Three Poems by Clare O’Brien
Welcome to Haworth
With time collapsing, Keeper runs on hills where walkers
vie to see the waterfall, the chair, to breathe Top Withens air.
They shrink from his unleashed greeting. A woman squeals,
holding aloft her frightened cockapoo. They shake their heads
as they descend, watching the girl who does not bag up
her mastiff’s shit.
And Emily walks,
mud-spattered and alone but for her dog, wondering why
the moors are full of her family name. She does not own
this Way, this weather, wuthering or not. The land she knows
is bristling with Berghaus, Hunter, Karrimor, their footprints
branded in the soil. Space and time have sprung a leak,
and all the layers run together. Past and present circle,
fearful like the sheep, reluctant to rest on sponsored
memorial benches to the lost. Emily and Keeper walk,
impervious to Arctic fleece and waterproof, through the
council car park at Penistone, out into the unnamed place
where nothing matters.
Stray Dog in the Rain
It has been wet for days. The sun is a fading memory,
squeezed beneath these swaddling clouds. Compressed,
her outline smudges blood and mud across the sodden sky.
Her skin turns black and blue under the violence of the storm.
The weather is dictating terms. Invading ocean roars, heaves
its bulk onto the land, drowning out the little cries of birds.
Her throat shapes anxious sounds beneath her tattered coat.
No-one here will hear her prayers. Stone deaf in its rage,
the supine land will lie in wait. Soon it will have its say.
It coils its spring. It does not care what becomes of her.
Conscience
In the dream, a nurse calls from a place
I’ve never heard of, to ask why I never
see my mother, dead this quarter century.
They tell me she keeps asking for me.
Or I meet my father, gone almost
as long, silver-haired in California.
He’s there to build bridges, he says,
though he never crossed the ocean.
So when I dreamed I’d killed my child,
dead of thirst, or heat, or hunger
in the back of a clapped-out car, I thought
it was the boy that I miscarried, years ago.
No. This body, starved and limp, was yours.
I blew away the husk of what you were,
the Peter Pan I’d ceased to care for,
the magic creature I forgot to feed.
I think you feared the withering of love.
Out here, I thought that you’d forsaken me.
The distance stretched, filled up with fearful
noise. We could not hear each other call.
Once you let go of my hand, I left you in
the dark. But like the others I have lost,
steadily, you dream your long way back,
and while I sleep, you make me bear the cost.
………………..
Previously PR to a politician and PA to a rock star, Clare now lives noisily in Scotland, writing her first novel, 'Light Switch'. Her work has recently appeared in Mslexia, The London Reader, Spelk, Cabinet of Heed, Northwords Now and anthologies from The Emma Press and Hedgehog Poetry.
Twitter: @clareobrien