Sinéad Morrissey

Sinéad Morrissey Poems

In my dream the dead have arrived
to wash the windows of my house.
There are no blinds to shut them out with.
...

Hyde Park, 1936. Cold enough for scarves and hats
among the general populace, but not for the fifteen thousand women
from the League of Health and Beauty performing callisthenics
on the grass. It could be snowing, and they of Bromley‐Croydon,
...

A soldier returned from a war
was how my P6 spelling book put it: I saw
cripples with tin cans for coins
in dusty scarlet, back from some spat of Empire.
...

In other noises, I hear my children crying -
in older children playing on the street
past bedtime, their voices buoyant
in the staggered light; or in the baby
...

5.

That their days were not like our days,
the different people who lived in sepia -

more buttoned, colder, with slower wheels,
shut off, sunk back in the unwakeable house

for all we call and knock. And even the man
with the box and the flaming torch

who made his servants stand so still
their faces itched can't offer us what it cost

to watch the foreyard being lost
to cream and shadow, the pierced sky

placed in a frame. Irises under the windowsill
were the colour of Ancient Rome.
...

This garden is so empty of time it holds me still, unable to go on.
I blame the leaves: they fell from the sky in such a wild, golden rain
They pulled me in, to see them thigh-deep over flowers and graves
That had been stamped with names and dates, faith and pain,
Like flags on sinking ships. No more years to go by, all whos
And wheres washed out in nature's fire, the only death here
Is Autumn's, and she does it too well. The trees' bold undoing
Is no serious grief, but an accomplishment of practice.
I wonder what faces the graves will have
When Winter is here, and her show is over.
...

I took it down two years ago, but he still comes knocking.
There was too much space in him.
I gave him everything on the outside -
The long curve of my spine; arms, feet, thighs.
He was the actor and director of his own imagination,
Dying for every exterior. The moving
Crown of my head was the rising star in his heaven.

Never whole and never alone, I got to wanting it
Without the sight of it. No show, no reflection -
Not even in his eyes, which were so outside of himself,
So beside himself, so down on every last cell of himself -
I craved for nothing but blind discretion.
He stands on my doorstep, pleading his lost barbiturate,
But the mirror is in the outhouse. I promise cobwebs, whitewash.
...

My father's in my fingers, but my mother's in my palms.
I lift them up and look at them with pleasure -
I know my parents made me by my hands.

They may have been repelled to separate lands,
to separate hemispheres, may sleep with other lovers,
but in me they touch where fingers link to palms.

With nothing left of their togetherness but friends
who quarry for their image by a river,
at least I know their marriage by my hands.

I shape a chapel where a steeple stands.
And when I turn it over,
my father's by my fingers, my mother's by my palms

demure before a priest reciting psalms.
My body is their marriage register.
I re-enact their wedding with my hands.

So take me with you, take up the skin's demands
for mirroring in bodies of the future.
I'll bequeath my fingers, if you bequeath your palms.
We know our parents make us by our hands.
...

You think it ugly: drawing lines with a knife
Down the backs of those writers we exist to dislike. But it's life.

One is disadvantaged by illustrious company
Left somehow undivided. Divide it with animosity.

Don't be proud -
Viciousness in poetry isn't frowned on, it's allowed.

Big fish in a big sea shrink proportionately.
Stake out your territory

With stone walls, steamrollers, venomous spit
From the throat of a luminous nightflower. Gerrymander it.
...

10.

The clocks do all the talking. He visits the grave in the middle of a three hour loop
and knows the year of completion of every castle in Ireland, His route
is always the same: the round tower via the aqueduct via the cemetery via the ramparts
via the Battle of Antrim during the Rising of the United Irishmen in 1798,
the slaughter of which is more present if he's deep in the morning
of his April wedding breakfast or locked into the moment they fitted the oxygen mask
and she rolled her bruised eyes back. She is unable to find the stop for the bus to Belfast
and stays indoors. The nets turn the daylight white and empty.
She has worn the married life of her sister so tightly
over her own, the noise of the clocks makes her feel almost without skin.
Sometimes she sits in her sister's chair, and feels guilty.
She has Countdown for company and a selective memory -
the argument at the funeral with her niece over jewellry and, years ago,
the conspiracy to keep her single, its success. Time settles over each afternoon
like an enormous wing, when the flurry of lunchtime has left them
and the plates have already been set for tea. He reads extensively -
from Hitler and Stalin, Parallel Lives, to Why Ireland Starved -
but has taken to giving books away recently to anyone who calls.
Winter or summer, evenings end early: they retire to their separate rooms
at least two hours before sleep. It falls like an act of mercy
when the twenty-two clocks chime eight o'clock in almost perfect unison.
...

My husband requests a sky burial
he wishes to be
as carrion sequestered by leopards
strung up in a desert tree

Back to the familiar corridor he
may choose any opening
but all the rooms contain me
dressed for a wedding
...

Love, the nightwatch, gloved and gowned, attended.
Your father held my hand. His hands grew bruised
and for days afterwards wore a green and purple coverlet

when he held you to the light, held your delicate, dented
head, thumbed-in like a water font. They used
stopwatches, clip charts, the distant hoof beats of a heart

(divined, it seemed, by radio, so your call fell intertwined
with taxicabs, police reports, the weather blowing showery
from the north) and a beautiful fine white cane,

carved into a fish hook. I was a haystack the children climbed
and ruined, collapsing almost imperceptibly
at first, then caving in spectacularly as your stuttered and came

- crook-shouldered, blue, believable, beyond me -
in a thunder of blood, in a flood-plain of intimate stains.
...

Are upright -
cast not by sunlight but by frozen breath:

we breathe
and are enveloped in an outline

and when we pass,
this outline stays suspended, not tethered

to our ankles
as our sun-shadows are. A boy was here -

fantastically dressed
against the arctic frost like an heirloom glass

in bubble wrap -
he has disappeared into the portico

of himself. Not even Alice,
with her knack for finding weaknesses

in the shellac
of this world, left so deft a calling card.
...

The wind and its instruments were my secret teachers.
In Podolskaya Street I played piano for my mother
- note for note without a music sheet - while the wind
in the draughty flat kept up: tapping its fattened hand
against the glass, moaning though the stove, banging
a door repeatedly out on the landing -
the ghost in the machine of Beethoven's Two Preludes
Through All the Major Keys, that said they lied.

Later I stood in a wheat field and heard the wind make music
from everything it touched. The top notes were the husks:
fractious but nervous, giddy, little-voiced,
while underneath a strong strange melody pulsed
as though the grain was rigging, or a forest.

In all my praise and plainsong I wrote down
the sounds of a man's boots from behind the mountain.
...

was not like last winter, we said, when winter
had ground its iron teeth in earnest: Belfast
colder than Moscow and a total lunar eclipse
hanging its Chinese lantern over the solstice.
Last winter we wore jackets into November
and lost our gloves, geraniums persisted,
our new pot-bellied stove sat unlit night
after night and inside our lungs and throats,
embedded in our cells, viruses churned out
relaxed, unkillable replicas of themselves
in the friendlier temperatures. Our son
went under. We'd lie awake, not touching,
and listen to him cough. He couldn't walk
for weakness in the morning. Thoracic,
the passages and hallways in our house
got stopped with what we would not say -
how, on our wedding day, we'd all-at-once
felt shy to be alone together, back
from the cacophony in my tiny, quiet flat
and surrounded by flowers.
...

My son's awake at ten, stretched out along
his bunk beneath the ceiling, wired and watchful.
The end of August. Already the high-flung
daylight sky of our Northern solstice dulls
earlier and earlier to a clouded bowl;
his Star of David lamp and plastic moon
have turned the dusk to dark outside his room.

Across the Lough, where ferries venture blithely
and once a cruise ship, massive as a palace,
inched its brilliant decks to open sea -
a lighthouse starts its own nightlong address
in fractured signalling; it blinks and bats
the swingball of its beam, then stands to catch,
then hurls it out again beyond its parallax.

He counts each creamy loop inside his head,
each well-black interval, and thinks it just for him -
this gesture from a world that can't be entered:
the two of them partly curtained, partly seen,
upheld in a sort of boy-talk conversation
no one else can hear. That private place, it answers,
with birds and slatted windows -I've been there.
...

Ingrid in her shawl's been here since nine,
burdening the tables on loan
from the church downstairs with Babushka dolls
and caviar, handkerchiefs and wine

from Yugoslavia, Bulgarian perfume.
My brother and I ask for a job
and are handed pink-and-white posters
of Peace & Détente to decorate the room.

It's trickier than we thought
to stick them straight so secretly we give up.
Almost everyone's smoking.
In the background, "Kalinka" on cassette

belted out by Red Army Choir
wobbles towards its peak. There's tea,
coffee, Irish stew, and a cool display
of anti-Mrs Thatcher paraphernalia -

pens in the shape of nails for her coffin
we'll buy and use in school.
Shop stewards come, and sympathisers
who, once a year, like Christians,

demonstrate their faith, the odd
bewildered lured-in shopper looking for soap,
or socks, but mostly it's just us:
Card Carriers and the Kids Thereof,

filling up the air with fevered talk. By four,
Rosemary Street's ablaze in the solstice dark.
We pack what's left of the wooden trains and vodka
into crates for another year and repair

to the Duke of York, where once
an actual Soviet Representative - tall, thin -
in frost-inflected English gave a speech,
and I clutched my lemonade and was convinced.
...

It never looks warm or properly daytime
in black-and-white photographs the sheer cliff-
face of the ship still enveloped in its scaffolding
backside against the launching cradle
ladies lining the quay in their layered drapery
touching their gloves to their lips and just as
They That Go Down to the Sea in Ships rises
from choirboys' mouths in wisps and snatches
and evil skitters off and looks askance
for now a switch is flicked at a distance
and the moment swollen with catgut-
about-to-snap with ice picks hawks' wings
pine needles eggshells bursts and it starts
grandstand of iron palace of rivets starts
moving starts slippery-sliding down
slow as a snail at first in its viscous passage
taking on slither and speed gathering in
the Atlas-capable weight of its own momentum
tonnage of grease beneath to get it waterborne
tallow soft soap train oil a rendered whale
this last the only millihelen her beauty
slathered all over the slipway
faster than a boy with a ticket in his pocket
might run alongside it the bright sheet
of the Lough advancing faster than a tram
heavy chains and anchors kicking in
lest it outdoes itself straining up
to a riot of squeals and sparks lest it capsizes
before its beginning lest it drenches
the aldermen and the ship sits back in the sea
as though it were ordinary and wobbles
ever so slightly and then it and the sun-splashed
tilted hills the railings the pin-striped awning
in fact everything regains its equilibrium.
...

Sinéad Morrissey Biography

Sinéad Morrissey (born on 24 April 1972 in Portadown, County Armagh) is an Irish poet. In January 2014 she won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax. Raised in Belfast, she was educated at Trinity College, Dublin, where she took BA and PhD degrees, and won the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award in 1990. She has published four collections of poetry: There Was Fire in Vancouver (1996), Between Here and There (2001), The State of the Prisons (2005), and Through the Square Window (2009), the second, third and fourth of which were shortlisted for the T. S. Eliot Prize. After periods living in Japan and New Zealand she now lives in Belfast, where she has been writer-in-residence at Queen's University, Belfast and currently lectures. Her collection, The State of the Prisons, was shortlisted for the Poetry Now Award in 2006. In November 2007, she received a Lannan Foundation Fellowship for "distinctive literary merit and for demonstrating potential for continued outstanding work". Her poem "Through the Square Window" won first prize in the 2007 British National Poetry Competition. Her collection, Through the Square Window, won the Poetry Now Award for 2010. In January 2014 Morrissey won the T.S. Eliot Prize for her fifth collection Parallax. The chair of the judging panel, Ian Duhig, remarked that the collection was 'politically, historically and personally ambitious, expressed in beautifully turned language, her book is as many-angled and any-angled as its title suggests.')

The Best Poem Of Sinéad Morrissey

Through The Square Window

In my dream the dead have arrived
to wash the windows of my house.
There are no blinds to shut them out with.

the clouds above the Lough are stacked
like the clouds are stacked above Delft.
They have the glutted look of clouds over water.

The heads of the dead are huge. I wonder
if it's my son they're after, his
effortless breath, his ribbon of years-

but he sleeps on unregarded in his cot,
inured, it would seem, quite naturally
to the sluicing and battering and parting back of glass

that delivers this shining exterior...
One blue boy holds a rag in his teeth
between panes like a conjuror.

And then, as suddenly as they came, they go.
And there is a horizon
from which only the clouds stare in,

the massed canopies of Hazelbank,
the severed tip of the Strangford Peninsula,
and a density in the room I find it difficult to breathe in

until I wake, flat on my back with a cork
in my mouth, stopper-bottled, in fact,
like a herbalist's cure for dropsy.

Sinéad Morrissey Comments

Wahab Abdul 15 January 2014

thanks for posting her poems...

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