Five Poems by Damen O'Brien

 

The Drawing of Lots

 

We drew lots in the beginnings of the world:

all the animals that were gathered there in peace,

the swiftest and the wisest and the bravest,

the cunning and the foolish, steadfast, patient,

each to a straw, starting from the long rush

plucked by the solid, didactic elephant, to the

spear chosen by the regal lion, the green blade

for the gentle panda and the last withered stalk

left to me, but if I was to be sly or wicked, if

I was to be responsible for the fall of Man,

I did not wish for pity or for sympathy;

scourge me out of Ireland, have the hero

fight me in his cradle, shudder to my touch,

I have never borne the heavy burden of

expectation, never failed a trust, betrayed a faith,

if I was ever evil, it was by nature as proclaimed

for me, if I am good, it is with a surprise; those

friends I have are true because their amity

was not won by looks or reputation, they have

carried their own strokes of grass, their own lots;

to be pretty as a peacock, or clever as a

monkey, to be stubborn as a mule is truly harder,

for the long ages of the world since we all chose,

are a straight-jacket and a yoke for the mighty,

I will make my kinship with the scorpion and toad,

I have not yet begun to swallow my own tail.

Medium Testimony

 

in the twenty-fifth year of my age

I find myself to be a dromedary

petit testimony – Ern Malley

 

Perhaps at any age a terrible thing:

my profile searing out across the sand,

with humps where I’d thought to see

my back, straight as the river Nile.

No matter what the animal, perhaps,

disclosures such as this are bound

to give anyone a shock, but heraldic

or heroic, if you could choose to

find yourself devolving in your prime,

turning into a lion or a griffin,

something inspiring, would be best.

However, oversights like this, mistakes

of fact so astronomical, as this one,

as Lady Bracknell said of the loss

of one parent, may be regarded as

misfortune, to lose both looks like

carelessness, and so it is with camelhood.

What could my friends have thought

when I put away pint after sloshing pint?

Did they snigger? Share a knowing look?

Make some remark I’ll wake tonight

in sweat, to hear recast with meaning?

Or my mother? She must have known.

My tendency to spit, my platelike feet,

which needed special shoes in school.

Keep the news away from him, she

may have told my doctor, let him dream.

‘Ships of the Desert’ so I’m told,

flowing majestically across the Gobi.

Well, at least I’m not Gregor Samsa’s

beetle, nor Seth Brundle’s man-fly.

I have my dignity.  We each deceive

ourselves, we each rewrite our ending.

There’s many I have met that were

not men, though they looked like men,

many animals that deserved to pass,

but could not.  It’s early in my life,

I’m still young, I could wake to wisdom,

I could yet find out that I am

a butterfly dreaming he was a man

learning he was a dromedary.

The Aerodynamics of Mythical Creatures

 

Spare a thought for Pegasus

whose antecedents were ridiculous:

child of pigeon and of horse;

his stubby little wings, forlorn,

could never get the myth airborne.

The truth is easy to deny,

but pigs might fly.

 

When the battlefield has its levy,

vanquished heroes expect a bevy

of buxom Valkyries, but they’re top-heavy.

All the footage will go viral:

helmet-first in a death spiral.

They won’t reach Valhalla when they die,

but pigs might fly.

 

As vampire bat, the feat’s no bother,

but as vampire, Vlad could hardly hover,

poised above his mortal lover,

the downdraft above her neck

of all that air, would make a wreck

of any romance he might try,

but pigs might fly.

 

The thing about the fearsome dragon,

despite the stories and the bragging,

its weight would have its middle sagging.

This cross between hummingbird and alligator

would leave a smoking crater.

Smaug’s reputation is a lie,

but pigs might fly.

 

Superman could not escape

the effect of icing on his drapes,

nor waterlogged and mildewed capes,

nor atmospheric decompression in his tights,

weather would be his kryptonite.

On long-haul flights he’d lose his dye,

but pigs might fly.

 

No matter what the motivation,

a cow can’t get the elevation

to leap the moon, nor acceleration.

Sufficient thrust is not a riddle

that could be solved by Cat or Fiddle.

Bernoulli’s Principle does not apply,

but pigs might fly.

 

An angel’s pectorals would be so great

to flap their wings at sufficient rate

to lift their robes, their halo, their holy weight.

No chubby little cherubin

could land their aircraft on a pin.

No heavenly hosts proclaiming on high,

but pigs might fly.

 

Witches cackling through the night

are too eldritch and too upright

to withstand crosswinds during flight.

Nor ghosts, their bedsheets billow and stall

and can’t make any progress at all.

The smallest gust would send them awry,

but pigs might fly.

 

What strange shapes the mind’s eye found,

most will not get off the ground.

But mythic aeronauts abound.

By catapult, or in a crate,

in the back of a Boeing hauling freight,

If dogs and apes in rockets can, so might I.

Pigs might fly.

The Market

 

The horror of it all: the women press the fontanelles

of fruit, the men raise the peaches to their nostril’s flair, the

womboks vape, the icebergs steam, the mushrooms blink

in the muddy bins, there’s rot somewhere among the onions,

whose horny toes and fingers reach, the yeasty noses,

ears and jowls of potatoes, severely permed cauliflowers,

woody broccoli, their stems yellow as teeth, herds, prisons

of apples, penned next to sunburnt oranges, the horror of it all,

the waxy lascivious bananas, the weighing, the measuring, the

suffocating bags of blue-faced berries, the milling too, the slow

negotiations of battalioned trolleys, the closeness and the rubbing and

the nodding in the aisles, the naked artificial light, the horror and

the terror of it all and worse than all the haggles and the signs,

the Mayan pyramid of melons like a pile of babies’ skulls.

Tyranny

 

That spring when another country’s square filled

with the earnest and the sure and the certain,

and the newly ungoverned swung their killed

patriarch and his family from the palace curtains,

I knew one day we would look from our balcony

where my husband makes his speeches, and our

countrymen would crowd below, but not to see

my husband speak, but to test the impotence of power.

 

That day the growing child inside me turned

as if in prophesy and I felt a distant fear

creep closer, for no matter the speech, I’ve learned

democracy has a million voices but no ears.

Now here I wait in the new spring, in the nursery,

while my husband listens to the raging of the un-ruled

and waits for the unfranchised and the free,

to realise that a king is equal to his fool.

 

Now the burning has begun, like old regret,

and ash fills the smoky sky, the anxious night,

tomorrow, these bloody rooms may hold a secret:

whatever the majority decides to do is right.

Damen O'Brien is a multi-award-winning Australian poet.  Damen's prizes include the Moth Poetry Prize, the Peter Porter Poetry Prize, the Newcastle Poetry Prize and the Magma Judges Prize.  Damen's poems have been published all around the world including Poetica Review, Poetry Wales, Touchstone Literary Review, Antipodes and Atlanta Review.  Damen's first book of poetry, Animals With Human Voices, was published in 2021 through Recent Work Press.