Apricot Press

After James Wright’s ‘A Blessing’

On a canal path near Athlone,
flies thicken the slow silence
of late evening heat.
Haloes of street lights shimmer
like apparitions where the sky
foxtrots with water as if
the world has imploded,
and there are animals everywhere,
wide-eyed and watchful,
who know displacement and the covert
frequencies of the wild.
I too am electric, alive with potential
energy. I wade into the shallows
of this moment. Dusk feeds on day.
On the canal, a stately heron, waiting
for the water’s tributes, senses the air
ripple, its head and neck a question mark,
rhetorical, for it knows there is nothing
I offer in diplomacy. Flushed to flight,
it is a king in exile
waiting for this darkness
to fade once more into light.
I am an intruder here and I know
if I step back into my body,
this world will break
into breathing.

at Lough Boora Mesolithic Site, Midlands, Ireland
 
After the stripping away of millennia 
of peat, there was still some vestige
of us: a memory,
where the stones that rose
 
ascending into the fossil-fuel air,
like plants reaching towards light,
had last known post-glacial breath
on a lakeside storm beach.

They found charcoal, burnt bones
of pig, eels and lithics,
for we are identifiable
always by our hungers.

We hunkered on this rocky mass
before the sphagnum moss bowed down
to the Gods of bogs, and lakes
transubstantiated to brown bullion,

before these domes were pillaged,
before the bonfires of the harvest.
After the wilderness returns,
after the floods, the rebirth,

after the accumulation of millennia,
I wonder if the earth will remember
our bodies; if it will bury them deep,
like fossils, like empathy.

Photo credit: Jeremy Hynes