2 poems

DAN DO ROIBEÁRD GEARÓID Ó SEACHNASAIGH

I used to daydream of Bobby Sands.

I was young & felt hunger.

I terrified myself the screws

were rushing to my cell

to beat me to bruises. The window

of the bus open, the sound of birds

that year of the hunger strike, birds

Bobby Sands said he could hear on the sands

of the bog near the Maze prison. I was hungry

on my bus to high school. I touched the screws

of the window, wondered of the cells

the guards blocked out the windows

so the strikers could not look out the window

& see & hear the birds. For what is a bird

but a flying thing that knows no prison. Bobby Sands

would die that year. I was fifteen & felt a hunger

for those men I read about in the news, screwed

into my brain, his words were like cells

that grew inside me, his words smuggled out of his cell

& somehow I found that pamphlet near a window

in a bookstore, xeroxed words like birds

that tumbled across the pages, words like Sanskrit

with meaning, & inside me was a hunger

for abstract words like Justice & freedom—screw

what they taught us in school—screw

all these fake stars when men died in cells

in the Maze, or in Attica, with not even a window

to look out at the light. I watched the birds

of the city: crows & seagulls rise above the sands

along the river & the red brick mills, hungry

birds that flew to the dump to forage trash, hunger

of their calls. Had they forgotten how to fish? Screw

school I said, & all the lies, the cells

of rooms, scolded if we looked out the window.

I ate my free lunch with a plastic spoon, birdsin the school yard. We were fat pigeons. Bobby Sands

died when I was not yet a man. In my cells

are words he wrote: “I forgot what it’s like to live.”

Or the story of the imprisoned lark who would not sing

for its jailer. So his jailer tortured him.

Let the lark free! The Lark needed no changing.

I sing for no academy, no reward, no prison state.

Bobby Sands was given the number 1066. Not even a man

the screws named him. He wrote his name in shit

on the cell wall. He wrote until he was dead.

“We were young men with old men’s faces,”

old faces as mine is now, in another century.

I read by a window, words that carry on

with a sort of hunger that never ended

after hunger & the State took his tongue.

We watch now as the men with money build prisons.

Ask a man in my country who was Bobby Sands?

& the lark who was imprisoned? His jailer

ended up caught by accident in his own cage

& the black birds arrived to peck his eyes out.

“And the larks sang like they’d never sang before.”

I HAVE WRITTEN FAR TOO MUCH

I should have spent more time just staring

at the finches on the line, or should I say listening.

I should have listened more to the made up language

my daughters babbled so many years ago,

to the signs my wife gave me, to the anger

in my voice. I should have learned how to turn it

into singing.

So much singing passed right through me

like the rush of morning traffic

that wanders through my window,

so much I let it pass me by.

I wake in the dark when the house

is still asleep & wander downstairs.

So much hurt I carry I cannot let go.

I walk out on the back porch

& look up to see the pale light

breaking the sky.

Inside us I know there is such a light

or is it really the night

I love & worked in all these years

I hid inside it.

When each day I could have entered

like a church where I hear children

saying psalms.

Open the doors in the air

& walk inside it before

it is too late. Now I hear

our dogs barking,

& my wife is peeing in the bathroom.

My oldest daughter is doing her morning

walking routine, pounding the stairs like drums.

What have I failed to give them

but the shape of everything I carry?

Or what did I not hear

that they have tried to tell?

But I could have given

so much more over the years.

Today I just might take my heart

out of my chest

like a bloody bird

& hand it to them

if it could help them fly.

Good morning father

my daughter says so formal,

as if saying it in prayer

to someone standing right behind me.

I was once a religious man.

In our old age the Torah tells me

you should love your fellow as yourself.

But what if you do not love yourself?

What if one is carrying one’s regrets

like an old woman in the old country

carries a bundle of sticks?

& then my wife walks in the room

radiant with sleep & touches my cheek

& goes to make coffee.

Perhaps I have not written enough,

not written down this world’s music

along the way? Not its symphony,

but its études in G minor.

The barely heard & seen.

The way the fish are there like letters

beneath the river’s page.

I once saw a mare standing still in a field in the rain.

I once saw my wife dance across the room

as if made of water.

Let the morning finches enter my ears.

Every day they sing their poems

& so the world is blessed.

What songs I still must learn from them?

I stand on the porch with a cup of coffee

& the crows caw good morning.

I watch the way the egret scissors the sky.

A truck honks & the driver waves

on his way to deliver the morning bread.

Sean Thomas Dougherty (he, him) is the author of Death Prefers the Minor Keys and the Second O of Sorrow from BOA Editions which won the Housatonic Book Award, and was co-winner of the Paterson Poetry Prize. His collaboration with Jeremy Shraffenberger Dueling Shovels was published by the University of Northern Iowa’s First Thursday Press.  He works as a Carer and Med Tech for folks with traumatic brain injuries along Lake Erie.