Jean O'Brien - The Wind Blows Through

Jean O’Brien’s fifth collection her New & Selected was reprinted by Salmon Publishing in 2018. She was awarded the Patrick & Katherine Kavanagh Fellowship in 2017/18. An award winning poet she won the Arvon International Poetry Prize and the Fish International prize and was recently shortlisted for the Voices of War competition run by UCD Historical Dept. She holds an M.Phil in creative writing from Trinity College, Dublin and tutors in poetry/creative writing.

The Wind Blows Through

I.M. Deboragh Diggs poet, who jumped to her death from the Bleachers at Umass Stadium, Amherst in 2009.

the doors of my heart and scatters like sparrows at vespers, it sings through the Bleachers, soothes as my words surround me and envelopes me in a caul of freighted, supple air.

The oncoming night is filled with rooks heading home to roost. Vagrant, out of place they tumble through the thermals their harsh kaah-kaahkaah ran-tan sounds a rough music

that fills me with despair. Still spring, night comes early in these parts, I feel like Euclid with his elements and theorems. I am sure I could make a straight line out from here; be held

in a trapeze of making, of vibrations, and travel through the waves to some outer world beyond gravity, beyond profundity. I crack the bell of evening open and I fly

Tracking Device

I left home to travel north. Satnav will not speak to me.

I revert and use a map, which shows the bigger picture.

I arrive just as darkness falls, weary with the moving miles of road,

the rushing hedges, the streaming trees. I unpack and settle in.

Yet every time I open my iPhone it tells how long it would take me to get home,

depending on weather and traffic the time shifts from morning to afternoon.

The messages keep me tethered, electronic bread crumbs. Little pings to bring me back

Should I stray too far off track

Whelmed

Because they fly so low, you don’t hear the whish of wingbeats ‘till the last moment and when you do look up there they are, a flying cloud in V formation cumulus heavy, necks taut, outstretched with breath left to honk and that huge white wingspan making you gasp at the majesty, the loud insistence of displaced air in their wake and think of King Lir and his changeling children turned into swans by his rogue wife, swans for life. Picture them asleep at night on the black canal water floating white feather coracles leaving you dazed and whelmed in their tailwind.