SurVision Magazine

Open House


Aristophanes believed that, in a world beyond our own, people –
and presumably animals? – lived free of conflict.

A hedgehog scuttles out of the rainy weather
to lie between the dog you patched up
after it was hit by a car, and the cat you saved
from a ditch-hole drowning. Then a mouse
hops across our planers and augers
to sip from the nozzle of a can of vegetable oil
standing among shavings at the bench.
And when a swallow flits to her mud-nest
moulded into the rafters, where also
a hive of wild bees thrives... well, harmonies
hold and, while they hold, we dream
a secret, placatory spell has turned the workshop
into an open house for stray and wilding,
cherish the thought of unprejudiced
paradise, no battle or blood-let, the world
in a state of tranquillity it has never known yet.




Vaunt


Ours is the competence of seeing into ingle-nook
or bog murk; we can spot a measuring light
to the foot of a suburban garden or the far face
of an abyss. Heartbeat of a stone, if
it exists, will be graphed to the tiniest palpitation,
cabbage-lugged clod from back of beyond
brought to book, basement ghoul or attic ghost
made to show, made to speak, every iota
of information pertaining to earth and humanity
critiqued, put through commercial
no less than intellectual vaunt. And still the world
will have good reason to cry. Still a small
voice inside our heads will say we could do worse
than Nietzsche – supposed by some to have
stumbled, at the beginning of his long
brokenness, to embrace the battered Turin horse.




Patrick Deeley is from Loughrea, County Galway, Ireland. The End of the World, his seventh collection with Dedalus Press, was published in 2019. His best-selling memoir, The Hurley Maker's Son, published by Transworld Ireland, was shortlisted for the Non-fiction Book of the Year Award in 2016.  He is the recipient of the American-based Lawrence O'Shaughnessy Poetry Award for 2019.