Live Encounters Poetry & Writing July 2024
After Francis Bacon’s party
on Cromwell Place, The Crucifixion,
and others, poem by Dr Arthur Broomfield.
After Francis Bacon’s party
on Cromwell Place, The Crucifixion,
and others.
The was and will be hovers
over the night of the last rave,
shapes dots and semi-colons,
warmed to waves, into blood-red lipstick,
boot polish for the hair,
the collar and tie of the conformed.
Your dots waltzed round the walls of Jericho,
and saved the harlot, her hall door
marked by a hanging thread.
In a flash you’ll show among them,
a species plant on garden leave,
flesh dancing to the beat
of a found poem.
Hot to primrose posies and dewy May,
holiday brochures, Torquay, San Tropez,
bikinis and tattoos,
swallows that fly north –
one shits on someone’s head –
fast fading violets, hawthorn, blushing red,
the reaction of cattle born
for meat hooks in the Fall,
and blind to tones of cool blue greys
and the darker drapes,
coordinates to your robes
for the moonless nights,
the children of Rahab –
the pipe smoking socialite.
her pal in pink and puce,
the corporeal bird
picking her ethereal hand,
she laid too long in
that sun-scorched little while,
the séance that huddles
round the chock-a-block bier,
wait for the roulette wheel
to brand the cursed names.
Among the stokers
who tend the embers,
here in the wastewash of the artist’s
last dip, behind you,
you drag a chair.
In the death-drops of the snag’s last stand,
they bathe, shave,
pay their toilet dues, frown
at the dowager maid
(you take it all down).
Flies in cloisters on an express train,
they hoist the black flag of denial.
© Dr Arthur Broomfield
Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet, short story writer and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland. His current collection is At Home in Ireland : new and selected poem. Arthur is Poetry Ireland Poet Laureate of Mountmellick.
Many thanks Mark for publishing a poem that means a lot to me
Thank you Arthur for coming aboard!