FOREVER CRYSTALLINE

The happy sleep in another country,
while I read again my diary
of all the years we never had,
precious as a flower to a dying soldier;
when love is over, you should starve it, they say,
but I prefer my own futilities.
Our silences hid a snowy forest,
at its heart a walled garden with a dead fountain.
Lying at the bottom, a shining white stone:
dreamwater turned to salt, crystalline forever. 


SAFE HARBOUR
For Claudia

The world had dragged me behind it –
a stubborn dog in a lifeboat – 
while opportunities floated past
like unnamed islands on a map,
hidden in the blank spaces. 
One must have been what I hoped for:
a paradise behind a reef
with endless joys to discover
and fulfilment of my cooling dreams.
Eventually, while I floated
lost in that long dying evening,
the moon threw light on the dark places
and I knew I had found it long ago;
the island I searched for is you.


OXYGEN DICTATORSHIP

One eye watching the emptiness all around
and the faded sketch of hostility above,
sleeping whales are boundary markers
suspended vertically just below the surface,
cordoning off a hemispheric dream space:
half of each gigantic brain awake
while the other dives deep in the subconscious
pursuing unimaginable prey
hidden in the limitless expanse,
until the need to breathe calls them back once again.

DANCING IN THE DUST

Mr Bedford’s shop was a treasure house
of dusty old things on endless shelves.
I used to dream about the gramophone,
imagining people in 1920s clothes
climbing out of the horn to dance the Charleston
by the till to scratchy old records.
Many years later my brother bought the shop
to continue the dancing in the dust.

S.C. Flynn was born in a small town in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His poetry has been published in many magazines, and in March 2023 leading US magazine Rattle included him as one of seventeen contemporary Irish poets in a special edition. In May 2023 he was long-listed for the Erbacce Prize out of 13,000 entries.