Seán Hewitt
I.
There are knives in the night –
ghosts, the air sword-fighting
with itself. I wake alone, call
the lift and descend in its box
of light to the empty street,
somewhere on the cusp
of a dream, passing through
the turnstile’s white iron star
to the field, bladed with ice,
and then I hear it… the dark clicking
the sockets of the hawthorns,
and in the holm-oaks, a dull
thwack of bone on bone, the rush
of leaves as a branch is flung
and shattered: the young deer
rutting, one shadow hurled
into the next, and I am cleaved
in the sweat, in the steam
of their bodies. Now, again,
I break as they lock the cross
of their sex in place. Who is it
that splinters out and steps
towards them? What new soul
is fractured from the sound?
II.
For years in secret I had longed
to shake the safehold, to cast
myself among the battery
as though love in its arms
held me back; and here
in the aftermath, stampeded,
I found a crow’s egg fallen
from the nest, smeared
among the broken
stems of yellow archangel
I knelt to – the furred hoods
of the flower held over
the streaked red tongues –
their little pietàs of pollen
dashed on the soil like the ends
of my wanting, and I was meshed
in guardianship –
the desolation of the hooves –
all the soft parts blood powers
through – and I came home
to find you waiting. All night,
like God into a flower, like God
into a bird, I tried to throw myself
out of myself and into my word.
III.
In autumn I will come back,
alone, for the snapped
antler, the blown prostate
of a chestnut shell, yellowed
and bitter underfoot,
and see only the trees
ruining over lacerated
ground. And I will recall
the bulge of the stag’s
throat sliding up with each
grunt hollow, and push
my fingers into their lashed
wood for the musk
of those hot glands,
the stain of urine smeared
from the furry sheath,
and taste in it
a memory of violence,
its urgent expenditure
here, where now
mist and quiet
are the only wanderers
copulating in fall’s
patient, declining land.
SÉAN HEWITT was born in 1990. His debut collection, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2020. He is a book critic for The Irish Times and teaches Modern British & Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. Tongues of Fire was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, a Dalkey Literary Award, and won The Laurel Prize in 2021.