séamas carraher contemporary irish poetry: IT IS THIS GHOST CALLED FATHERING, SON

it is this ghost called fathering, son

for

georgette vallejo

On this day, lungs like bellows, lungs like

liberated and collective factories,

on this deserted day, both cyclist and labourer

equally privileged and redundant,

on this still superstitious day, liberally crow

and mist,

the cold empties, still, in its direction.

Such is a box for this head, black as a mirror.

That blocklike head bewildered

to feel this thing like all wreckage

in some house

to feel any murderous stone, any at all, stone

or category,

in this direction now called day

then what happened, they ask, whose arms are

unfurled like commands?

On this day, windlike, without a solitary

insurrection, without adding additional genocide,

without no farther beating, no extra murder, no less

food that none

in some house: “holy mother of god!”

On this overfull day in its dawning, its material

and theoretical feeling,

head like light, head black, antithetical as light,

empty, after work which is no work,

after dark, with this windlike quiet, this almost

wind,

almost naked in some house,

where this labourer and shovel overfill, again

- then this stone must be called pain,

both in its feeling and unfeeling roars,

in this direction now called day.

Simply, and so it is our human condition

where we stand on our heads

coming from yesterday and leaving already

for tomorrow.

On that corrupt day, specific in its breaking, its

felling, practically like a tree,

on this no more dreamlike day in its broken glass,

on this shred of day, day surplus no more than any other,

in some guarded house where nothing happens and

our rifles are unloaded, where all is unreachable

where all aches reek of the past,

on this day politically inaugurated in each moment

with everything muted and solid, with everything

in waste like a book, bourgeois and rotten,

colonial and imperial as a radio,

chemical, dissected, fabric, artificial,

mouthless!

Then all pain must be human and desolate

in its unspoken knowing,

in our geographical and military direction.

Now here, senora, is a gull split open

in the first light already polluted like

an officeblock.

On this houselike and imprisoned day, heart

negative towards this stateless Beirut, this ruinlike me

in his past becoming, both and equally cave and inaudible.

Democratically palestinian, peasant, provisional

and MAN, erected daily like a grudge, ropelike, weather beaten

and MAN, (his world corroded with iron and muscle,

to have to eat this shame once, and daily!)

sleeps her bishoplike sleep, glorious and wonderful

and on its head, democrat, communist, terrorist,

and 200 yards away them crops prosper in our withering

like this soviet fuchsia (who me would scream at, silentlike)

in this grim burrow, in this box of wreckages,

to have waited so long for this inexplicable direction,

to be guided in all our erasing like a map:

such is our family:

(this box, my deprived son, is called a BANK

and abstract in any slavery like other metaphors and nooses.

Here is where your hungry nose points,

like christmas!)

On our concrete and uprising day, lungs like bellows

in this strange recognition, with their mouths gagged,

on this other day, and this struggling day, optimistically

irish, and workingman and international

(peruvian in poverty for a song!)

the walls are thin with his scraping

with the cawing of inedible gulls and the canning of

resources.

Stare at it: it cannot enter where there are no more doors,

neither bank nor stock exchange, nor international monetary fund,

it cannot own what it already owns,

futile, furious, dispossessed.

As if the world was not quite right.

All pain must be cold and light, personal,

toiling, expressive, exploited

(both siege and slum under their canning

and its epitaphs!)

AND THE HEAVIER ITS CHAIN THE HARDER IT BREAKS

(toiling and futile in this sandpit called “work”

rolling like a bell in our future silences,

singing in cracks in this choir called “culture”

hands all fingerless like “philosophy”)

and

this lightness must be human, and historical and abstract

and unborn, daily,

here after all toil and collective in its futures,

here historical like this house with its dismantling

girders, its public dust,

its landlord and spies,

and this history, like all concepts also a first

cause (in all our revolving doubt)

and it is pain and simply

like a wall being

painted in stones.

And so the walls work, son,

and the floorboards work,

and the darkness like a name, settles on your head.

It is these answers that bail the cold to the street

(and you too will work like a prisoner,

either running from the axe or into this dark light called war)

much like my grandfathers’ corpse,

both sailors and servants,

it is their answer who calls now like an employer

who trudges and is heavy and is tomorrow

and everywhere already today, fearful, in its insight,

this our most difficult task

in this glass lie like a statesman.

It is this fullness of nothing, oppressed,

that grows like a cancer,

to be here, like a dancer with no feet,

to be free already in this burst lung,

to be so empty burdened with rights,

to be empty like an applause,

such combat!

To be loaded in plastic and textbook,

to starve, simply, like a wife,

to be full like a pin,

it is this godlike priestfilled

fullness that drowns these prisoners

it is my father who nails

his shovel to my head (simply and painlessly

like an education)

with his fear of books

who comes, as good as an other

to ghost these uprising arms

with each others desperate

séamas carraher

Published, Pemmican 2011, Pemmican Press (Site closed).

César Abraham Vallejo Mendoza (March 16, 1892 – April 15, 1938)

By Juan Domingo Córdoba [Public domain or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3ACesar_vallejo_1929.jpg
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Vallejo

Georgette Marie Philippart Travers (Paris, 7 January 1908 - Lima, 1984)

By Miguel Pachas Almeyda Libro Georgette Vallejo al fin de la batalla (Archivo Max Silva Tuesta). (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

El poeta César Vallejo en Niza - 1929

By Trabajo propio. Reproducción de una fotografía de autor desconocido. (Archivo de la Biblioteca Nacional del Perú) [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons