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Bluebagopolis:
(My native city once rejoiced
in the name of Linenopolis)*
Blue bags soaring in the air,
Blue bags mired in the gutter.
On every tree and fence
They flutter.
In the car parks
They sough, and scuffle, and mutter.
One party's answer
To this pyrrhic bacchanalia—
Let them eat Gaelic;
Let them eat Feile.
I know not one who wants to be told
Gerry's brainchild's meconium
Is not a crock of gold.
A swarm of stinging jellyfish,
Ghosts and shrouds and cauls;
Puffs of ack ack and
Burdenless parachutes fall.
I imagine blue bags
Smother the corner boys
Like the leucocytes
in Fantastic Voyage.
Seldom rising from bed
To sleep it off,
Small stones appear
(from what ethereal plane?)
In your bed.
Who in Bluebagopolis could explain?
But you pull the duvet over your head,
And struggling,
Bring back your wife from the dead.
*Liquor bottles are sold in blue bags in Belfast.
Bluebagopolis was nominated for a Pushcart Prize in 2007.
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The Cows Muddied My Personal Helicon
Tonight, his sacred cows come home
To Elysian pastures in the Academe Grove.
From their hides you get glycerine –
Nitrates and ammonia from the pish and dung,
And their ponderous hooves blend the clay.
They're this spin-doctored Odyssey's
Cattle of the Sun.
Bogs, horse ploughs and boarding schools
Were not for me. Rather cobbles,
Handcarts and Sawyers' chicken
Bar-B-Q machine, transported me,
Though not as far as Stockholm in Tails –
Not in my wildest dreams.
For I only wrote of my peers
Blasted by the prayers of saints
Poured from base vials
And sold with ironmongers' complaints
Over loutish wiles.
His cattle are not our lodestar—
Pharaoh never dreamt such ominous steers,
Whose claps will swamp new Irish poetry for years.
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Feasts of Hunger
If there's still any taste that I could bear
It's for little else but stones and earth.
Dinn! Dinn! Dinn! Let us eat
Rock, coal, iron, air.
My hungers, turn around.
Feed, hungers, on the meadow of sounds.
Suck the poison so gaudy to see
From the foison of convolvuli.
Eat,
The stones a pauper cleaves.
Old churches' masonry.
Boulders, the floods progeny;
Loaves that lie in grey valleys!
Hungers, it is bits of black air;
The azure trumpeter.
My stomach causes me pain.
Unhappiness is to blame.
In the nadir of the ploughshare's path
I pick violets and Venus' Looking Glass.
As I am hungry—
Anne, Anne,
Flee on your donkey!
Under the leaves the fox howled
And spat the fairest plumes
From his feast of fowl:
Like him, it's myself whom I consume.
Salads and fruits wait to be picked and yet,
The hedge spider eats nothing but violets.
Let me sleep! Let me simmer
On the altars of Solomon.
The rust and scum ooze into one
And merges with the Kedron.
~Arthur Rimbaud (1872)
Rendered into English verse
by Eamonn Stewart (2005)
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Eamonn Stewart was born in 1964 in Belfast, Ireland. He won 1st-prize in the Irish Children's Poetry Competition on two
consecutive occasions – ages 13 and 14. He left vocational school and trained as an advertising photographer. Later,
he worked in London as a focus-puller, and then went for a degree in Film History. He now is working on film scripts, including
a modern-day version of Pincher Martin by William Golding, set amongst the London homeless.
Eamonn says he's divorced and has 2 children. His son has had poems published in children's anthologies, while his daughter
seems only to have inherited his talent for the graphic arts.
This is Eamonn's second appearance in The Centrifugal Eye.
Contact Eamonn
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