Shishir 2022 Poems - Oisín Breen

 

The Melody of Order
By Oisín Breen

 

The apex
Is a seed
Of death,

 

And my love is,
Love for none, they say,
Because of this emptiness:

 

The long layer of tedium
Surrounding us, its surface flat,
It commandeers our lives.

 

But I know the truth.
It is as true of predator
As it is of prey:

 

In brittleness we find form,
In shapelessness order,
And in being lost, a home.

 

4² by 5

 

With us in flight,
Time, it passes by,
But we remember the dead,
The singing stones,
The traces they leave,
And my tenuous grasp
Of heartbeats fast, and slow,
Is a tightrope of chaos,
Which sunders us
In the face of memory,
So we ask, 'what is i?'

 

There is a void, also,
In which we walk.

 

It opens with fire,
And leaves us spent.

 

Oisín Breen, an Irish poet, academic, journalist, and now a Best of the Net Nominee, is published in 98 journals in 20 countries, including in About Place, Door is a Jar, Northern Gravy, North Dakota Quarterly, Books Ireland, The Tahoma Literary Review, La Piccioletta Barca, Decomp, New Critique, and Reservoir Road. Breen’s second collection, Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín will be published by Beir Bua Press, January 2023. It follows his well received debut, 'Flowers, All Sorts, in Blossom.

 

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