for Wolfgang and Birgit

I failed to sleep last night, I failed to have the dreams
that would take me safe from one day into the next.

I failed to be brave, afraid of the train, its snout of steel
pushing out of the dark into the station at San Pietro,

its sides towering over us blue and white and filthy with night.
It hissed, cracked open, impatient, warm as a belly inside,

I was shaken as it took us like some fallen angel breaking
its teeth on a language too new and too earthly to speak.

I have opened the door to the day without faith in its miracle,
I will cough up the night from my lungs, the city will breathe

and I will see across on the opposite hillside a man on a balcony
move among his plants, touch them, sprinkle them, nodding.

My belly is soft, my head is a stone of my making, I report
that little is known, little is left, too much is imagined.

I think I might try now to go to a church and be prayerful.
I think I can see that the man on the balcony follows some rule.

I failed to sleep last night, after listening to my friends speak
of repairing, slowly, the falling-down church on the hill in their town,

as if too much would be lost, as if angels would drift unanchored
from this town unremembered without its dawn-lit shining omphalos.

Kevin Brophy

You woke with a headache
and opened the bedroom window blind.
You bent forward as morning light came in.
It fell on your belly and breasts
and your sleep maddened hair.
I could hear the sickness in your voice
as you accepted a salad bowl to throw up in
and two pills with breakfast.

The new sun tipped itself up over distant mountains
outside the kitchen window and slapped colour on the houses
across the slope from us, oranges and yellows,
a set of green-blinded windows,
and darker green tops of the thick trees behind.
Two gulls floated past the balcony
wondering what to do with themselves
now that the sun was out and a whole day promised.

Coffee, cereal, your emails, homework
all attended to at the table as the headache dissolved
magically you said, kissing me quickly
as you ran out late to your lessons across town.

The plants on the balcony know nothing of you.
They lean out over the traffic fumes below
and do their best to breathe and grow,
                            to do their part as we all do.

Kevin Brophy

This poem has not yet been written
and before it is I want to say I respect
the President of the United States,
the man himself and his office

and I respect what the people
mean when they say Democracy
though I do not know what this
might have to do with being armed

and having put these points like this
as plainly as possible
on the table here between us
I can warn you I might be saying tomorrow

or perhaps in a few days time
depending on my mood and inner music
that there will be
no agreement, no truce, no bipartisan understanding

and no poem
until the military ceases
to buy the bullets made in the precision workshops
of Missouri, Iran and Africa.

This poem, as you know, has not yet been written
and in protest at the militarisation of education,
work and death,
it might never be written or spoken.

You will understand what silence is
when this poem remains unwritten,
uncreated and forever unspoken.

But I want you to know
this poem, even if never written,
holds the President of Russia
in severe respect, the man himself and his office –

this is
in case you might misunderstand
what is meant
when what must be said fails to be spoken.

Kevin Brophy

For Marianne J Boruch and David Dunlap

We walk past the ruined past
pasted to the Academy’s cloister walls,
past broken Latin stones’ fractured inscriptions,
one fragment reading ‘OVE IS’,
and I know that though the sea is coming
and volcanoes are not finished with us,
crossing this garden in this courtyard in the evening
with a sentry in a box by the iron gate
watching black-masked fundamentalist
speeches on a laptop on his desk,
all seems to be falling into place
            temporarily and beautifully.

You say goodbye, we say goodbye,
and we drift away down a hillside
past a bar where young people under awnings
drink and talk into the evening, seeming
to know how to live deep into this night
how to make the harmless sounds of conversation.
We want to sit here too with them on the hillside,
a scooter waiting outside
and an unearthed monstrous stone foot or hand
propped artfully somewhere nearby.

The bluestone cobbles tire our feet as we go down
to a tram where more people out of the night
talk, drink, lean a cheek on the black window glass
of a swinging electric lozenge whose brakes hiss.

As a child I was impatient for night to come properly down,
as if doubt could infect the universe if dusk lingered.
Doubt was the rope that tied hands behind backs.
Doubt was the door left half open.
Doubt would keep you from the confessional.
I dragged blankets over my head,
wore soft napped cotton pyjamas
as the night at last came down over me neatly.
I wanted it there, then I wanted it gone
when I opened my eyes.

Night, larger than any cathedral, larger than our suburb,
was the thing squatting over us more ancient than childhood,
always interested only in itself.

Tomorrow the sky will reveal a smog-grey streak
swiped across those distant mountains.
We will walk to the top of a nearby hill,
I will remember your legs over me in the night,
your shoulder against mine,
we cannot untangle these bodies, their unreadable parts,
we are Gullivers to the ropes and threads of the night.

We will walk to the top of a nearby hill
and remember something
as the hill falls away below a low wall
all the way down to a river that rolls like a prisoner
in its narrow cell until its mouth spits the broken
vowels and letters of the past out in an unheard howl to the sea.

This night in the Academy’s cloister
we passed a beautiful stone coffin,
the sliced off tops of columns,
a cocktail party under arches,

and we feel right, we are right,
we step out into the night
and drift down the hillside past a bar
where people sit in semi-dark talking
of the life they have or would have,
glancing up at us as we walk among them,
the night perfect, us perfect too.

 The sea is moving strangely, insistent,
and volcanoes are considering
what sounds they might make.
The enormous ruins are held down
and scraped back by many bony hands.

The sirens we will hear tomorrow
from the park where we walk
will never cease, they will go round and round
sweeping up whatever they can in their path.

Kevin Brophy