Work 3

by Séamas Carraher

Mention now these
in their unredeemable stares
who swear with their sweat
worked long and harder
as cold as ice cut fog
into their chests
for these precious minutes
nailed like Hegel’s mask on
the cover of a book;
how we slaved and saved
each of these oddments.
You, who would give everything
but the meditation of ruin
leaving your ghost
to God
and your children to damp clay.
A book, a mothtorn cloth
of Engels facing a  vase of dead
flowers
rich in their assorted ruin
as if such trivia in the
unmentionable heart of our
insignificance
could wake history
a minute too soon,
believing in the quiet and
careless desperation
of dying men
(that it had all mattered):
a light pulled from its opaque
source
as also this, our antithesis
in these cheap and gaudy images
for us,
who are all men labouring
with their own despair.