Matthew Sweeney

The boy watched the crow peck at the ground,
tugging out a worm which it swallowed,
then digging around, hunting for some more
He saw the grey feathers on the neck and back,
the same grey as the seat of his patched pants,
while the black patch on his right knee
matched the black of the crow’s main feathers.
The boy’s bare feet looked at the crow’s claws.
Should he go over and help it find worms?
Should he run and take it up in his hands,
then bring it back to the red houseboat
to keep there, tied on a string, as his pet,
feeding it worms, speaking Finnish to it,
teaching it to trust him and fly ahead,
always returning to him standing on deck,
while his bearded father negotiated the locks
waiting for the water level to rise or fall,
barely looking as the crow landed on the boy’s
shoulder, with a caw that earned a stroke
and a song that he’d made up about a crow.

Yes, I can see you, said the dwarf,
swinging from his chandelier,
flicking out his long orange hair,
as I lay under the leopard-skin sofa
entangled with a purple-eyed nymph.
A peacock uttered its long harsh cry
which ricocheted off the round mirror
encased in a copper ring, causing me
to curse and wriggle out, abandoning
the nymph who rolled up into a ball
and whimpered, as a white crow
flew round my head, then zipped off,
cawing me to follow into a yellow room
where a piper spun webs of green and blue,
and my nymph swirled with the dwarf
whose orange echoed the leaping flames
of the log-fire, in front of which
Dr Quincy swayed in a hammock, sipping
brandy, stroking the now quiet peacock
who suddenly laid an egg that was gold.

The Spanish soldier stood on the beach at Ballyliffin,
he had managed to swim ashore from the sinking ship –
the last windblown straggler of the failed Armada –
and he eyed, at the far end of the strand, a castle,
wondering what nobleman lorded it there, and whether
a servant was peering at him now through a telescope.
Were dogs loping their way to him across the sand?
He was renowned in Burgos for his way with hounds,
and he had some English, but they spoke Irish here.
Had he escaped drowning to be hacked to pieces, then
devoured by a pack of Irish wolfhounds? He wished
he had a box of the gold bars that had been on the ship –
they would have bought him any amount of armour.
He looked around for rocks to hide behind and wait –
for what? There would be no rescue from Spain, nor
from any of these indigenous Irish – although he was
here to help them defeat the brutal, Protestant English,
but what help could he deliver alone? Still, hadn’t those
at home welcomed the exiled Donegal prince, O’Donnell,
and named a long avenue in central Madrid after him?
And hadn’t they sent a whole Armada to help the Irish?
No one could have factored in such a huge storm.
How many, like him, stood on a windy, northern beach,
wondering what could be in store for them. He wished
he’d done research and knew the word for hungry,
if nothing else. He wished he’d done a course in Irish.
He’d heard that Irish girls were the lookers of Europe.
Maybe he’d get lucky and a beauty would rescue him?

The birds sing at night in Chamissoplatz,
they sing of street-battles fought in 1945,
they sing of storms that will wreck their nests,
that will blow down their trees. They say: Listen
to the bird on the moon, the big white bird
who will fly down here when all is ruined –
the houses, the restaurants, the people –
when the air is too hot to breathe or fly in,
when the bicycles all have been melted,
the dog bones fused to the broken streets.
The birds sing this at night in Chamissoplatz,
say: Drink water while you still have some,
go for long walks in the bucketing rain,
visit the Antarctic while it’s walkable on,
spend time in Holland while it still exists.
I hear them from the kitchen, the bathroom,
I hear them when I’m back in my bed,
and they keep me from falling asleep again.
I know they will be quiet in the morning –
only at night can they sing in Chamissoplatz.

They hung the cat at dawn on the last day of summer.
They chorused out a dirge when it stopped kicking,
then all together flung their bottles out into the lake.
Miko held up a hand lacerated by the cat’s claws,
as if it was a trophy. They snapped it with their mobiles,
allowing him alone to punch the swinging corpse.
‘What now?’ bellowed Heike. ‘It’s a baby of a day.
Tomorrow we disperse across this great big land.
Let’s have a morning to light up the winter evenings.’
‘We agree’, said the giant twins, ‘Let’s kill someone.’
A gust of laughter shook the dangling feline
as an elderly jogger in a red tracksuit hove into view.