When the winding sheet of history coils
Stiffly around handrail and chimney stack,
I’ll be reminded it’s no longer enough
To write poetry, to build monuments
From toothed stanzas to the splintering ego,
Or to the first, vinegary taste of love.
It will recall itself—the bruised brickwork,
Election posters slung to every lamppost,
Grimacing T.D.s, slogans promising national
Reform, dotted strategically all over Dublin.
Flakes of arctic light, a needle’s sweet-toothed
Glint, lie trampled beneath a car tyre.
Fanlights crown the Ascendant doors that I
Have passed in late-night bewilderment,
Every footstep its own keepsake. But for now,
I move with a scavenger’s subtlety,
Ignoring the chained, sneering neon, panic-
Stricken cars, the Beckett an incandescent harp,
the Ha’penny, arched like an arrowless bow.
Omnivorous-eyed drunks swigging cans
On a boardwalk bench, wastewater
Quenching the tumid Liffey below.
It’s a world apart, the volta of urban fever clotted
On wrought iron railings, College Green bruised
By rain, by rainfall’s acid cleaver, statues joisted
Like deadpan colossi: Goldsmith, eyes fixed
On a book, Burke in picture-perfect solemnity,
Grattan posing with imperious bravado
Against the capital’s daily rage: a bastion
Of multiplicity now, of manifold strangers.
All of this, and more: from the hard man
I pretend to be, to the anxious boy I remain,
Trying to know these streets better than any map
Or Sat Nav, cutting through shortcut and laneway,
Hard-earned wisdom advising me to keep
The head down. This century’s first, exhausted
Decade is over. The city’s motto,
And its Latinized hauteur, mean nothing now.
And all that’s left? The blindness of rivers.
Fanlights. Glinting needles. The sneer of neon.
Ascendant doors. Brickwork. Laneways. Chimney
Stacks. Rain. Obiedentia. Civium. Urbis. Felicitas.
This splintering stanza. Fog. Darkness.
About the Creator
Daniel Wade
Daniel Wade is a poet and playwright from Dublin. His debut play 'The Collector' at the end of January of this year. He is the author of the poetry e-chapbook 'Iceberg Relief'. His spoken-word album is 'Embers and Earth.
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