Live Encounters Poetry & Writing September 2026
Desire, poems by Jean O’Brien.
Desire
The teasel is losing its purple
it has been ravished by butterflies
and bees, it sways gentle, barely
moving in the slight, early evening
breeze, that lifts tendrils of your hair
like a lover might to softly kiss
the nape of your neck
and bring back thoughts of earlier,
of once upon a time, of before.
The air becomes dense with desire.
Picasso Museum, Malaga
“We all know that art is not truth, art is a lie
that makes us realise the truth.” Pablo Pisasso.
We viewed the world jigsawed, as he saw it.
Fantastical creatures, heads elsewhere,
a collage of women with misplaced breasts,
eyes askew, strange pairings, tint and shade,
rough beasts lighting the dark gallery walls.
Brutal ceramics, sculptures, sketches –
swirls of a restless mind,
whatever worked. Then deep cuts of the palette knife
impatient impasto brushstrokes,
wood, paper any paintable surface to hand.
In this museum photos of his young son Paulo
seated on a scruffy donkey in the Jardin du Luxembourg.
I have walked those same gardens,
smiled at the sight of children
legs astride the small animal’s back,
hanging on to the reins for dear life.
We paused then before his brief Blue period – saw
the loneliness, melancholy, poverty before his spirits lifted
to Rose, when he painted himself out of that
dark corner and burst into exhuberant harlequins,
experimental clowns, canvases awash
prisimed with rainbows. His life. A rollercoaster.
We passed from the dim gallery
out to the terrazzo courtyard, glazed light
and the chiaroscuro effect of the Spanish sun
on a quiet January day, our minds sparking colour
in that golden hour before dusk.
Summer Nights
Long evenings stretch into night, it is summer,
night is short, twilight will last till ten pm.
dawn will break around four in the morning,
We watch as light lengthen,
how it jewels the grey of the city, how it
sparks rainbows in the fountains, makes golden
the flecks of mica in warm granite walls and burnishes
the Portland stone.
The city’s pulse, Plura Bella runs out seawards
under bridges guarded by their jealous river gods
and we drive out to the coast or the nearby
mountains to enjoy these extended days,
gifted as a reprieve from leaden winter.
We are released from the everyday, time to ourselves
from the bustle and busy,
from the eye-watering screens.
We can scan for horizons, see where skyline
and sea merges, rest our eyes on light,
smell the seaweed on the tideline, burst the brown
bladder-wrack with our toes and smell
the sudden sharp stink of ocean salt.
We keep an eye on the sinking sun,
marvel at the moon rising in the sky
cradling each other till summer’s done.
© Jean O’Brien
An award-winning poet, Jean’s 6th collection Stars Burn Regardless was published by Salmon Poetry (2022), her 7th collection Whole Cloth is almost ready. She was visiting lecturer/mentor to Carlow University, Pittesburgh winter 2025. She was Writer in Residence in 2022 in the Irish Cultural Centre in Paris and hold a Patrick Kavanagh Fellowship. She holds an M. Phil in cw/poetry from Trinity College, Dublin and tutors in the Irish Writers Centre and at post graduate level. In july 2026 she had a poem published in The Irish Times newspaper and broadcaste on RTE Radio 1.