Sinéad Morrissey Poems

In my dream the dead have arrived
to wash the windows of my house.
There are no blinds to shut them out with.
...

Hyde Park, 1936. Cold enough for scarves and hats
among the general populace, but not for the fifteen thousand women
from the League of Health and Beauty performing callisthenics
on the grass. It could be snowing, and they of Bromley‐Croydon,
...

A soldier returned from a war
was how my P6 spelling book put it: I saw
cripples with tin cans for coins
in dusty scarlet, back from some spat of Empire.
...

In other noises, I hear my children crying -
in older children playing on the street
past bedtime, their voices buoyant
in the staggered light; or in the baby
...

The wind and its instruments were my secret teachers.
In Podolskaya Street I played piano for my mother
- note for note without a music sheet - while the wind
in the draughty flat kept up: tapping its fattened hand
against the glass, moaning though the stove, banging
a door repeatedly out on the landing -
the ghost in the machine of Beethoven's Two Preludes
Through All the Major Keys, that said they lied.

Later I stood in a wheat field and heard the wind make music
from everything it touched. The top notes were the husks:
fractious but nervous, giddy, little-voiced,
while underneath a strong strange melody pulsed
as though the grain was rigging, or a forest.

In all my praise and plainsong I wrote down
the sounds of a man's boots from behind the mountain.
...

was not like last winter, we said, when winter
had ground its iron teeth in earnest: Belfast
colder than Moscow and a total lunar eclipse
hanging its Chinese lantern over the solstice.
Last winter we wore jackets into November
and lost our gloves, geraniums persisted,
our new pot-bellied stove sat unlit night
after night and inside our lungs and throats,
embedded in our cells, viruses churned out
relaxed, unkillable replicas of themselves
in the friendlier temperatures. Our son
went under. We'd lie awake, not touching,
and listen to him cough. He couldn't walk
for weakness in the morning. Thoracic,
the passages and hallways in our house
got stopped with what we would not say -
how, on our wedding day, we'd all-at-once
felt shy to be alone together, back
from the cacophony in my tiny, quiet flat
and surrounded by flowers.
...

My son's awake at ten, stretched out along
his bunk beneath the ceiling, wired and watchful.
The end of August. Already the high-flung
daylight sky of our Northern solstice dulls
earlier and earlier to a clouded bowl;
his Star of David lamp and plastic moon
have turned the dusk to dark outside his room.

Across the Lough, where ferries venture blithely
and once a cruise ship, massive as a palace,
inched its brilliant decks to open sea -
a lighthouse starts its own nightlong address
in fractured signalling; it blinks and bats
the swingball of its beam, then stands to catch,
then hurls it out again beyond its parallax.

He counts each creamy loop inside his head,
each well-black interval, and thinks it just for him -
this gesture from a world that can't be entered:
the two of them partly curtained, partly seen,
upheld in a sort of boy-talk conversation
no one else can hear. That private place, it answers,
with birds and slatted windows -I've been there.
...

Ingrid in her shawl's been here since nine,
burdening the tables on loan
from the church downstairs with Babushka dolls
and caviar, handkerchiefs and wine

from Yugoslavia, Bulgarian perfume.
My brother and I ask for a job
and are handed pink-and-white posters
of Peace & Détente to decorate the room.

It's trickier than we thought
to stick them straight so secretly we give up.
Almost everyone's smoking.
In the background, "Kalinka" on cassette

belted out by Red Army Choir
wobbles towards its peak. There's tea,
coffee, Irish stew, and a cool display
of anti-Mrs Thatcher paraphernalia -

pens in the shape of nails for her coffin
we'll buy and use in school.
Shop stewards come, and sympathisers
who, once a year, like Christians,

demonstrate their faith, the odd
bewildered lured-in shopper looking for soap,
or socks, but mostly it's just us:
Card Carriers and the Kids Thereof,

filling up the air with fevered talk. By four,
Rosemary Street's ablaze in the solstice dark.
We pack what's left of the wooden trains and vodka
into crates for another year and repair

to the Duke of York, where once
an actual Soviet Representative - tall, thin -
in frost-inflected English gave a speech,
and I clutched my lemonade and was convinced.
...

It never looks warm or properly daytime
in black-and-white photographs the sheer cliff-
face of the ship still enveloped in its scaffolding
backside against the launching cradle
ladies lining the quay in their layered drapery
touching their gloves to their lips and just as
They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships rises
from choirboys' mouths in wisps and snatches
and evil skitters off and looks askance
for now a switch is flicked at a distance
and the moment swollen with catgut-
about-to-snap with ice picks hawks' wings
pine needles eggshells bursts and it starts
grandstand of iron palace of rivets starts
moving starts slippery-sliding down
slow as a snail at first in its viscous passage
taking on slither and speed gathering in
the Atlas-capable weight of its own momentum
tonnage of grease beneath to get it waterborne
tallow soft soap train oil a rendered whale
this last the only millihelen her beauty
slathered all over the slipway
faster than a boy with a ticket in his pocket
might run alongside it the bright sheet
of the Lough advancing faster than a tram
heavy chains and anchors kicking in
lest it outdoes itself straining up
to a riot of squeals and sparks lest it capsizes
before its beginning lest it drenches
the aldermen and the ship sits back in the sea
as though it were ordinary and wobbles
ever so slightly and then it and the sun-splashed
tilted hills the railings the pin-striped awning
in fact everything regains its equilibrium.
...

That their days were not like our days,
the different people who lived in sepia -

more buttoned, colder, with slower wheels,
shut off, sunk back in the unwakeable house

for all we call and knock. And even the man
with the box and the flaming torch

who made his servants stand so still
their faces itched can't offer us what it cost

to watch the foreyard being lost
to cream and shadow, the pierced sky

placed in a frame. Irises under the windowsill
were the colour of Ancient Rome.
...