A Poem

–SBB with Alamgir Hashmi
Islamabad, Pakistan

 

Post Scrotum

 

Watt? Yes. But the same when the Mal’oun died
in the island; this island severed,
repousse, reeling with peat-reek;
this drizzle of grief–
interminable falling on the wide sea.
Moll’s face saffron-coloured, hair like
petals plucked from a white chrysanthemum;
local boys on stout or busy at hurling;
and our scriveners, on regular beat up in London,
aping accents of the English gentry.
I broadcast in Irish then, from Radio Eireann,
the right embers and all that fall to the ashes
or whatever I often whispered to myself
through Murphy, Philips, or Grundig.
No, not Grundig, for the word grounds the air,
the mind slips out of form in that language,
is not hand in glove as now. Example:
with a handschuh your hands feel they wear shoes;
the foot’s in the mouth; and you write with your feet.
Paris is O. K. Paris is all right. Paris is O. K. All right.
I was lecteur d’anglais in that place, teaching Doublin’
English and writing like Thom A. Becket what no one,
except J. J. in some arseholy state or other, would attempt–
in a language of my own.
I hear now that across the Chunnel
one side tells the other it’s French I wrote;
the other side calls it English, or by other appelatives;
such as would divide the protestant cake in catholic portions
and make for a nice debate
in the Parliament of European Foules.
If I said Parnell was no string-pulling
politician, women would be tightening the girth
of their drawers with double-knotted strings.
I left because truelove had run out of the vein,
the earth turning no end but negative;
its slow poisons free a sweet violet in my lungs.
And, yes, French had a point or two.
That dusty potato dropped in 1921 or 1845,
it named the apple of the earth–
to say nothing of the rotten core.
Peeling. Peeling.