i.m. Caroline Walsh

Before cave-paintings there were caves,

wretched places, cold and damp and dark,

and although they built fires at the entrance,

and gathered round in skins to eat the burnt flesh

of slain deer, and kept watch for sabre-tooths

and ravenous bears prowling the ice wastes,

they were afraid to look behind, back

past the shadows into the blackness

of the deepest reaches of those walls

where no-one dared to go without a light,

and all those bulls and stags and horses

would have stayed inside the small brains

of the hunters, unless one of the tribe

had not taken a sandstone slab, and slowly

hollowed out in it a space for deer-fat

and a sprig of juniper as a wick, and kept it lit

so that the painters, and the others,

could see what they were making,

fabulous beasts, whinnying and prancing

and pawing the ground, alive

in the guttering flame of a careful lamp.

Taken from John O’Donnell’s latest collection, On Water, published by Dedalus Press