Three Poems by Seán Hewitt
PN Review 231, September - October 2016
Mocoa
The light sweated on the banana palms.
Mocoa was delirious; the loud, wet
forest knotting the gaps in its own sound.
As the path levelled, the river found a ledge,
its own slight horizon. Every hope of water
shivered white at the bare rock’s touch,
finding its voice in the sudden fall.
All day, the river replayed.
The sun flashed in its open memory.
Flamingos
We stopped for the night at a hostel
with beds of stone, dry plants outside
shuddering the sand from their shoulders.
The little huts, the children, the dogs
lost in the sudden dusk.
We spent the day like pilgrims, walking,
the wind tugging us homewards
by our coat hems, fixing and unfixing
our collars. In the evening
we sat beneath an uncovered light bulb,
a new planet with young time-zones,
and planned a novel we might write
when we were home. Over the hill
the sun fell behind the cacti,
a whole forest of shadows standing
arms raised saying, behold.
Beyond the salt-flats, the flamingos
froze in the blue-red lakes.
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Of Kingfishers
‘if they are hung by the beak in a dry place, they change their coat of feathers each year, as if by virtue of a vital spirit that survives and continues to persist in some hidden part.’
Gerald of Wales
Its rare burst of colour in the trees
like a full bud splitting open under the sun,
the bright taper glazed to form the beak
through which, once dead, a sharp needle
can be threaded, catching the tongue.
One I remembered over the dam by the low
rotting platform where nightfishers
were rumoured to land illegally
gleaming pike with the teeth of saws.
One took my mind off things
as I read alone in a cafe on Bold Street.
One I saw at the reconciliation, hanging
from the door by its silent beak.
At the end of love, it swung slowly,
a bloom of feather, still hoping to be
lost, like water, in a photograph of sky.
Pushing your way through
the city's winter,
trudging above the subway's
hardened arteries,
breasting stymied ranks
of traffic, you might catch
a quick, zeroing glimpse
of how things will stand
at the ultimate freeze:
dogs and their leash-bearers
halted in mid-procession,
feathers of steam
poking iced from their lips;
a newspaper page
caught sailing aloft,
shellacked, spreadeagled,
a late bulletin;
a few snow crystals
sprinkled off a high cornice,
hung in space a few feet
above the ground;
and you yourself shouldering
against the stiffening
air, pressing up to that
heaviest glass door
without a handle,
without a hinge.
And you too will soon
assume a final posture,
monumental
beyond your expectations.
The afternoon sun,
so unaccountably
out of heat, will locate
all in a whitening glare,
a far off lens
edging into focus
everything, everything
at long last.
These poems by Seán Hewitt are taken from PN Review 231, September - October 2016. More poetry, features, reviews and reports are available in the issue and across the back catalogue, accessible to paying subscribers.