Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet and Beckett Scholar from County Laois. His work has been widely published in Ireland, The UK,USA, France, India and Serbia. His study on the works of Samuel Beckett’s , The Empty Too : Language and Philosophy in the works of Samuel Beckett, has attracted academic interest. Arthur’s current collection is At Home in Ireland, Revival Press.

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Before All This

The birthing cave is bright tonight.
An easterly ruffles
the cobweb curtain,
a shaft of moonbeam
impales the granite shrine.
.
The Count retreats to a couch
of scutch grass,
a cloak of goatskin
hangs from his shoulders,
drip drops towards his feet.

Winter:
he hauls Middle Ages
out of a worn fiddle,
taunts Silver Spear, the airs
he’d saved from the flames,

pre-natal Pilates,
heat to the bebop fruit bat,
the fireless vault
with the bloodless heart.

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Seen from his Cell

His world is a granite cell
cocooned in a matrix of snow where
the writing sparkles on the wall,
the mercury showing twenty below.

Here he can resign his death right
in the sunfire’s cunning design:
the kindled sparks of morning
the cooling embers of evening
the June rose in bloom at noon,
glorified by painters and poets
fluent in skyborn colours and ink,
the mechanic, hot with tap and die,

tools gifted with the power
to create the colossal lie.

The slaughterhouses that,
infected, attract full houses.

These circus acts of the living dead
he could view through
the knowing eye
of the happy dead
that sees such things
from the dead of night.

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Ypres

In this theatre,
where the stage lights
are broken bones
that glint in the full moon,
a girl, in a walk on part, pouts,
reaches for a man in uniform.

He, now a puff of vapour,
drifts in the smoke and dust,
props loaned from an old production.

She mingles with other men.
They unearth springtime and harvest
with picks and shovels,
make homes for themselves
where worms, who make their homes
with the bristle of their bodies,
mine the perma soil for rotting leaves.

Here, men wake to Flanders’ mud,
the songs and suns
of mortar fire and canon,
the moans of fallen comrades,

while the nascent beast,
teeth brushed, claws edged,
adds the finishing touches,
rouge and ruby red lipstick,
before the curtain rises.