Saturday, February 4, 2012


“If you had been here tonight” © Mike
Absalom January 19th 2012

If you had been here tonight
I would have said
-Sit by the fire with me!
Listen to the burning turf weaving
poetry
out of the dry stalks of the
long lost bog!
And we could take a swig or
two of the water of life,
Jameson’s perhaps or
Bushmill’s or Paddy’s,
and watch prehistory turning
to ashes
right before our eyes.

But you are not here tonight
and it is unwise to step
outside
on the sharp January night that’s
in it.
There is no saying whom you might
meet.
Here the souls of the dead
are everywhere.
They had sooner leave their own
shadows
than leave their own stories
behind.
The gary-gowlan is out there in
his jack-a-lantern boots,
standing guard with his
pitchfork at their graves.

If you had been here tonight
I would have said
-Sit by the fire with me!
Listen to the hissing turf coals
keening those old lost stories,
We can watch prehistory
turning to ash before our eyes.

But that night you were not
here.

Up where the forestry has
levelled walls
and jacked out the keystones
of old cottages
and thrown them about as if
at a stoning
there is a darkness that even
the moon can’t reach.

The night you were not here I
stepped outside
and looked up into my own
darkness.
The unimaginable past fell
around me as starlight.

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