Live Encounters Poetry & Writing January 2025
Without Looking, poems by Thomas McCarthy.
Without Looking
A tree that brought no pears
Sulks into the brick wall, and cuttings
Are scattered across the wet grass
Where you’ve been pruning late roses,
The dextrous movements of your hand
As you pruned the loose fibres,
The promise of a second chance
Creating a happier atmosphere.
Under the trees it is October,
Here the loosened beech leaves have
Fallen apart and the piercing sting
I felt when I grasped without looking
Was a trapped wasp quietly dying –
Full of attention, in momentary pain,
I considered the horrors of this year
And the lateness of the hour,
And thought again of the year as so much
Hard rain falling slantwise in our thoughts:
This unimaginable year the world’s just had,
The ruined pear tree, the stab of pain.
Blackberries Beneath Dromana House
There, where the tidal Blackwater meets the winding road
At Killehala Pier, we had stopped abruptly to take a longer
Look at winged Dromana, its pale lilac in the late sunlight,
Its magisterial importances. I knew that it was to this house
And on this road that Grania Fox had grieved for her lost love
As she regained her foothold in the gentry’s valley. High
Windows among trees and balustrades, the house still pulls
Us upward into sunlight and ebbing tides. Though it is the
Wild fruit we picked by the water’s edge that now fills
Both mind and mouth: a sweetness I’ve never tasted, never
Before in all my childhood blackberry-picking. It must be
The taste the gods reserve for those who wish to remember.
Ballistic Missiles Overhead
Are not bound for us this day, us being neutral –
Though accidents might easily happen
And an entire Irish city could noisily expire
As Cork expired in 1920. A bad year, that year of flames.
We’ve seen so many buildings shudder in loosened robes,
The pink streamers of a child’s bedroom
Hanging from the seventh floor,
Swallows returning to a blown-away street.
In this way our poem must be the last carrier of wreaths,
Bearing phrases to make every coffin silent.
The sky is full of disorientated migrants.
Destruction with its fake magnetics keeps them airborne,
Each meridian spattered with blood.
Commentary is so intense it is biblical,
The cold blood of the eclipse is cold, its cover total,
Making the time left to us wide open
To human error. Make no mistake. These missiles
Are not meant for writing with. Wherever you look
This page is in flames; and the night-sky, it is likewise.
© Thomas McCarthy
Thomas McCarthy was born at Cappoquin, Co. Waterford in 1954 and educated locally and at University College Cork. He was an Honorary Fellow of the International Writing programme, University of Iowa in 1978/79. He has published The First Convention (1978), The Sorrow Garden (1981), The Lost Province (1996), Merchant Prince (2005) and The Last Geraldine Officer (2009) as well as a number of other collections. He has also published two novels and a memoir. He has won the Patrick Kavanagh Award, the Alice Hunt Bartlett Prize and the O’Shaughnessy Prize for Poetry as well as the Ireland Funds Annual Literary Award. He worked for many years at Cork City Libraries, retiring in 2014 to write fulltime. He was International Professor of English at Macalester College, Minnesota, in 1994/95. He is a former Editor of Poetry Ireland Review and The Cork Review. He has also conducted poetry workshops at Listowel Writers’ Week, Molly Keane House, Arvon Foundation and Portlaoise Prison (Provisional IRA Wing). He is a member of Aosdana. His collections Pandemonium and Prophecy, were published by Carcanet in 2016 and 2019. Last year Gallery Press, Ireland, published his sold-out journals, Poetry, Memory and the Party. Gallery Press published his essays Questioning Ireland in September of this year.; and Carcanet will publish a new collection, Plenitude, in 2025.
These poems are wonderful. Thanks for them.