I
You spiked it, slammed it, swilled it, horsed it down,
bare-backed the wolfhound through the throng
of London’s moshing, mongrel exiles,
lost soldiers searching for a soldier’s song.
You plucked a feather from the cockerel’s nape
and with it blew the sluice-gates open:
out they tumbled - roaring, fighting, spilling -
the punks who played melodeon in the barns
then smashed their heads against old England’s walls
or bent the bow until the fiddle burned
or passed out cold under a petrol sky
in which you floated with your ancient grin.
II
You screamed the scream of silent labouring men
whose faces at last orders were curlews
fleeing gunshot, bog holes in a storm.
You saw in broken glass the heavens’
tender constellations: the hunter laying
down his needle; the ploughman stumbling home,
the bear refusing to be judged or judge.
And now, as you lie on your deathbed,
we’ve come to do what you’d have done:
to weigh in love the loser’s lot,
to bend in to the man without a voice
and whisper you are held, held and understood.
Cian Ferriter’s chapbook Earth’s Black Chute won the 2022 Fools for Poetry competition and was published by Munster Literature Centre last year
You spiked it, slammed it, swilled it, horsed it down,
bare-backed the wolfhound through the throng
of London’s moshing, mongrel exiles,
lost soldiers searching for a soldier’s song.
You plucked a feather from the cockerel’s nape
and with it blew the sluice-gates open:
out they tumbled - roaring, fighting, spilling -
the punks who played melodeon in the barns
then smashed their heads against old England’s walls
or bent the bow until the fiddle burned
or passed out cold under a petrol sky
in which you floated with your ancient grin.
II
You screamed the scream of silent labouring men
whose faces at last orders were curlews
fleeing gunshot, bog holes in a storm.
You saw in broken glass the heavens’
tender constellations: the hunter laying
down his needle; the ploughman stumbling home,
the bear refusing to be judged or judge.
And now, as you lie on your deathbed,
we’ve come to do what you’d have done:
to weigh in love the loser’s lot,
to bend in to the man without a voice
and whisper you are held, held and understood.
Cian Ferriter’s chapbook Earth’s Black Chute won the 2022 Fools for Poetry competition and was published by Munster Literature Centre last year
