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Live Encounters Poetry & Writing May 2023
Hell hath Fury, poems by Arthur Broomfield
Hell hath Fury
‘It takes so many years to learn that one is dead’.
T. S. Eliot
This place is the all do, all say,
one-way train on a wet Sunday.
Eros Moon, after a silk tight,
Lucifer waits, night, lies by.
Sun embroiders shrouds
for the early arrivals,
stirs his potion through the mix
of christening robe squabbles,
holy wars fought with pebbles.
The mouse in the trap
fights for survival.
Alf had raised the lid early,
As is his way, the sun in accord,
crawls from his hob-hot gurney,
snaps cadaver scenes for the record:
Polar fires that bleed to the beat
of a string quartet,
the mood music of Sahara floods.
belches of the fed,
the robin in his grave
that blesses the worms he eats,
are makings he files and saves,
a mummified menu of Calvary treats.
This is the halting hearth
of his buzzing bits and pieces
it’s where they fell to earth.
He takes the weight on his elbows
reads the chemtrail codes of Robin Hood’s arrow:
Hell is Vlad impaling, the age-long,
the sun at high noon. The all right, swing song.
After the Septs of Laois sculpture
‘Human kind cannot bear very much reality’.
TS Eliot
Too much for the man
who shuns the heat of sun,
he’ll undo it in cold blood
through beams from half-mast moons,
the splinters in the sky,
the mourning star.
If he, for a moment, sees
seven cantilevered steps,
though he knows no thing –
he eats potato stalks
with men in silk-lined cloaks –
he’ll drink Methuselah’s wine
that’s feared hot in those parts.
The sun, her sleeves rolled up,
sings a dirge out loud
near the deep fat fried,
the one that they all want,
the purged undead, and the died,
uneven numbers count,
Art thou not also one of his disciples ?
After ‘Saint Peter Denying Christ’
Pensionante del Sareceni
Salvation Army jacket frayed,
shoulder thread bare,
a few follicles resisting
the high lights.
The fabric that held
his body together ravels.
She rips through him,
as devout disciples do
in times of spin.
‘You stitched him up
with your “I know not the man,”
not even a hello out of you. ‘
The crafted sermons,
the indulgent rage in the porch,
the ego trip on the lough,
the matrix looms
over him
in the preternatural night.
In time – after Emmaus,
the ghostly fibre, the hologram –
He would understand
The necessity for yarns,
the mohair shawl of the masses,
and could say,
He is not the man I know or am.
© Dr Arthur Broomfield
Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from Laois, Ireland. His works and interviews have been published in Ireland, The United Kingdom, Serbia, India and the USA. He is current poet laurate for Mountmellick.