Slow Down
Now, we’re alone, just me, you and
the cold stone face that reminds
me that you are gone.
My face is dry but not for want
of washing with the salty rain.
If the stones beneath me glittered now,
they would not reach my eye.
Slow down, slow down.
Tight and aching, my chest shudders
horribly, like a dying fish
in the desert of my eyes.
Your voice was the music of making light,
a song of spilled milk and laughter.
I like to think that you went laughing
when you left us.
Slow down, slow down.
Your voyage down the black canal
was without ceremony or pomp,
as you’d have wanted it.
That I could have seen your face
in the water, wrinkled like
a well-read book, and just watched
for one last time—
Slow down, slow down.
I hope you’re happy with the bed we made,
of lacquered wood built and satin lined.
I hope you sleep well.
Walking away, I feel and hear
the rumble of the obituary train,
ready to burst forth and hit me.
I am not ready.
Slow down, slow down.
Katyń, 1940
The noble bearing of the pigs
was no concern of the butcher’s sons
as they set to work in the forest of Katyń,
disposing of the tainted stock,
stained with the blight of intellect.
They kept their records in clean ink,
ordered, they drove the muddied trucks
to the grave. They took the pigs in ones,
brought them to the burial pit,
fed the hungry forest floor,
overfed it, maybe, forced
too much meat in its moist mouth.
The forest grew on the mounds of pork,
filled with flies and became tropical,
began to produce seasonal storms
that blew in the face of the unseeing war-gods,
and, then, from the trees, came the gorillas,
armed with fists, whispering words,
testing the sounds they had learned from the ghosts
of the pigs of Katyń. Finding them good,
they called the ancient forest magics
and transfigured the mumbles and murmurs to roars,
rushed from the forest and unfurled their fists
to fill their hands with earthed lightning.
The Slates
Once upon a summer’s day,
my dad was on the roof.
“My boy, we come from noble stock,
this slating is the proof.
Once these slates were slated on
a castle out the way.
Our ancestors were justices,
the nobles of their day.
But then they tore the castle down
and used the stone elsewhere.
There’s pieces now in Mitchelstown
and more right here in Cahir.
You never know, until you look,
where history may be found.”
And then he ripped some slating off
and tossed it to the ground.
Once upon a summer’s day,
my dad was on the roof.
He told me of my noble stock,
then shattered all the proof.
Dean Buckley is a writer of fiction and poetry, originally from Cahir, Co. Tipperary and currently living in Galway City, where he studies creative writing at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His interests include browser games and competitive debating. He has previously been published in ROPES, Verse Kraken, Revival and A Hundred Gourds.
–Art by Lisa Griffin
–Art by Sarah Hardy