Brian
"Andúileach IGTF"
Joined: 04 Nov 2002
Location: Cill Dara
Posts: 14,787
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OK LADS -
Print this Off
THIS poem just has to be SAID aloud -and not just READ
I read it out aloud here - with a few pints on board - to a crew who were similarly embued and embibed
It got a very very loud round of applause
So print IT - and SAY IT out loud
Dont just try to read it silently with lips moving.
SAY IT OUT LOUD
SAY IT OUT LOUD
Fire
1.
I spent the night staring at the fire,
watching the red and silver disintegration
of the wood, how the flames never touched
their fuel but consumed it nonetheless,
as though they sprang from within the tree,
were always in it, hid, until spark and tinder
took and released them, how the different types
of wood brought colour from the flame, blue,
orange, green, yellow, violet, transparent as poetry.
Fire draws the eye in, the crack and pit
of bark holds until the wood becomes
a breathing ball that makes shards
of grey silk on the surface lift
like skin flayed from flesh and bone.
I watch the pulse of heat bleed its way
across the inner surface, darkening
and brightening, rushing in and out
of the fire-heart, blushing over its face.
Each infinitesimal change more beautiful
for its brevity, a living blur, where I became
as lost as many are in the sea.
It warmed and consumed me,
reddened my hands.
2.
I stepped ashore to bless this place,
spoke my incantation, claimed the beach
and the headland, the valley and the mountain;
claimed the tree and the bird, grass and calf,
stone and wolf, lake and fish, crow and hare.
I immersed my hands in the sea, the sand,
the earth, claimed all their borders.
On reaching the marshland I baptised
my hands, withdrew them red and dripping,
the rusty water hanging on them like cold blood.
I divined that this was a land full of blood,
knew that it had tasted it early like a pup
that plays among the sheep, until one day
it nips too hard, draws blood, finds its red-
toothed craving. I washed and washed
that omen from my hands, but here it is
returning in the last light of the fire, burning
like the approaching dawn, red as tomorrow’s
blood, red as battle, as shame, as persecution;
red as bigotry, as hate, as blind fury,
the monstrous red we paint our enemies
burning, red as we picture devils;
red as our hearts, red as pain,
red as history read as the future,
red as a child’s scream, burning in its throat
as the child burns in its bed, burning red
as remembrance for the bodies never found,
for the sons and mothers, for the fathers and daughters
burning for everything done, and for everything yet to be done,
for all of it, for the end of it, for the start of it;
burning for invasion, red as displacement,
burning knife-sharp in the belly, red as starvation;
burning like a tongue ripped out, like the death of a tongue,
red as tongues of fire that appear not to touch but still destroy,
red as protestations of innocence on a stone ear,
burning like the cry of powerlessness; red as futility;
burning like the need to speak out, red as the fear of speaking out,
burning red like responsibility, bloody as all our hands.
(c) Nigel McLoughlin, 2004[/code]
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March 01 2005, 1:17 AM
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Thanks Pól --- I also believe that Poetry is an aural art - I compose orally and feel the work only truly lives when read out loud. 