Ted McCarthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Ireland. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada and Australia. He has had two collections published, November Wedding and Beverly Downs. Find his work on his website.

 

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Lost Hours

 

As the month deepens, night

comes early, sets like concrete

among the run-down terraces.

It has the crushing weight of abstinence,

the silence of a last gun fired.

Corner lamps throw a slick

yellow on intermittent rain.

Lost hours, these. But someone

has left a light on, curtains

open, in an empty house

as if to say I have been here,

I have gone, may never come back

but I have been.

 

 

Planes

 

The tracking app shows planes

blanketing Europe. This morning they’re benign,

bees on a honeycomb.

These past days they’ve swarmed

like flies round old meat in the sun.

 

The sky is empty, blue,

land on the screen, invisible.

Somewhere between the two

is the point at which mood tumbles

or soars. It’s never still,

 

it shifts from one hour to the next.

But at its heart, this panicked

need to get a fix

on everything, to unpick

what isn't there; to pin down smoke.

 

Pity our troubled planet

worn by the unending march

of countless ants upon it;

pity the troubled ant – each

feels earth shiver at its touch.

 

And all those restless eyes

darting left to right at screens

in search of insight or repose,

their flickering thought marooned therein.

They mourn the fate of bees

 

as if it were enough. But nothing

ever is. The first bite of knowledge

leaves through the years a bitter tang,

its eloquence a blister on the tongue.

The swarm of icons bubbles to the edge.

 

 

The Comet-Chaser

 

The imprint of a vagrant

on morning grass; a hill away,

a tannoy relays the progress

of a requiem. New tears, old hymns.

A life drifts in the gap of air,

but whose? This is the town,

trying to shake itself awake,

 

where fewer fires are lit

as a generation passes. Stranger,

you too have seen the smoke

diminish, mist burn off ever earlier,

once thought the dew eternal, 

if you thought at all,

as you walked it into the earth.

 

You passed this way too late.

The ground is cleared where children

hid from the call to homework.

It was easier then to ignore

for a little longer. Such moments,

sweet in our memory

as blackcurrant on the tongue,

 

were never enough. What we knew

as the void drew you: stars –

numbers, not myths. And then beyond

to the space where long looking 

plays tricks perhaps, and sense

gives way to a hunch,

a dream ages old –

 

to be the first to see

a smudge on the night sky

through a long lens,

then fight for naming rights

with a dozen others.

And what then? How long

before the few who notice, forget?

 

Will fame last longer than a prayer?

There is no dew, only water

broken from a locked core

into countless shards of itself,

each drop on grass a jewel dying.

And we are all already dead,

we are none of us yet born.