A Poem by Seamas Carraher

AUTUMN IN GHETTOES

for caoilfhionn costello

She absolves her human being with this dance.

She throws it at me like a net.
"This is a reason for winter," she says,
"unlike your politics."
i choke her easiness with another question.
She walks away and drowns in whatever
you call it.
i feel this cold and this hard on a dirty
bus returning from Dublin.
i empty the house with it and its remains.
It is still Autumn.
And there is no one listening.
It is still Autumn and we could be drunk
but it would be someone else.
She forges my emotion and dedicates it to
children.
They have starved sensibly in this feeling.
It is both Irish and Imperial.
A product of famine.
i have stopped trying to feed the ones
i have inherited.
My life is dull in its eternal moments.
Much like the cold that accuses the dole queue.
My life tells me i am not here, not really.
That i have suffered in a continual birth of
others.
They cannot be me, nor themselves,
now not even Autumn.
There is too much and too little significance.
Still, here in the middle things change.
i tell her the leaves will grow again.
i tell her this cloud could pass.
And these murderous walls rot.
But she will feed these children irrespective
of whether they are ours or not.
And here:
(where we have been rounded and beaten
here where we call this animal oppression
freedom!
and these myths truth! and this mirror reality!)
here...
she feeds them, unanswering.
i. can. not. ever. understand this.
It is like a collision among the tools.
In this way i put my burning tongue in her heart.
Such an Internationale!

Séamas Carraher was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1956. He writes on the Ballyogan estate, in south County Dublin, at present. http://www.seamascarraher.blogspot.ie/