Poetry: Selections from S.C. Flynn

THE BATTLE FOR THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

 

They lied when they said that nothing

would ever be the same again,

when the icy truth cuts much deeper;

nothing will ever be different.

Turn your back on the challenge if you want to,

but at last when we’ve opened every door

in our frantic search for whoever it is

holding the missing pieces of us

in their tightly buttoned pocket

and you’re tired and giddy from hanging

like a bloodless bat from a crystal ceiling 

dreaming up conspiracy theories

and wondering what’s really going on,

come out of the cool, darkened corridor,

take my sweaty, trembling hand in yours;

choose or be crushed by the choice you didn’t make

and then let’s climb into the sky on a rope

or walk, on and on, unblinking, into the sun.

THE TERMITE MOUNDS SPEAK

Northern Australia

 

I scramble up the highest tower

like a war priest climbing a pile of heads,

clinging on somehow among the rubble

as sheets of sand and dust slide down the sides

and ants swarm thick around my feet.

I spread my arms out, stretching north and south

to make a sunburnt aerial. The mounds

are in my mind and I am their voice;

the loudest of all in the land of the deaf.

NIGHT IN THE 15-MINUTE CITY

 

The wind is all that is left of the sky

and it chases the night through the streets.

Sleeplessness is a strict father that drags me,

a stumbling shadow in clothes, on and on,

over Beckett Bridge, around and back.

I want to crawl into my memories

and lie still, but there is so much more

to deceive myself about right now

and so many new ways of doing it.

The city’s lights are strung out like thoughts,

mostly disordered but sometimes lined up

as if leading towards a hidden goal,

only to vanish suddenly, swallowed

by the monstrous grin of the mystery.

FROM THE MUD TO THE STARS

 

Go outside, drop to the ground, lie flat, stretch

and hold the grass as tightly as you can;

feel the resonance of rocks

that might one day rise up and flower

into houses or jails, walls or schools.

Ignore the calls from other worlds,

their wordless but convincing rhetoric.

This piece of Twenty-first Century we are chained to

is all there is and all there will ever be,

so don’t fall off the Earth; there is nowhere else to go.

TEMPORAL NAVIGATOR

 

Who will leave first,

who will go with whom,

who will meet again:

the confusion of travel arrangements

after my grandmother’s funeral

displaced the priest’s assurance.

 

We can never really understand

the early versions of ourselves – 

though reverse deepfakes are tempting – 

but maybe at eleven I began

not thinking of what we cannot know,

shielding my eyes from the blast zone. 

THREAD

 

Together we write the book of time,

adding a word here and there to the text,

painting tears on statues with our fingers.

 

Every key we were given was a lie,

just ghosts clasping hands and dancing

in the air above a cemetery.

 

Sitting among the cheerful people

in my hand-me-down clothes and jokes,

I hear my own laughter from far away.

 

Hope fools us all with its childish chatter:

why should we not have happy things

just because one day they will be gone.

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 around the world, including Rattle, Quadrant, The Antigonish Review and Cyphers. His poetry collection “The Colour of Extinction” will be published by Renard Press in September 2024.