Oíche na Scuaibeanna Fada 2

Wurra Wurra: The Night of the Long Brooms (Part Two)
(translated from the Irish of Micheál MacSolamh “Oíche na Scuaibeanna Fada”)

In the press there are days folded like clean linen
waiting for the dirt.
Inside the closet
a clock keeps ticking
and they say it is only a matter of time.

Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

And then three women, naked and wild as the storm driven wind in the chimney’s breast stepping in on this Night of the Dead and of all the Holy Saints stealthily, rag-haired, broom-clad, besom-handed, bucket swinging, brush proud. From the black shadows they drove the ciarógs and the clocks and the millipedes and the wood lice and the silverfish and the daddy long-legs and the black spiders, herding them silently out of this sad and dusty bachelor gaff and off its surface of unswept regret. For this is the echoless hole of entropy that a connubial extraction leaves behind. Since our separation it has been mine.

Broomsticks I saw first.
Glowing like iron rods under a blacksmith’s bellows,
red as the geraniums in my window alcove
they moved towards me out of the darkness.

In the press there are days folded like clean linen waiting for the dirt.
In the closet
a clock keeps ticking.
and they say it is only a matter of time.