Birds
Birds on telephone wires,
Kingfishers flying in summer showers,
Sing Greek tragedy to fill the hours,
And it is time we heard their call.
The air is dying.
Kingfishers flying in summer showers,
Sing Greek tragedy to fill the hours,
And it is time we heard their call.
The air is dying.
Breathlessness in the Anthropocene
The air thickens as heartbeats thicken:
In clusters, and falling in numbers,
With the stale movement from tick
To stopped clock, its motion mercury
Chambers and barometers,
Magnets, steam, and anvils of burnt stone,
Valves, tubes, and pressure gauges,
Hissing, insistently,
Measuring the within
And the winsome without
Which lies alluringly,
Like a bedded consumptive,
Flower fallen flush, plush
As a rose in its ethereal pungency,
Like starlings too, sturnidae:
An iridescent backdrop
Of complexity
To us, standing still,
Through third laws,
And cleft right hands at the tiller –
And, as the heat lingers longer
With each passing day,
Even the ivy feels the shift,
And so much else, too,
Feels a whittling in its embrace,
And, as each moment accelerates
Weighty with the gravity of being,
Fulsomely, wantonly
In gulps, and gasps,
I yearn to remember
The setting of the sun.
In clusters, and falling in numbers,
With the stale movement from tick
To stopped clock, its motion mercury
Chambers and barometers,
Magnets, steam, and anvils of burnt stone,
Valves, tubes, and pressure gauges,
Hissing, insistently,
Measuring the within
And the winsome without
Which lies alluringly,
Like a bedded consumptive,
Flower fallen flush, plush
As a rose in its ethereal pungency,
Like starlings too, sturnidae:
An iridescent backdrop
Of complexity
To us, standing still,
Through third laws,
And cleft right hands at the tiller –
And, as the heat lingers longer
With each passing day,
Even the ivy feels the shift,
And so much else, too,
Feels a whittling in its embrace,
And, as each moment accelerates
Weighty with the gravity of being,
Fulsomely, wantonly
In gulps, and gasps,
I yearn to remember
The setting of the sun.
Here, at the End of all Things
The chronicle of seasons,
A wild pall-bearer of change,
With snowdrop lips,
Ferments the fruits of wakefulness,
Of sleeplessness, narcolepsy,
Neuroticism and paranoia,
So that once, briefly,
There may again be warmth.
Yet I yearn for the toil,
Its intense legacy of wildness,
And for the end of all things,
When pale flowers will caress extinction.
And it is our grandfathers’ faded memories
That have sustained us,
Theirs, a legacy of sun-starved hills,
Hedge-row teachers, implacability and defeat.
And yet, this shared past: a lost future,
Here, where sparrows populate
The remnants of a yew,
Gobbling their wretched last meals.
A wild pall-bearer of change,
With snowdrop lips,
Ferments the fruits of wakefulness,
Of sleeplessness, narcolepsy,
Neuroticism and paranoia,
So that once, briefly,
There may again be warmth.
Yet I yearn for the toil,
Its intense legacy of wildness,
And for the end of all things,
When pale flowers will caress extinction.
And it is our grandfathers’ faded memories
That have sustained us,
Theirs, a legacy of sun-starved hills,
Hedge-row teachers, implacability and defeat.
And yet, this shared past: a lost future,
Here, where sparrows populate
The remnants of a yew,
Gobbling their wretched last meals.
Oisín Breen is a poet, part-time academic in narratological complexity, and financial journalist. Dublin born Breen's widely reviewed debut collection, 'Flowers, all sorts in blossom, figs, berries, and fruits, forgotten’ was released Mar. 2020 by Edinburgh’s Hybrid Press. Primarily a proponent of long-form style-orientated poetry infused with the philosophical, Breen has been published in a number of journals, including The Blue Nib, Books Ireland, The Seattle Star, Modern Literature, La Piccioletta Barca, The Bosphorus Review of Books, Fiery Scribe, The Kleksograph, In Parentheses, Kairos, and Dreich magazine.