As One

As One

John F. Deane

We are carrying our death about with us –
deep in the oesophagus, perhaps, attendant,
or in the folds and furrows of the brain. And though
conscious of God’s unreasonable demands
we admit, too, to our unreasonable response. Today
insistent mists are holding the countryside enthralled,
while tulips, in sundry vivid colours, bow low
in gentle reverence; the bugle-flower sprawls
out across the lawn and I think: sometimes God
holds us tenderly on her upturned palms. Perhaps
ours may be a sea-death or, more likely, a road,
when God will lay her iron-solid world-weight down
on the tenders of our days. Knowing that there are wars
and time-worked earth-disasters, still I watch – trusting
to the drive of compelling cosmic forces – the orchid,
the upward-uncoiling fern, while I remember the three
Palestinian children – who had been playing ball
by the sea-shore – blown into shreds and bone-bits
by the state-of-the-world Israeli fighter jet: they
had carried their death about with them for too short
a time and – though we know that barbarism
divides us, soul from soul – we, hurting, cry out
as one, in the woodshed, the cow-byre, in the high
-rise offices of the city: have you abandoned us!

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John F. Deane
Poet

John F. Deane is an Irish poet who has published more than a dozen collections, including his most recent book Naming of the Bones (2021, Carcanet). He has received many honours including the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry.

Photography by Alena Beliaeva