by John MacKenna

My mother was sitting on the cemetery wall,
reciting an old poem, not loudly but with the carefulness of one
who knows her discourse might be heard.
Her legs were dangling in the summer air.
The cherry trees had stretched themselves as far as evening would allow.

That’s when she got the news about her son.
I can’t be sure who brought the word — that angel of the Lord? —
or if it simply blew in on a western breeze
and landed like a small, dead bird there on her aproned lap.
But, anyway, that’s where and when the news arrived.

She dawdled for a moment, the verses hollow now.
Then, finally and silently, traversed the broken ground,
and froze my singing father with her words.
The eldest child is gone. Softly, they set about preparing
a place for him at the table they had laid.

by Thomas McCarthy

Fallen martyrs of Antioch, time’s unrecoverable flora —
It’s not me, it’s the garden itself that becomes nostalgic
At this time of year. There’s a chill in the steel engraving
Of September and that arch opportunist, Piranesi,
Moves from the fallen triumph of spent roses,
Withered fruit canes, berries that have given up on God,
To set his easel where the view might be sold, yet again,
In a grey tourism of compost. Spring is now as distant
As the star anemone, or potentilla cinquefolia;
Or the ovate, aromatic white flower of strawberry
That seemed as fresh as a young Centurion in the heat
Of last May. As for the primitive rose so loved by Pliny
And its two hundred varieties that filled the Coliseum,
There’s nought but an odorous after–taste. There is
Nothing to be done as the page turns, the two of us forking
Old potato stalks, the year shriven before pagan idols.

by Thomas McCarthy

The howling November wind, that chill Taxing Master, stiffens
Entire buildings in the Castle yard. As we grow older
We also stiffen a little more as if preparing for a wind
That will finally test what we are made of. No colder
Wind than the wind that blows across cobbles, no sense
In hanging around on Dublin stones: his death is a year older

And yet it is no wiser. His life was an umbrella forced open
In a flapping squall from the East Wall. No one answers
To the squawking numbers. The hat–stand inside is empty
And the poet has gone, except for these words on stone stairs
Words echoing in the wind, words that make books seem put–upon
And savagely abandoned. A language has died in poetry,

A chiselling language clocked–out for the last time;
But the words that were made from cobble–stones
May be carried over in translations of rain:
Rain and gulls, vanilla documents and fugitive rhyme —
For with the dead all translators are not the same,
The distinctive dead need our confirmation, a firm sign

That everything useful can be built again with broken stones.
Here is shelter. Here are some of the best Dublin statements —
What are the stars? We can’t carry on but we must,
Or ‘proclaim their era at an end.’ We pick over the bones
Of a draft directive, we protect the briefing documents
In heavy rain.’ We pray that cobbles may be more than dust.

by Paul Casey

for John W. Sexton

the slop migrant vortex of turf muck
near swallowed him whole one grey farm day

he said, but for a bubble of air
caught in his jacket and but

for the tight wrists of Fionnán the wiry,
oh purple god of moor –grass, he was a sure goner

not an ear within range, nor an echo
of those frantic syllables survived

one time, one near took a full horse
he said, but for a prehistoric farmer

vice–grip on the tailbone
as another held the head

the black mud swallowed four megalithics
then belched in final surrender

bogholes in the city are invisible
people just can’t see

when you’re up to your lower lip in one
eyes everywhere, and so few hands