The Eyes of a Child, their Eloquence, Width & Weaponry

by Séamas Carraher

Something startled that child. Breaking its run into a knot.
Not to name it, in its furious strategies.

Behold a street, warm as my own, so
emptied of its compulsion in
transport
its mastery in mechanics,
a street, cold as my own, emptied like a hollow barrel
in a hollow time, her wide-eyed recognition
like a war.

Something resurrected this child, like wind
breaking out in voices,
unnamed in my other cruelty
of mother and father,
much like the untarmacadamed choice of being
other.

So is our great coming in futures.
Its being is the shortest distance between two wars.
To be limbs must be the heresy of wages, to translate,
not to name it in its losses, like
a hunger in our civilian conflicts.

Mother, then love me in their cruel killing.
To be child in all rainfall and invisible bureaucracy,
to be lit like a sniper in her unprotected love
to be plastic-and-bulleted in our remains.

All abstraction and lie is chissled
with sweat and years work
from the unformed mass
that is ours here in our dirty silence,
all air to this blood, to be muted
and full.

Such is our machinelike production,
These contradictions of love.

Not to name it in our crippling, creator, clay.
Something startled that child
broke with furious families.
Behold it, straight in its zygote, worker, human.
See it, body. It surrounds your terror at its own creation.
Always a great synthesis in contradiction. Of past and future.
And of other lies.

Accept this birth, as easy as her
plough furrows corpses (past and future,
thought in her unthinking present).

Children of the world’s proletariat!
Sons and daughters of steel and poverty.
Infant of mortal statistics, malformed in theology,
your mouth like an equation or a crime.
Accept nothing!

All this toil has born produce, dry mother,
like a gambler in my absence
i could give you a vision.
It is like a tumour in your core fat with reason.
It is like a myth in our sickness, see it
spin with the grace of a tractor,
also the inevitable, like a cement mixer.

Accept nothing!
Yet your lacking in self.
Like this to the right
we censor ourselves,
like this, both right and left,
all time here is the hell of our choice.

i can’t name it in my guilt
that eats its dead
buried like a self possessed with memory.
Something startled that child. It breaks.
Its face emptied like the wind.

It is all words and less.  Like poverty.
A dead weed that grows in the gutter.
It is all words and emptied like faith.
In its hand it is like a light.
It is like a light shining.
It is shining like a light
striking her face

before the sky falls down.
Them weapons in peacetime.

It is still not named. Not finance, tax,
pension book, poorhouse.
This is the corpse’s history, wordless, like a grin,
like a great hunger in the mind. And
dead on its feet.

Accept nothing. First!

The charity of objects transfix you, child,
in your lessons on democracy, like the Fall,
(this hunger unforgiven)
in this corporation of your false tenure
(this hunger half forgotten)
i can’t name it:
bank clerk, labourer, streetsweeper, academic!

Something startled the child. Like the boredom of an
explosion. In our amnesia.
Startled by grace in your dying,
by grace in each enigma of growth, (husband in its
brilliant filth, strong muscle, tumour, potato blight),
who now, mother in your depression, wraps the street
in a frugal mystery,
mother with no mouth for death:

here is a supermarket carpark,
this is a wall of cracked plaster and
beside these slum walls of red brick,
unlike our prisons the sky still opens
(alternating history’s nightmare with dreams).

i tell you now, in
my human and political rigour,
in my sacklike children, and broken heads,
all these ghettoes are wars,
all wrapped now, in mercy, unsayable,
to be the choice of discovery, to vomit this question
in the dark. Like a dinner.

It is hidden to be a nothing in these revelations.
Then this thing startling (much better than a flag),
O, this human child, in its furious winds
(also broken at birth of its immortal)
and all our humble exclusion,
and these needs if its lungs find air,
and here and unnamed
in these other cruelties, of master and wife,

not nameless, no,
the first word, here, now, crawling
in desperation, like from crumbling brick
from all our ghettoes
of who you once were, child, in
my mere epoch ago, then
it was like yesterday, as
now, startled, in brilliant being.

Almost like a weapon.