Oisín Breen

Caesura

All we love, today,
Is drenched and bleary,
And we are
As temporal as a poem.

Yet unlike words, for us,
Sequence is no prerequisite state,
Instead it is the onus, on us, the steady hand
At the tiller, too, that makes all action incumbent.

Yet tonight we must sit together to remember
Our dreams, and those fantasies we lost, in time,
Now that our cities are empty except for feathers
And blood, and the grey ley lines we travelled once.

So it is, I weep blood under the crimson-bloom
Of red leaf maple trees, crossing myself
With a ritual of spent stars shattering in the sky,
And I know the ceaselessness of time.

The End Anew to End

Death is a snare, and we the trapped hare –
Senses in lieu of limbs bared like torn muscle
In steel jaw-traps – suffering
Under a merciless gloaming of the soul
Which racks even the flesh of children at play –
They in pirouettes – those shadow dancers
In the dusk, of harvest time – realizing
In one long day they’ll race each other’s heartbeats
To a standstill, and pull flecks of hay
From each other’s temples, laughing;
Then one of each pair will fatten with the weight
Of another marked utterance of life wrought unto being –
For they, like us – hareish – watch the fires burn
And traps snap – senses again in lieu of limbs –
Racked with fulsome distemper,
And each mile fled is marked by a funereal stone.

But one marker is harder to traverse than the rest,
Because when your mother dies the tether snaps,
And something is gone that will never return.

But in loss there is also the renaissance of stillness:
One heartbeat in which to live, one vision, one mind,
And a coalescence – Our footsteps illumined
By what we may yet become.

So with one heartbeat,
One steady moment of exultant pleasure,
In rapture,
I am become the sum of my parts,
And beyond it,
The end anew to end.

A poet, part-time academic in narratological complexity, and financial journalist, Dublin born Oisín Breen's widely reviewed debut collection, ‘Flowers, all sorts in blossom, figs, berries, and fruits, forgotten’ was released Mar. 2020.

Breen has been published in a number of journals, including About Place, the Blue Nib, Books Ireland, the Seattle Star, Modern Literature, La Piccioletta Barca, the Bosphorus Review of Books, the Kleksograph, In Parentheses, the Madrigal, and Dreich magazine.

Twitter: @Breen

https://www.pw.org/directory/writers/oisin_breen