celestial moon unhides behind heart-racing clouds
    All in the arms of physics and this is heaven we are blessed to happen in

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    A Poem for Refaat Alareer

    In the poem your butchers
    fear to breathe, the murdered nurseries

    are clean, the brimming
    table-top restored – your every room

    aflush with idleness again,
    a bowl of flying spices

    near to hand, the oven-bread
    uplifted through the haze: a feast

    the windy air will sing
    from the open-hearted balcony

    to the salted promenade below,
    where a boy

    is counting ripples out to sea,
    and the market-men

    are bundling their wares,
    the coming dark

    a gentleness
    and rustling of wings:

    no raining heat
    or carnage to allay,

    the waterways unpoisoned
    by cruelty or death.

    You see – the dream
    your fingers fashioned like a sail

    is soaring in the breeze;
    your pen

    outlives the bullets
    of the eviscerator’s gun.

     

    The Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer (1979-2023) was killed along with his family in Gaza on December 6th. His final broadcasted poem, “If I must die” makes reference to his statement in an interview that if soldiers arrived on his doorstep he would fling his pen, his only weapon, in their faces. 

  • Poem: No Record of Wrongs

    No Record of Wrongs

    Love does keep a record of some things—
    your solitary walks in Coln Saint Aldwyn’s,
    a precise curl of Virginia Creeper tendrils,
    vermillion in autumn, the way you carefully
    smelled horses’ necks beneath the mane back home,
    velveteen crushes of cornhusks lashed to lampposts

    Love notes you’ve yet to find a Petoskey stone,
    have not managed to secure passage
    in a hot air balloon at dawn. Love traces
    those scars left by its own sweeping hand, marks
    your fevered night-sky relish, your strange enfolding
    of language in language and the red-winged blackbirds
    enfolding themselves in blue-green marsh

    Love keeps a record of you singing to yourself,
    tallies your tears. Love folded a page corner
    the day your shoulders sank like the horizon,
    from a grey-salt schooner, love knows how
    you should be touched.

    No seeker of wrongs will read
    love’s record, nor ask for it
    let love’s book be freely shown

    and may we ever seek
    to write


    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Bliain an Áir – ‘The year of slaughter’ 1740-41

    Bliain an Áir
    ‘The Year of Slaughter’, 1740-41

    Around the earth, a warring, wooden sea of brigs
    was bristling, a-flame; volcanic ash
    descending on the vacillating map. The weathered world
    began to shift – a tiny alteration
    sowing ice across the land. The shining-bellied geese
    no longer wintered by the lough. The turf-blue river
    waters died. An iron frost persisted, all the spring,
    without a rain, the blooming yearly crop undone –
    in every rill and valley, sick. The factious common people
    roared in protestation; then dwindled down, masticating
    slowly, like a herd, on sour, curdled soup and sallow greens:
    a meal of nettle stems and charlock – the lush,
    green-leafed, light-golden-flowered thing that grows
    among the grass. The lark-lit summer moors
    were blank; the meadow-birds aghast. No longer
    having feed to give, the grieving poor death-rattled
    in the fields, as the little cows they tended fell.
    Like rotten sheep themselves, after supping
    dead potatoes in distress, whole parishes surrendered,
    passing out, in fever-thin delirium, to waste
    and bloody flux: a plague of desperation, day by day.
    Town and city quickly filled with remnants of the living.
    The census-takers floundered; swelling ditches overflowed.
    To put an end to expiration, the famous bishop
    brewed a broth: a medicine made up of milk
    and boiling water, with a sprinkling of chalk –
    to be dispensed among the stricken, till the ague settled down.
    Feature Image: gravestone in Coolaghmore, county Kilkenny of the Lee family, of whom three members died in 1741–42.

  • Waking Up

    Waking Up

    He had thousands of kodachromes
    when he died. Nowadays they’d be snaps
    stored on the cloud, given back
    tritely as memories by some iphone.
    Anyway, they went in the bin,
    regardless of what they meant to him.

    I have chameleon words, collections of notes,
    playing the same role: tie it down —
    capture it. What? You, me, the sound
    it makes to live; not bringing old stuff close
    again (that was bad enough back then),
    but the dazzle of being able to comprehend.

    Of course, insects don’t waste being alive
    worrying about themselves;
    they continue to batter themselves
    against windows, the life of the hive
    before their own; or fanatically nest
    under stones, enslaving aphids and the rest.

    And rabbits are the same, chewing and getting rattled.
    All have better things to countenance
    than their own permanance.
    It’s baffling that we are so saddled,
    knocked over by the whole picture.
    What it says in the Scripture

    at the start — about Adam and Eve:
    it’s not really about sex and so on;
    it’s about seeing yourself, alone.
    Waking up. To what you may believe.

  • How I Remember Her

    How I Remember Her

    I glared that first night as she vaunted perks
    And spoke in winding roads; uncouth she pried
    About my grade and cut. Around her stride,
    I feel as though I’m drunk. I miss her quirks.
    The nights we stargaze drag on. I should work.
    I see her down the bar, then on my floor.
    Embracing tears outside her dawn-lit door,
    I waste my time deciphering her smirk.

    She trembles when I pet her hair,
    She conceals what I have learned to love.
    With every fight I lose her brazen flair,
    Reveal a girl who claims life’s unfair.
    But she’s a worrying one, a single dove,
    A dress-up doll that yearns to care.

    Featured Image: Louis Jamnot (1814-1892), Le Vol de l’âme

  • Poem: A Partial Epitaph

    A Partial Epitaph

    My friend, with many an article and book
    saved in the Cloud, would censure Robert Emmet
    for attitudinising in the dock.

    We’re most of us the beneficiaries
    of ordered states; opinion-formers wanting
    Emmet stopped is something that one sees. 

    But this rant? Picture him in middle age,
    pardoned, respectable, like Thomas Moore
    a frequent guest at the Vice-Regal Lodge.

    Which to begin with doesn’t get Tom Moore,
    friend of the stranger, dining with Zacchaeus,
    his harp a bow strung for the indigenous poor.

    I leave them to it – their vast carelessness,
    their Twitter feeds correct and comfortable
    above the whole world’s pitiable distress.

    Those by whom Robert Emmet was condemned
    no doubt imagined some long-term improvement
    in how the poor lived. Difficult for them,

    his edge, his relevancy; or to foretell,
    in cabins and coffin-ships we’d breathe his name;
    our grá for justice his memorial.

    Feature Image: Depiction of Robert Emmet’s trial (Image is available from the United States Library of Congress‘s Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID pga.02521)

  • Poetry: Haley Hodges

    Belshazzar

    I never knew myself to have a Persian beard, now,
    This is odd, this will need some explanation
    So too the crown and concubines and all these
    Half-drunk vessels from the house of God
    Isn’t it 2023 or 2022—was I not, just now,
    Pulling up in a Subaru or whatever it is I
    Get myself around in? In fact I’m quite certain
    My father was born in 1959 and hardly Nebuchadnezzar,
    Though it is his second term as village president
    (He ran unopposed this time) for the Most High God
    Set him over it. TEKEL

    Says the writing on the wall of my lordly mind, haunting,
    TEKEL—you have been weighed in the balance
    And found wanting

    God I am always wanting
    Wanting wanting wanting I am
    Always wanting in or out of the balance,
    And there is no wisdom in these Chaldeans
    I have summoned to advise me, these useless
    Fuckwitted Chaldeans with parlor tricks who break
    My words with sticks and hurt me thus. How many more,
    (I wonder!!) how many more misdeeds before my kingdom
    Is divided, and given to the Medes?

    Feature Image: Rembrandt‘s depiction of the biblical account of Belshazzar seeing “the writing on the wall“

  • Nicholas Battey: April Light

    April Light

    I’ve let the world of people go
    in favour of growing
    spring evenings,
    what all the buds know,
    the jonquils and the willow,
    the prattling birds,
    water chasing water to river,
    fold of showers.
    What sage said April is the cruellest month,
    the year’s promise
    in its tall shadows?
    Let the world of people go.