Sending postcards from shipwrecked
cities, the slow burn of dried wood
embering into dusted coils and whiskers.

Someone whispers about “the city of
clocks” as it gets dark, strangers on trains
with brakes pleading, and the ground dissolves
underfoot,

ankle-deep in yesterday’s run-off rain
that dropped like leaden punctuation
on the streets – breaking the flow of
conversation, delaying the full range of

our shared stories that were unburrowing
up and out from the choking drains;

we can only imagine – even dream of –
when we were pleated into one
another, staring at the sinuous hillsides,
moved by the Earth’s dampening musculature
as it, and we,
heaved into life under a gaudy
pink lightshade sun,
that casts the shadows of
a drop in the ocean pilfered
from a side-street,
and of a last wish folded
into an envelope
and left under an unmarked door.

 **

Eoin Flannery is a Professor of Irish Literature based in Limerick, Ireland. He has published 12 books of literary criticism on modern and contemporary Irish fiction and poetry, with a special interest in environmentalism. He is currently preparing a collection of poetry entitled, Unshadow.

P76 issue 9: Poetries of place/ displacement/ diaspora/ odyssey: On-line Edition. Table of Contents