Cassandra Voices

Tag: poem:

  • Poem: Chimera Times

    Chimera Times

    You’ve lived beyond your relevance—
    Another song, another age,
    Another line while in a trance,
    Routine by prompt, an empty stage.
    The art lives past the life, and all
    They want is what you did when young,
    The bright first thing, the curtain call,
    When fireworks flew and bells were rung.
    Yet still the audience appears.
    The props are now collectible,
    But all creation’s in arrears,
    And art is imperfectible.
    A shiver slices to your core.
    Your fans will get the eulogy
    Before you end the trilogy
    You started many years before:
    A snowball with a granite shard,
    The encore to an emptied hall,
    The dance all done, the classics played.
    Back then it was not so hard
    To be the major act, enthrall
    Your fans, at least the ones who stayed.
    A fad will rise, a bubble pop
    With the slightest touch. The greatest hits
    Came out before you called it quits,
    And “timeless love” was set to stop.
    You won the day but lost the war,
    Remembered as the one who did
    That thing, you know, the thing he did,
    The thing he does for one more tour,
    The thing he did, the thing he did before.


    Feature Image: The Chimera, by Louis Jean Desprez, 1777-1784. Source: The Metropolitan Museum of Art

  • Poem: ‘The con cometh’

    The con cometh

    The demon smirks, having laid out her wares.
    Will they see what she’s doing?
    Will they realise how they’re being taken in?
    Not all will grasp how an influencer works.
    She hopes they won’t. Her power over them
    depends on her ability to cajole and deceive.
    She insinuates herself into their thoughts,
    whispering temptations, telling them that the world
    is theirs for the taking. Only a click away.
    It’s not all about apples. Other goods are available.


    Feature Image: Max Beckmann – Family Picture (1920)

  • Poem: Ion

    Ion

    Light itself is a chapel
    an east-west wash
    spilt on the Christmas rose.

    Space itself is a chapel
    a fruitless bowl
    flowers dried in a jug.

    Life itself is a chapel
    at water’s edge
    murmur of patient prayer.

    Feature Image: Saint Enodoc Church, Trebetherick, Cornwall, U.K.

  • Poem: Gillnets

    Gillnets

    I remember as a child picking them out
    from the bow, and peering down at currents
    moving freely through their masks – the net draped
    from an orderly row of cork floaters, near shore.

    There a canopy of beeches could dapple light
    onto the water’s surface, or space between two pine boughs
    slant a shaft that widened undertow
    to an aquascope’s beam stretching my fathom,

    to where I could spot a sea trout’s glint
    in the haze of algae-motes flickering,
    or the larger shadow of a salmon gliding
    over rocks in olive sea-moss at the bottom.

    But I never witnessed the billowing out
    and tangling; the settlement upon giving in –
    I came always to the hush of fires smouldering.


    Oil painting of gillnetting, The salmon fisher, by Eilif Peterssen

  • Poem: ‘Fothering the Sheep’

    Fothering the sheep

    Only minus seven this morning
    but the gate latches are frozen solid.
    ‘We’ll need a kettleful to unfreeze them.’
    There’s more snow forecast and a gale warning.

    ‘We need to get hay up to the sheep
    before it blows in.’ The cart’s struggling.
    The sheep are gathered, waiting. ‘They’re patient,
    I’ll give them that.’ The snow’s firm, packed deep.

    ‘Nay, don’t all push at once! You’ll get your share.’
    Sheep surge forward, eyes fixed on the hay.
    The lads flick it up. It falls in bundles on the snow.
    Strewing the hay shows the sheep they care.

    Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poem: There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris

    There is a Panther on the Streets of Paris

    slinging hammocks of intent between each step,
    hunting unbroken hearts beyond the senses.

    No one knows.
    Rumours breeze like leaves along Boulevard Saint Germain.

    Another takes a table at Le Café Des Arts
    indistinct in clouds of Vogue Bleu.

    No one.  Not even the off-duty gendarme
    whose breath caught in the branches of his lungs

    when he glimpsed its paws’ dry prints
    on Rue De Verneuil after rain.

    A physician at Hôtel-Dieu
    treated a man who claimed the creature styled

    his hair with an upward rough-tongued lick;
    a couple on Pont De Carrousel who swore

    they were undone declaiming love,
    as if their hearts were removed to make one.

    An ophthalmologist looked behind fiery eyes
    the day Notre-Dame succumbed

    to its blood against the sky,
    and the dense fur of melanistic night.

    Feature Image: Denishan Joseph

  • Poem: Luke 2:1-7

    Luke 2:1-7

    _           It was the time Augustus Caesar had cried pax
    As children used to do, and said the world must now be taxed,

    _           When Joseph, following the government decree,
    Went out of Nazareth and travelled down through Galilee.

    _           If words are put into a prophet’s mouth, and before
    He knows it, he’s uttered them beside the trembling posts of the door,

    _            Then Caesar’s made unwittingly an agent of God’s
    And Joseph’s destination is, against all the world’s odds,

    _            The one that destiny and Micah once decreed.
    Each little act they performed there becomes for us a deed

    _           Of great significance, but in the ancient text
    You’ll find no search for a place, no donkey, no Joseph vexed

    _           By three refractory innkeepers, no ass and ox,
    No treasured doll that’s laid inside a painted Amazon box

    _           And children crawling around as sheep, causing mayhem.
    We are just told it was, when they arrived in Bethlehem,

    _           That the days of Mary’s pregnancy came to a close
    And she brought forth her firstborn son, wrapped him in swaddling clothes,

    _           And laid him in a manger, since there was no room,
    No, not in Tyndale’s inn, or Virgil’s, or that of Jerome.


    Feature Image: A painting of Bethlehem by Vasily Polenov, 1882

  • Poem: ‘External Return’

    Eternal Return

    My sixteen year old daughter comes to me to complain about
    Patrick Kavanagh.
    O great irony, hardly are the words out of her mouth
    And I can see those fucking potatoes,
    The drills and the furrows of old bloody Monaghan!

    Why do we do it? Why does every generation get subjected
    To this kind of shit?
    Isn’t Life bad enough without having to force poetry
    About bleeding potatoes down their bloody throats!

    And then, just as I am almost in despair,
    And I’m a bloody poet myself,
    Her voice pipes up again, and she adds;
    “Although, Epic isn’t half bad, at least he mentions Homer!”

    And, I see again my reading of the poem through her eyes,
    When I too saw the ancient importance ricocheting
    In Paddy Boy,
    As she too recognised the importance of Homer
    And his epic take on Life.

    Staring across the kitchen table at her,
    With not a potato in sight,
    I somehow saw the great blind ancient hovering above us
    Monumentally human, whispering to us both
    Across the infinite.

  • Poem: ‘What comes to mind in Ireland’

    What comes to mind in Ireland

    What is black? An absence of light,
    the cassocks of parish priests,
    dark peat in an Irish bog.

    What is brown? A leather belt,
    decaying plants, veins of iron in stones,
    the layered bark of a log.

    What is grey? Lowering clouds,
    skies threatening rain over windswept water,
    the speckled muzzle of an old dog.

    What is silver? A crucifix round a neck,
    handcuffs and shackles, thirty shiny coins,
    a flash of light through heavy fog.

    Feature Image: Daniele Idini

  • Poem: Vitruvian Woman

     

    Vitruvian Woman
    For Laura
    A Poem for Halloween

    Svelte limbs, aquiline and flow, her enjambment;
    The whole pelvic girdle hypnotically balances,
    Famously compared to a serpent which dances,
    And which has all full-blooded heterosexual males entranced…!

    And, there you have it! The Feminists declare,
    “No more male gazing here!”
    Where are we? How did we get here?
    Whatever happened to coup de foudre, colpo di fulmine ?

    It was a Friday night, I had been sitting, drinking with colleagues,
    When you entered the public bar dressed in your finery;
    The cream- coloured micro-skirt, the flesh coloured tights,

    The pliant leather of your black knee high boots!…
    Colpo di fulmine!… my ass jumped off the bench, reflexively!
    We have known each other now for 25 Halloweens.

    Feature Image: Norbert Szomszéd