Four Poems by Teresa O’ Connor Diskin

 

I Have News for You

after Tony Hoagland

 

There are people who see promise in denuded branches and black buds

 and others who see only the stranglehold of Winter

 

There are people who look at a stone wall and don’t think of poverty and the stoniness

of the West and of the hands that built it and where they are now

 

There are others who look out at the sea and think of childhood revelry

and yet others who see only a cavernous graveyard

 

There are persons who look at a gnarled old tree and don’t think of who planted it

and how many have sheltered and found shade beneath it through the years

 

There are those who see the world in monochrome at the expense of today’s joy

and tomorrow’s epiphany

 

And there are acquisitive human beings who like ticks with suctorial apparatus

imbibe every ounce possible from their subjects

 

And others who see growing old as something that happens to everybody else

but not themselves

 

I have news for you –

 

There are people who have come to an early realisation

That life is no test flight for me or you and there is no recall on time

 

And every morning they embrace life with gusto

and are thankful for every moment of being

 

 

Sonnet Without End                                                            

after Francois Villon

 

I stand in shock at the sound of silence

As warm as toast and head to toe I freeze

While at home I’m in a foreign land

Near burning bright, I shiver

Bare as windswept rock, clothed like a sheep

I smile in tears and hope without promise

Consolation I take from sorrowful symphonies

Gladdened, and yet of contentment I have none

I am able but lacking in sinew and vigour

For me there’s nothing definite but what’s unsure

Nothing hidden but what’s crystal clear

I have no doubt now except the surety

of no love without pain, no beginning without end

 

 

The Long Now 

                                                                     

The slow coach of youth speed merchant of age

In a tangled web like tofu eighty-six billion fire

Big energy consumers in the domed upper room

 

Subjective mind time perceived differently

One second: the number of a Caesium atom’s vibrations

over nine billion, only one lost in a hundred million years

 

Four hundred atomic clocks around the world

Marking time of a future civilisation for ten thousand years

The Clock of the Long Now

 

The past didn’t happen and the future will never come

Will tick once a year, bong once a century and the cuckoo

will come out once every millennium

 

 

Staring Po-faced at Us                                                         

 

A body of atoms seven thousand septillion maybe

Hydrogen    oxygen    carbon    nitrogen    calcium    mostly

 

Cell death a genetically regulated process

At the atomic level we are all hitched

One atom in everyone’s lungs

at any moment was in Caesar’s

as he exhaled his final breath

 

Why do we always turn our attention to everything else?

About the same as our birth weight our ashes

Teresa O’ Connor Diskin’s work has been published in Skylight 47, The Galway Review, Dodging the Rain, Vox Galvia, Spilling Cocoa Over Martin Amis, Irish Farmers Journal, Reach Poetry, Drawn to the Light Press, Mag Pie, Poetry in Lockdown Archive, U.C.D. and she was shortlisted for Poems for Patience 2019 and 2022.

Her work is forthcoming in Dawntreader.