Cassandra Voices

Tag: poem:

  • 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.

  • 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

  • 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)

  • Poem: Hope in Despair

    Hope in Despair

    I have always loved museums, no doubt having a kind of prophetic disposition I realised the somewhat terrible and prodigious potency that was entombed in their almost sterile yet  paradoxically life-affirming grace. Loss, chronic loss, is the ultimate domain of all humans.

    It seems to me that the problems here below on Earth have reached such an escalatory saturation point that we have been probing space, and for quite some time now, in an almost frantic bid to escape, but, as William Shatner recently said, and I merely paraphrase, space is just full of more cold, dark and hostile matter.

    The tremor of the tympany, the delicate frisson which all ten digits can bring, the storm of sounds trembling just as you are standing alone, right there on the brink…

    Slow read. Be not fraught with the weight and trouble of your servitude, but rather cherish the day and be more aware of it harbouring amplitude.

    Feature Image: The National Museum of Ireland – Natural History, Dublin, sometimes called the Dead Zoo.

  • Poem: ‘Congratulations’ by Kevin Higgins

    Poets may be divided into three types: those of us who must be and are, or have been, suppressed, at least until after we are dead; those whose subject matter is so commonplace/banal that it doesn’t matter either way; and then those who become pure decorations of the Regime.

    One key qualification for a poet becoming a pseudo-poetic decoration for the Regime – a quality much on display this week – is to know when not to say that a terrible, long poem taking one side in a war in a most crude and unthinking way, is exactly as terrible as it is because he/she hopes to be published in the future (or again) in the same venue, suspecting, probably correctly, he/she would be less likely to achieve such publication if he/she doesn’t keep his or her beak strategically shut on such occasions.

    Indeed, indiscreet beak-opening might make an invitation to participate in an upscale literary cabaret or two less likely. This is what it has come down to.

    As I sit/lie on what might turn out to be my death bed – I am doing everything I can to survive and haven’t at all given up hope but really have no idea if I’ll be here this time next year – I find myself laughing at the Irish poetry world.

    The phenomenon is not unique to contemporary Ireland, though its Irish branch has particular characteristics, usually involving a special relationship with NATO and the sacred 12.5% corporate tax rate. But such tendencies are spreading like an international fungus. Every part of the English-speaking world has a local variant of concern.

     

    Congratulations
    after Zbigniew Herbert

    A few will be obliterated
    but in an nice way.
    We don’t like the word censorship,
    abolished it yonks ago.
    Certain word combinations must be
    nudged to the bottom of the basket
    until after we’ve all safely
    choked to death in our dressing gowns.
    Though, worryingly,
    they always find their way back out again.

    Others, we can leave optional.
    You know the drift:
    the suffering of academics, their divorces
    after the regrettable entanglement with the student;
    how it felt to phone the crematorium
    to book a spot for their ninety five year old father.

    But for having so successfully helped it
    deny its own existence
    the regime has made you
    compulsory.

    Your personage will be strapped
    into an airplane seat, exported
    to Asia and beyond,
    like a Bangladeshi made t-shirt in reverse.

    Your metaphors and similes will be at the service
    of the International Happiness Corporation –
    Diversity Department –
    currently headquartering here for tax purposes.
    You will walk through all the right doors
    secretly wearing their logo.

    Life will be mostly festivals
    of enforced grinning,
    during which you’ll pass the hours
    counting each others’ teeth.

  • Advent Poem by Haley Hodges

    Advent

    We have endured long in the dark.
    It is a burden (A magic? A madness?) particular
    To us. Long endurance of darkness is not light,
    But speaks of a belief that light’s radiance
    Merits enduring long in the dim we know—
    In the dusk we are.

    The world is a bone
    Full of Christ-marrow; its sun a merely
    Mortal star, spending itself to lighten
    What it can, just as the Godman upon
    Entering our long dark did, except
    In his mortality—no mereness.
    He will put flesh again on this
    Old bone, the world, his own
    Milk-fed flesh in the great
    Stable dark, a holy darkness:
    All the void
    Is not.

    This is, and has been,
    And shall be.

    What Mary treasured up
    In her heart was Death
    Leaving the carcass of the world
    At his arrival. She treasured up
    The world alive, all alive
    With a brightness
    That turns the noble sun
    To pitch.

    Feature Image Advent and Triumph of Christ by Hans Memling, 1480.