Jack Grady, Always Watching and other poems

Jack Grady is a war veteran and a founder member of the Irish-based Ox Mountain Poets. His poetry has been published in Ireland, the United Kingdom, France, the United States, Canada, Indonesia, Portugal, India, and Nepal. He has read at international poetry events, including the Festival International Poésie Marrakech, in Morocco; Poesia a Sul in Olhão, Portugal; and in Seville, Spain, at an event honouring Spanish poet Emilio Durán. His poetry collection, Resurrection, was published by Lapwing Publications in October 2017 and was nominated for the T.S. Eliot Prize.

Thank you Jack Grady for this gathering of poets. The generosity of the poets to share their unpublished work without a fee with the rest of the world is the very heart of what poetry is…lyricism nurtured with raw wisdom, honesty and a generosity that defies logic. In these days of hardship it is the songs of the poets that keep us alive to life itself. - Mark Ulyseas, Poetry is…therefore I am.

I am not a guitar or castanets or the clacking heels of flamenco dancers nor am I any sound they dare make in the future dystopia. I am not the rifles raised or their bolts driven home or their aim taken nor am I the blindfolds of those soon to be shot in too many nations to be mentioned. Nor am I the Madre de Dios or the Madre del Diablo or whatever last cry the doomed will make. I am that moment when you raised your shoulders and stuck out your chest that moment when you sucked in your breath like a lion and roared that moment when at last you grasped the reins of your life that moment you lived and the lies died.

Always Watching

Almost everywhere the poster. It may change year by year, but it is always there. Sometimes it looks different, perhaps painted another colour. Other times it seems the same, though the name of the virus portrayed may change. But always at its centre the eye, an eye with an x-ray stare that strips you to the bones of your guilt as you walk by to another place where it stares again as it watches you approach the lamppost where it is mounted or a bank that no longer deals in money but only in a different sort of currency, your credit based on your worth as a serf to the invisible owners of the eye, watching, always watching that your steps don’t stray out of line.

With Eyes Wide Shut

‘…sometimes the wind…gave a broad roar around the traveller, as if all Nature were laughing him to scorn….’ – Nathaniel Hawthorne, Young Goodman Brown

Was it a warning he caught, or was that a plead in her eyes, as he vanished in the magic of a Witch-Sabbath night, and, like Salem’s Goodman Brown, heeded neither faith in God nor in Faith, his wife? Or was that a whip in her words lashing him from home, or was it the wind laughing him to scorn?

He drove so focused on his self-obsessed road to the treasure marked X on the map to success that he never looked back until too late to catch his wife embracing the moon. But he sensed he’d been duped by the devil or himself; that his wife was a beguiler, a mask on a snake;

sensed that his life was but the horns he must wear until death woke him up from his nightmare.

Cape Cod Crucifixion

Motionless like an aborted foetus immersed in a jar of formaldehyde the pup of a Great White Shark was betrayed by a Judas of an ebb tide and even the sharpness of its bared teeth could not free it from its Golgotha of still water the breathing of the shark’s gills cut off in the trap of a liquid coffin walled in rock