For Pat Costelloe, d. 2026
The downy birches shed their skins –
the air a thicket of drifting trees.
The leaves are jagged paddles, thinly green,
somehow filtering the star’s heat
that falls invisibly in sheets
about our bodies, weighs our breath.
The Bronze-Age bog-men felled them
with affection, laid them out
in measured strips
with dexterous, ceremonial gentleness:
the birches, downed, became a trail,
whole days of hungry, hissing wetland
fixed; they made the sink-holes passable.
This one, squatly shining, never still,
I sometimes walk to listen under:
when the grey light lifts, in any weather,
it has, I think,
an almost audible shimmer.
Some passing
people are much the same.
Of them and it, I wonder –
how deep the dark? How far forever?
I tread your day-lines lightly, neighbour.
The man with no name remembers his home.
A former winner of the Cúirt New Irish Writing Award and the Fish Poetry Prize, Ciarán O'Rourke is a poet from Dublin. His second collection, Phantom Gang, was longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2023. His third collection, Prophetstown, is published by The Irish Pages Press.
More work by Ciarán O'Rourke
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