Three Poems, S.C. Flynn

 

ELEVEN KILOMETRES

Mariana Trench, Pacific Ocean

This is where life’s journey ends, 

the deepest well of the world’s mind,

mother earth’s vagina

and darkest subconscious.

The outside pressure would crush you flat;

remember what it’s done to the creatures

we passed on the way, the world’s deformed children

that it hides away for shame, floating nightmares

of tentacles and hard flattened bodies

that stay by their mother’s side and do no harm.

But maybe you and I are the disgraces,

the ones who were born in the shallows above

and then crawled up on land and grew wild;

without the discipline of deepest water

our brains ballooned out big and empty

and now the clever wandering children

descend in technological incest.

HUNTERS OF THE LIGHT

The arctic terns will soon be gone

to seek the endless daylight in Antarctica,

passing over Cretaceous cliffs of gulls

and then, while the sun grows hotter, 

rivers of Serotonin drained from cities;

diasporas of isolated minds

locked inside, dreading arrest in the night.

On they go, away from the darkness

that covers interrogation and famine,

above the fires and record temperatures

until they reach the melting ice of Dayworld.

When the days again get shorter they return,

craving the insomniac sun,

longing to sleep but fearing to dream.

MUD SUBMARINE

Sir John Rogerson’s Quay, Dublin

Six men descended in this diving bell

while the colours in its extra thick windows

dropped an octave lower. On the riverbed

they were double-pressured, low tide pirates,

close to the surface but far from its rules.

A different, distinct sense of time

must have floated down there; uneven,

gulping down entire empty intervals.

In the impatience of their seclusion

they surely hungered for strangers’ faces

but only saw the nameless press of twilight,

lingering sediment of isolation;

fluid forming something out of chaos

then instantly discarding any shape.

S.C. Flynn was born in Australia of Irish origin and now lives in Dublin. His poetry has been published in many magazines, including The Honest Ulsterman, Cyphers, Abridged and Orbis.