stone-lonely

Seething: 

Then you wore me out.
Stone at the end of
an accusing finger,
flinched at your fist.

Salt-block
rasped by a tongue.
Your tongue,
prince of my dithering.

Now I'm a tree,
my own patient roots.
Freed from you,
thin in the wind.

Dockleaves dancing
in the dawn
and autumn rain.
A stone alone.

Wind in a tree
that made me
what I am: mad
and stone-lonely.

Scorched by August
in that foreign place.
December excluded
from the songs.

..............................

You can lap against
my absence forever,
beat your wings
in the dark of my leaving.

Alone on a crag
when you joy to the peewit,
remember I left you,
unhinged my dandling hand.

When you crouch alone
in the pillars of grass
broken by moonlight,
remember, rabbit-catcher,

the curse of anger
is in you. The shame
of fury and a harrowing
lust for control.

I wouldn't go with you
down that road. Now
we are both alone
by rivers we love.



Barry MacSweeney, from 'Flamebearer' in Wolf Tongue: Selected Poems 1965-2000 (Tarset, Northumberland: Bloodaxe, 2003), pp. 174-75.