Tetch Poems

The Passionless Revolutionary

THE PASSIONLESS REVOLUTIONARY


A ragged impulse – the scrivener’s tetch
truncated our conversation on the working
class.  Your brief was their craft
was their art, which liberation lost
to them: mine was an impounded version
of the waggoner’s instance, the vetch
caught up in the wheel, thus anneal
the war on wills, the writer’s mockery.

Justice, your fruitless wand and weal
is power to blow the thrust of the argument
over the innocent sweet scatterbrained 
head of your sister.  The lace-
maker’s art has a hand in this, but
like fingerless gloves, makes raw vision blind.

published IN MEMORY OF HER, Dublin 2008