Before - Sean O'Brien

Make over the alleys and gardens to birdsong,
the hour of not-for-an-hour. Lie still.
Leave the socks you forgot on the clothesline.
Leave slugs to make free with the pansies.
The jets will give Gatwick a miss
and from here you could feel the springs
wake by the doorstep and under the precinct
where now there is nobody frozenly waiting.
This is free time, in the sense that a handbill
goes cartwheeling over the crossroads
past stoplights rehearsing in private
and has neither witness nor outcome.
This is before the first bus has been late
or the knickers sought under the bed
or the first cigarette undertaken,
before the flush and cross word.
Viaducts, tunnels and motorways: still.
The mines and the Japanese sunrise: still.
The high bridges lean out in the wind
on the curve of their pinkening lights,
and the coast is inert as a model.
The wavebands are empty, the mail unimagined
and bacon still wrapped in the freezer
like evidence aimed to intrigue our successors.
The island is dreamless, its slack-jawed insomniacs
stunned by the final long shot of the movie,
its murderers innocent, elsewhere.
The policeman have slipped from their helmets
and money forgets how to count.
In the bowels of Wapping the telephones
shamelessly rest in their cradles.
The bomb in the conference centre’s
a harmless confection of elements
strapped to a duct like an art installation.
The Première sleeps in her fashion,
Her Majesty, all the princesses, tucked up
with the Bishops, the glueys, the DHSS,
in the People’s Republic of Zeds.
And you sleep at my shoulder, the cat at your feet,
and deserve to be spared the irruption
of if, but and ought, which is why
I declare this an hour or general safety
when even the personal monster –
example, the Kraken – is dead to the world
like the deaf submarines with their crewmen
spark out at their fathomless consoles.
No one has died. There need be no regret,
for we do not exist, and I promise
I shall not wake anyone yet.

Sean O'Brien. Emergency Kit. Edited by Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney. Faber & Faber, 2004.
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