Saturday, February 4, 2012


“Wurra
Wurra: The Night of the Long Brooms” © Mike Absalom 2009. Revised February 1st 2012
“Oíche na Scuaibanna Fada”

In the press there are days
folded like clean linen
waiting for the
dirt.
Inside the
closet
a clock keeps
ticking
and they say it
is only a matter of time.
Broomsticks I
saw first.
Glowing like
iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the
geraniums in my window alcove
they moved
towards me out of the darkness.
And then three women, naked and wild as the storm driven wind in the chimney’s
breast
stepping in on this Night of the Dead and of all the Holy
Saints stealthily,
rag-haired, broom-clad, besom-handed, bucket swinging, brush
proud.
From the black shadows they drove the ciarógs and
the clocks
and the millipedes and the wood lice and the silverfish
and the daddy long-legs and the black spiders,
herding them silently out of this sad and dusty bachelor
gaff
and off its surface of unswept regret.
For this is the echoless hole of entropy that a connubial
extraction leaves behind.
Since our separation it has been mine.
Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like
iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the
geraniums in my window alcove
they moved
towards me out of the darkness.
In the press there are days
folded like clean linen waiting for the dirt.
In the closet
a clock keeps ticking.
and they say it is only a matter of time.
Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like
iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the
geraniums in my window alcove
they moved
towards me out of the darkness.

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