Collaboration - Ciarán Carson

I am being paraded through the streets with my head shaved,

with no memory of what I have done to deserve this.

I run a gauntlet of women who call me slut and whore,

staggering under their fusillade of accusation:

What stories did I tell, what lies? What names did I reveal?

What men did I sleep with? What did I do? For what reward?

Or in a catacomb deep under Paris they press gloves

of barbed wire on to my bare hands, and when the wounds have healed

they point to the brambles left on my palms, saying, Surely

these lines of head and heart and mind are those of a traitor.

When you wake I hold you tight, saying, It’s only a dream,

the language of dream has nothing to do with that of life.

And as eventually you sink back into the deep well

of sleep, I wonder if by my words I have betrayed you.

Ciarán Carson. "Collaboration". For All We Know, 2008.

Light Pollution - Nick Laird

You’re the patron saint of elsewhere,
jet-lagged and drinking apple juice,
eyeing, from the sixth-floor window,
a kidney-shaped swimming pool
the very shade of Hockney blue.

I know the left-hand view of life,
I think, and it’s as if I have, of late,
forgotten something in the night —
I wake alone and freezing,
still keeping to my side.

Each evening tidal night rolls in
and the atmosphere is granted
a depth of field by satellites,
the hammock moon, aircraft
sinking into Heathrow.

Above the light pollution,
among the drift of stars tonight
there might be other traffic —
migrations of heron and crane,
their spectral skeins convergent

symbols, arrow, weather systems,
white flotillas bearing steadily
towards their summer feeding.
A million flapping sheets!
Who knows how they know?

The aids to navigation might be
memory and landmarks,
or the brightest constellations.
Perhaps some iron in the blood
detects magnetic north.

I wish one carried you some token,
some Post-it note or ticket,
some particular to document
this instant of self-pity —
His Orphic Loneliness, with Dog.

Advances? None miraculous,
though the deadness of the house
will mean your coming home
may seem an anticlimax
somehow, and a trespass.

Death of a Naturalist

All year the flax-dam festered in the heart
Of the townland; green and heavy headed
Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.
Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.
Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles
Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.
There were dragon-flies, spotted butterflies,
But best of all was the warm thick slobber
Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water
In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring
I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied
Specks to range on window-sills at home,
On shelves at school, and wait and watch until
The fattening dots burst into nimble-
Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how
The daddy frog was called a bullfrog
And how he croaked and how the mammy frog
Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was
Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too
For they were yellow in the sun and brown
In rain.
Then one hot day when fields were rank
With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs
Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges
To a coarse croaking that I had not heard
Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.
Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked
On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:
The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat
Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.
I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings
Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew
That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it. 

Seamus Heaney, 1939-2013