By: Simon Heathcote

Others

Can’t flowers be silent & birds sing?
A late breeze kisses a single blade
setting off a Mexican wave of Irish green — 
a tsunami for little things to learn panic.
I don’t see so well but I listen.
There’s no escaping the lie
& the gut-sprung punch
the suffering of congealed minds
all those feints designed to mock
the common man while
deliberately taking his money.
Don’t try to be a good person — 
being a person is work enough.
Wait there for a time. Languish.
Let the goddess hold sway & stay quiet.
I have never met a human doing
I could love well — they are always running.
Rush, rush! Keep eyes shut!
Leave stillness for another season.
Work out foam returns to ocean.
To bear the news risks shooting.
Leave others alone.
Truth is more flaccid than it was.

COLD LEASH

O! Cold wet skin of winter
wake me when the day
is warm & the swallows
back from Africa.
Catapult your spies into
seasonal weather.
Still the bitter winds that
raze the fields & flow
your love into our home.
The cantilevered arm of spring
will never stretch as far
as autumn & we are forced
to stay indoors, to gulp down
our sorrow. Yet I am naked
& remember what life was
before the world let out the
bristling dogs of Future.
Have you noticed each perpetrator’s
leash is always longer than your own?

GOLD MINING

You sit, old friend, at this late stage — 
though not old, not young — 
stripped by summer’s moist claim
thickening swells in blood & body
breath high in meagre chest
caught in sagging curves somewhere
on a continuum between action & infirmity.

So, you slip bare feet on cooling tiles
look up at the great gloved hands of God
surgically white & waiting — 
each cloud a bird of prey
as the heart seeks its morning pills
& that walk you intended in soft green hills
suddenly withdraws its claim.

The one field of hope is razed — 
you know no-one’s coming
& so the cry goes out if only to oneself—
I need connection. Why do I so often stay away?
You pause to reflect on long observation
of the world’s behaviour to see the natural extinction
of the thirst for pleasure, thirst for living
& thirst for knowledge, which you did not foresee.

Life’s bitter pill is sure defeat
the pull of entropy, the tug of penumbral shade — 
another day, another day you moan
not quite dead & waiting for a sign
perhaps the voice of God
only to discover you are knocking at the gate
not for death but the disappearance of this ‘I’
cause of all your pain.

SIGNS AND WONDERS ON THE WARD

Your graph is the story of mountains
& deadly peaks — a heart planted as a child—
an old man with an EKG.
No words or woman can save it.
Stoppage time tells us its scarred
with love-battle grief
 — they now call it ‘enlarged’.
‘Isn’t that a good thing?’ I ask
my new white-all-over friend.
There is no silence like a doctor’s desk.
‘And those pills…what do they do?’
Instead, he goes upstairs to consult ‘the team’.
‘We’re taking you in,’ he says.
nods as I shake my head & tell him not to fret.
I am an ageing Lear long playing this scene—
a part established over 30 years.
I know my lines, what happens next.
Only the gurney exits stage left.
Try as they might, medics fumble
take centre stage at the wrong time
can never make out what the director says
scratch their brilliant heads & say
I should be dead ‘but we are happy
for you to go slowly, in your bed’.
Home then, heart firmly beating in my chest.

THE GOD OF FORGETTING

These moons we wait as winter
watching old stumps of trees
& the long fall of summer in the back mirror
The sun snubs its crooked nose
& childhood slows
hour by hour

We would watch the
clock on its cold black cord
hear the magpie screech
collect each passing minute
like a Sunday mass
to spend when time moves again

Each laboured second rings
with intense white heat
& silence slips a scapula
between the
crater-ribbed villains called parents
we were too small to fight

I imagine crows on forked trees
pecking at the light — how dark things
came to eat our suffering
like a salvation
& all those Hail Marys
I was too young to comprehend

until finally we were flamingoes
washed clean of
Remembering which like Love is a god
a necessary thing like
for a time Forgetting is

I wonder how memory grows roots
but the darkness that came calling
was my answer
the descent & the falling
again & again

NO AMNESTY FOR ABSENT MEN

Can I tell you dust to dust
when you pop up remote & unbidden
early one August morning 2016
saying you’ve been looking for me
& – I love this –
‘we are in fact brothers’

Blood ties but only through an ebony void
where father should be.
A tepid relationship with fidelity
& convention is noted & well said.
I agree neither of us saw him again…
& understand your anger but ….

Was it five children and seven wives
or five wives, seven children?
Transposing may be partly denial
& I keep hanging on to my position
in the vast strata of family lines.
You, admittedly, arrived first & are excused ire

But I am first of the next batch — 
(prettier wife you begrudgingly said)
& need to make clear — 
I wish you didn’t hate our father
& saw instead the headline to his act
‘Dublin orphan ‘given away’ to clueless
English couple’ whose name we bear.

Doesn’t an underdog deserve an advocate?
Diabetes took his feet at the end
& not one of us pitched up with a bucket.
No wonder they all drew a monster
furiously coloured his empty space
bitterly crayoned outside the lines.
I only saw a man running for his life

A BALCONY SEAT FOR FELINE EASE

Deep in the leather of the sofa
glued to its seat by great guilt-free
gobs of laziness, la dolce vita — 
our neighbour complains from her balcony stronghold:
‘You will ruin that thing’
but we like it worn — the way
it takes on seasons without complaint
how its face turns a neat brown-grey
She — I think it’s a she — 
came with me from England
& when I sit and read the greats
imagine where else we might be
Vienna is not far, Prague too
Croatia & the Baltics are a stretch.
Pushed against the kitchen window
this two-seater is a great reclamation
for two cats who teach the fine art
of daytime sleeping as purrfect consolation
for lives well-lived