Justin Quinn Poems

I
Dear Alistair, the summer's in at last.
I saw a field of barley just today,
ears greenish, but the awns already brassed.
I saw a river trickling through dark clay.
I saw the hop-bines at a slant, their shapes
stacked high on trellises like wet drapes.

So, yes, it's summer, but who wants pastorals?
I threw my apple blossoms in the trash
when Adolf started passing nasty bills,
said Brecht, then wrote in block caps at a dash.
Who'd sing the seasons when the Eastern Bear,
awakening after winter, sniffs the air?

The last few months we're clicking on Ukraine -
the granary of Europe, transit gas,
etc. Corpses on the streets again
from Kiev out to Kharkiv and Donbas.
The languages and ethnic groups unclear.
Before this goes much further, I'll need a beer.

II
And get a second one in while I'm at it.
I'm thirsty after walking for six hours
along the different coloured pathways plaited
from Prague to here, past hills and lime-tree bowers,
past chateaux tourists call both Wow and Awesome,
and past the barley and the apple blossom.

It's Beroun. The pub is in a wrecker's yard
with tanks and armoured cars parked in a line
for kids to clamber on, a rusted rear-guard
the Russians left behind in 'eighty-nine.
Not far away the long E50 sings.
I like to sit here and consider things.

While this inflated bear, the brewery's logo,
considers me. Irish. Letter writer.
Living in Central Europe (where it's no-go
for Emperor, Commissar and Gauleiter
these last few decades). Basically, driftwood.
So, Bear, is this OK? Are we all good?

III
The bear declines to say, but has a stein
of frothing beer in his soft plastic paws.
As well as that, he's tied down with a guy line.
I think I'm good. I've given him no cause.
Now, where did we leave off? Russia . . . tanks . . .
(And since you're here, I'll have another. Thanks.)

Yes, well, who knows what's going to happen next?
The Poles will fight, the Czechs are doing their best
to tell themselves Crimea wasn't annexed
- it just returned to Mother Russia's breast -
the Germans analysing how wind blows,
and Putin's mad or bad - nobody knows.

In other words, the usual bloody mess
of Central Europe. But you're in Berlin
and I've the same last lines in my address.
The hops and barley will be taken in,
malted, milled and mashed once more this year.
Dear Alistair, it seems we're both still here.

IV
These last few decades, everything I've seen -
a woman's eyes widening at the gate;
a road in August that wends its way between
pylons and plum-trees; Mlýn Café when it's getting late;
a different tongue adjusting how this hand
comes near, this breath makes song, these lips command -

how much do these things weigh? You took the measure
of the earth in forty sonnets, so tell.
Say also if our labour and our leisure
undo that earth, despite our meaning well.
And is the good life on the left or right,
or does it lie in arguing these all night?

The bubbles burst on this fresh glass of beer.
We make our globes and look to the horizons.
The Cold War gone, it seems we build a sphere,
then it implodes with terrifying licence
as money swerves off anytime it pleases.
And in midsummer, suddenly it freezes,

V
or, years on, weeds start growing from the roofs
around this yard, the buildings near collapse.
I love to watch them putting on their grooves
when wind goes by. I love the wider gaps -
their radicals edging bricks apart like awls
to let large swathes of sun inside the walls.

I love the nettles drowsing near the rust-
encrusted finials of this old Trabant
and rain-warped office desk, becoming dust.
And in all this, the round and self-important
owner-brewer arrives today for work.
He pulls up in a shining, jet-black Merc

and knows his stuff, to judge by what I've had.
(I will, thanks, yes. No harm in a third.)
He's talking vats and mashes with a lad
and listens to the other's every word.
Like other artists, he spends his afternoons
making conversation in the ruins.

VI
Or does he just take orders from the bear?
Who, by the way, is swaying in the breeze
more than before, as though he's trying to tear
the guy line up and stroll about at ease.
It's either that, or the beer is playing tricks.
(How many? Could be three, but hardly six.)

As I go out I give him a wide berth
and blunder backwards into an armoured car.
Absorbed in greater struggles of the earth,
he doesn't deign to notice. The door's ajar.
When I get in, I see whoever parked it
set up the bear as the machine gun's target.

These last few decades, apple blossoms filled in
for politics, inflated bears made beer,
and real ones slumbered in the east. My children,
these last few decades, were born and grew up here.
The bear's now gazing at me with no suggestion
of a smile or of a frown. What next? Good question.

30 June - 7 July 2014
...

I lost a glove
and kept the other,
my life on hold
through snow and storm,
one hand cold,
the other warm.

I lost a glove
and while the other
hung on to me
for all I'm worth,
the first roamed free
over the earth.

I lost a glove
and found another,
another sheath,
a shade of leather
that seemed to breathe
a different weather.

I lost a glove
and it found other
flesh to clad,
crimes to commit,
although I had
no hand in it.

I lost a glove
and, sad, the other
at the breach
would try to clap
but couldn't reach
across that gap.

I lost a glove
then lost the other.
I'd no more forms
that could withhold
the snows, the storms,
the perishing cold.
...

beginning with a line by Jan Neruda
The earth's a child and doesn't think
to draw the people in so fast
that they're transformed to pools of blood and cartilage
at the very last.

For instance when they climb the railing
held up four hundred metres high
above the parks, the buildings and the roads,
and step into the sky

the earth wants them so much it says,
‘Now come to me.' It's had enough
of barriers keeping them apart.
Who could resist such love?

And so they come down in their hundreds,
these ones who wanted quickly out,
so tired of leaving things to fortune - some
in silence, some with a shout -

as streetlamps twist their necks to look
up at the heights and finish gazing
down on a human heap against the earth,
whose love still proves amazing.
...

Sage is just the thing
for snake bite, bee sting
and keeping all the bad at bay.
The bush stands guard through ice and snow
and when warm winds begin to blow
it draws mauve flowers out of dark clay.

They steeped it in a tea
with rosemary,
garlic, horehound, baby's breath,
and called it Four Thieves Vinegar,
convinced its perfume could deter
the swelling horrors of Black Death.

But it will do, good herb,
to salve and curb
a common cold or nerves, and I
these days, with everybody's eyes on
the grim news banked on the horizon,
like how its leaf spears face the sky.
...