Robert Breen, a Boston firefighter first published in The Harvard Summer Review, and the Communion Arts Journal (Australia), Boston Literary Magazine, and The Big Table Publishing Company— three books including his most recent The Light of Civil Day. His poetry will be published in next issue Lapwing Publications. Awards: Margaret F. Tripp Poetry Award, U.S. House Certificate of Special Congressional Recognition and 2025 Honoree as Irish American Echo Heroes Award. Seamus Heaney’s poem Helmet in District and Circles immortalized Breen’s heroism and sacrifice. His numerous correspondences with Heaney reside at Emory University’s Rose Library. He lives in Brunswick, Maine, USA.

A Meadow Song                                                                                                                                                                                   

      When we exist death is not

       and when death exists we are not—Epicurus  

                                                                  

                             I

 

O music of any genre whose beauty— 

awakens me, whose purity drifts like vapor 

 

off melting snow into the ether,

recalling youthful nights I placed 

 

a small transistor radio on my pillow 

comforting my restlessness to sleep—

 

sing to me of waking to that kitchen table 

where bread, but never roses acquired a place

 

though dandelions did—those I picked

glisten amid vacant lots cracked

 

in the fractured remains of foundations

with scattered bits of broken glass 

 

and crabgrass patches—Coo woo, 

coo-woo of pigeons perched everywhere, 

 

though old timers talked of flocks 

so great their wings blocked the sun.

 

Please sing my mother often asked, 

sing Fly Me to the Moon.

 

A tune I later sang with others

in taprooms, where I began to identify

 

even more with harmony’s sway 

as occasional drinks were sent my way—

 

as the Cape Cod bartender told our crowd.

He keeps singing, I’ll keep sending the beer.                     

 

Of course our crooning moved to dance, 

space-time still alive in memory, complex twisters, 

 

scattering amplitudes, unfolding, whirling

as is one in the symmetry of our rhythms.     

 

                           II

 

When I remember singing and dancing 

I think of us as waves of excitation rippling ashore 

 

in rosa rugosa patterns I simulate walking a meadow

surrounded by woods full of wild florae,

 

hearing songbirds knowing 

how we all blend in the cosmic flow—

 

a precise hologram fluctuating 

with the power of observation 

 

in this universal jubilation, 

everything a motif for our existence, 

 

aware of our brief solos in a melody 

of always was and always will be symphony,

 

our birth’s interstellar as any we share  

with utopia’s choir in a performance   

 

as grand as DNA’s Golden Rule spiraling

with the same molecular structure as galaxies—

 

a bewildering conceptual cycle pointing

the way to Penrose’s sacred geometry—

 

the infinite becomes finite. So please

sing to me of Pherecydes who proposed 

 

souls’ immortality and his apprentice Pythagoras 

who heard music in the celestial sphere

 

calling to us here, where we dance as particles,

and where we dance like waves.    

 

                  III

 

Eliot pens his auditory imagination that we strive 

to transcend our temporal and everlasting existence.

 

If all time is eternally present.

All time is unredeemable.

 

His tension of present time leads me to a spiritual door

I open to find an abstract treasury with his mystical rose.     

 

A scamp like me taking comfort in the master’s brilliancy. 

I know little to nothing of winning the day—                                               

                                   

except a bell may toll, a flame may incinerate,

or an epitaph might be inscribed on stone. 

 

                            IV 

 

Knowing every day is its own eternity,  

a little sadness fills me at sundown

 

before watching galaxies full of starlight

like meadows of paintbrush, daisies and wild roses   

  

all chorusing the past is present as I celebrate      

what gives me pause to comprehend I am 

 

no antithesis to any of this—so believing or not

in an afterlife is calming—to realize my single

 

lupine in the field is one among many 

decaying from the moment it blooms.

 

So let me value my time in this eon

and realize an all-encompassing opus knows my note. 

 

The Enchanted Cottage

          

 With liberty and justice for all—Francis Bellamy 

                        

Patrick Pearse’s timeless thatched roof, 

whitewashed walls and elegant green door appears 

 

on a bluff emitting a yank’s dream of kinsfolk— 

a captivating scene with a white horse grazing, 

 

appears as if Beowulf’s 

fairy-smith crafted this vista.

 

Overlooking Eileabhrach Loch’s silverish water,

tranquility flows through us—if only Dagda could stay

 

this bliss, let stories, poetry, and music spring

from Connemara’s lakes and mountains,

 

written and spoken in ageless Sean Ghaeilge.

As we honor Patrick’s fight for Irish independence,

 

imagining him with Emmett and Wolf Tone—

in the Land of Youth enjoying the rewards of martyrdom,

 

as the world’s new wars recall your poem,

Mother, mourning the ancient blood sacrifice. 

                                                      

After the Easter uprising and executions,             

when Black & Tan arson scorched the interior—

 

his sisters’ love rose like a phoenix  

to rebuild the cottage where we stand, 

 

listening to its whispers of freedom 

as the globe keeps teetering

 

on a precipice of never-ending 

blood-shed seen on five continents— 

 

the poet’s country name interchangeable 

with any other nation under tyranny—            

 

Ireland unfree will never be at peace, nor will we—

fools scorning our neighbors or obey false prophets.

 

Let us resist and emerge from wars’ fog 

to see a harmonious mist embracing this Irish cottage. 

Ribbonism       

 

            I am Australian, I knew my name

            and ancestors were Irish—Thomas Keneally

 

Under a sliver moon do you hear what I hear?

I understand little of my turbulent journey,

with every step I’m left with only questions. 

 

Irish monks saving books, as with The Republic— 

speaks of gods, justice as Socrate’s beliefs

collide with status-quo; he drinks a cup of grief. 

 

Ireland’s barefoot peasants whipped 

into ditches make way for the landlord’s carriage,

an oppressor with his right of droit de seigneur. 

 

A hush-hush society begins with a bit of green cloth 

blooming through a buttonhole, a growth denoting 

a hereditary faith in wisdom within the want.

 

A three-leaf-clover, a St. Patrick metaphor 

venerated by all the Irish, morphs 

into hate through a monarchy exploitation. 

 

Turning up with a green-ribboned collar,

placing withered hands in your pockets, 

just trying to breathe free is declared illegal.

 

Landlords’ unspeakable immorality of genocide,

engineering a famine, homelessness, forcing

thievery to avoid starvation and the bitter cold. 

 

The ribbon and theft draw seven years of hard labor,

to raise a surplus population in exile, chained 

below deck on a 140-day voyage to Australia. 

 

Under godless sky, a floating witness to cruelty,

convicts whipped by freezing then scorching winds 

kept alive under maritime laws, for hard labor.

 

Fortunate prisoners were assigned to estates 

to care for cattle and sheep, appeasing

the endless need for wool and mutton in London.

 

Those convicted of serious crimes with a life 

sentence were given over to the road gangs, 

becoming bestial in chains, mutinies punished 

with four cracks of a whip, enough to break 

the skin: Riley received one hundred lashes,

for saying, OH my God, a hundred more for smiling.

 

Today do you hear what I hear, a new they 

barely concealing hatred with masks and lies

justifying murder, terrorizing, and lawlessness.

 

these assumed lawmen in perpetuate—

I understand little of our turbulent journey

with every step I’m left with only questions.   

The Long Haul                      

            Odysseus knees quaked, his spirit too;

            numb with fear he spoke to his own great heart: 

            Wretched man—what becomes of me now, at last? —Homer 

 

Boats hauled-out to solid ground stand for repair,

at ease between battened-down coastal homes,

 

relieved from a season of hammering seas.

Time-honored traditions of setting steel-traps,    

 

casting heavy nets, baiting lines, still chart lives.    

Children of these seafarers still learn to read omens 

 

of Poseidon’s jealous rage on blue oceans. 

Widow-walks, relics kept repaired from harsh weather

 

abandoned by pacing feet, replaced by texting. 

Coastal candle power long since snuffed, 

 

antiquated lighthouses replaced by satellites’

waypoints, the new version of “red right return,”  

 

but modern technology can’t always save them

from the seas’ increasing gales.

 

The faithful will stay courageous,  

but only a fool wouldn’t fear a ten-foot swell;

 

young mariners still bond with Odysseus, 

their ancestors, those they sweat with— 

 

and me, although they don’t know it,

as the ocean ripples beneath my pebbled feet, 

 

as gulls stalled above a trawler 

awaken forlong memories

 

as dangerous as the maritime—fighting fires, 

harrowing rescues, building collapse—

 

we smoke-eaters may as well be at sea

facing countless line-of-duty deaths.

  

Nobody, should ever drown, but reach

a gentle painless death, far from the sea. 

 

I give way to thoughts of those capsized,  

who survive a rogue wave taking the rest,  

 

risk their lives for something unexplainable.

Forever dry-docked, my gear outlawed—

 

leather helmet, rubber coat, hip boots 

from a bygone era collect dust— 

 

if I returned to work I’d be unrecognizable 

to the new AI generation on the job.  

 

Spending vintage winters of my hermitage 

remembering lifesaving calls in frigid weather

 

in quiet interludes, nightfall warmed by a hearth fire,

casting moving light on blackened brick.

 

Yet I roost as if on watch in a crow’s nest,

holding tight above squall-tossed decks below, 

too choked-up to voice my taking

a last clear-eyed look longing for Ithaca,    

 

my youthful trials behind me—

scars and sorrows still storm my shore,    

 

as I whisper Mea-culpa, into the tempest

for those I’ve failed to love enough.