Friday, September 7, 2012

A Poem by Seamas Carraher

LETTER TO A BELOVED
 
Love, i am wasting
in this hundred years of our exile,
my chest nailed in disease
with other people's debris.
Listen, the concrete
is throwing stones here
in despair.
Nothing can grow and
the killing won't stop.
i have crossed this threshold
between time and our timelessness
on the veins of my wrist.
All the trains are on time,
this is no extraordinary crisis
in a century of greed.
My knives were sharpened on my mother's milk.
i still cross
this country of our homecoming,
a flag burning
in subversion for the dead.
Love, the time is late, and
spring an unknown season
half full
of shooting and bombing,
with fear groaning in all its hollows.
On this point in the unwinding of space
i sit and tease the pain on the point
of your nipples.
i remember your claws that
scratched my old wounds.
i remember when the rage stopped,
your face peaceful like a child.
And then i remembered
a time when the feeding was full
and it was elsewhere,
more human in our futuring,
and another time in its truces,
and with that note cracking your
sleeping forehead
and the day breaking in segments
between our fingers
i joined your thighs with my maleness,
laughing,
at the unwinding of war,
the permanent nature of losses.
 
 
 
Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He lives and writes on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, at present.
Recent publications include poems in Dead Flowers, Pyrokinection, Dead Snakes, Carcinogenic Poetry, Naphalm & Novacain, The Camel Saloon, ditch, Bone Orchard Poetry, Istanbul Literary Review and Pemmican. Previously his work has been published in Left Curve (No. 13, 14 & 20), Compages, Poetry Ireland Review, the Anthology of Irish Poetry and the Irish Socialist (newspaper).

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