Poems by Michael Corrigan (Ireland)

Published in The Ofi Press issue 37.

Irish Diaspora 1958.

They’re the ones

not in the picture

who didn’t dance

at the sisters’ wedding

the absent friends

toasted at Christmas

the long distance phone call

the infrequent letter

the song not sung

at the family gathering

the small cheap suit

the small cheap coffin

the dull wet day

heavy with unsaid things.

Lamb

Easter was the sacred place

in a hardscape of thin months and make do,

lambs birthing in the night fields

midwifed by my silent father,

gently cleaning and putting them to suck.

I held the bullseye lamp, childish chattering

In the cold spring air.

Strong dark tea in predawn quiet

then early mass and back to the fields

a ritual repeated all the Easters of my youth.

The city deafened and dazzled,

I mixed mortar with lime and sand,

carried bricks in a crafty hod,

a navvy Jesus on the ladder to Golgotha.

My father passed, his silence ever dutiful

and home, no longer home,

became a place of imagination

returned to in fugue

after

every drunken night

every drunken day.

I still attended Easter mass

now hollow in my patchy clothes

hands and health forever broken

face seared, branded  with the alcoholic mark of Cain

a derelict man, a derelict life

endlessly repeating the desperate words  of hope.