We're delighted to present a pair of poems from Secret Poets, the début collection by Darren Donohue, published by Turas Press.
Secret Poets charts the poet's journey through illness and his determination to uncover the sublime hiding within the every day.
Late at Night
Late at night,
when the moon rolls on its side,
and empty fields mourn history,
dictators kill poets.
.
Surprised in their pyjamas,
stolen from their beds,
they're marched to where firing squads
miss their target,
taking one, two, three bullets
to send geckos flying
in the hidden dark.
.
A wooden-legged school teacher
and two anarchist matadors
are trapped like paper
between scissor-blade headlights.
.
Lorca, standing apart,
dips his pen in their shadows
and draws their faces
in rings of gun smoke.
.
The briefest silence
and petty rage
whistles through him,
dragging the poet
from his balcony of stars
into an unmarked grave.
The Weed
What must the weed make of it all?
After a lifetime of pushing, growing,
stretching, flowering, to find itself
embedded between two concrete walls,
its feet planted in some mother crack,
the little chink through which it sprang.
.
The view ̶ a grey concrete garden competing
with a heavy grey sky, a modest peach house
with matching drains, a mossy chimney stack
black with soot, old bits of pipe drooling
over an outhouse roof, a shy breeze now
and then. How absurd! And yet, the weed
continues its journey upward, trying to see
.
over the wall and into the next garden.
What patience! Such perseverance!
Teach me, little weed, your inexhaustible curiosity,
your blind faith, your undiminished character
and infinite certainty. Look on me and share
the allegiance to which your root is tapped.
Secret Poets is published by Turas Press
