Four Poems by Sean O’Brien

Clearing

‘Nay, give me eyes, and light, lest that I sleep in dying.’
Psalm 13, translated by Sir Philip Sidney

Felled trunks in loden greatcoats lie
on the edge of a clearing: officers,
disarmed, beheaded, awaiting disposal.

Wreathed in the smoke of his creation,
pipe in hand, a hatchet for an axiom,
a Master comes this way once more.

When I am done, he says, the sound
of this wind in this wood is true silence
because it is mine and the world is over.

Yet here you are, still wandering waist-deep
in rusty ferns and amputated limbs.
What else can I tell you? Death’s work

goes on, in a different part of the wood.
Nodding and smoking, he makes to leave.
What is a man if not his work? he asks.

What better work than this, the duty
in which death and benediction meet
and all this brash begins to burn?

Bertran

See how the lamp is worn under the arm
or carried aloft as a head –
too late for salvation, too late perhaps
even to warn, but stylish
nonetheless, according to its lights.

Lighthouse Days

The emperor, betrayed when his grognards
refused the invitation to surrender,
is delivered here by moonlight in a pinnace
with three keepers, tonnes of pemmican
and crates of books he’s never had the time
to read till now, when the insistent leisure
at the lighthouse renders them intolerable.
These days he wears his hat indoors as well.
He climbs the stairs, descends, ascends,
sits at his ‘escritoire of packing-cases’
while the ink in its well sets hard. There must,
he thinks, be meaning, even here, perhaps
at noon, low tide, now, with the lighthouse
stranded on its throne of bladed rock. A child,
he thinks, would grasp it instantly, the bare
necessity, when the horizon too withdraws
from the engagement, and the mind is left
with rock-pools filled with brown-eyed weed
that blinks at first expectantly and then in panic.

He closes the shutters and lies in the dark.
In itself, he sees, the self is punishment.
Each night brings up sixty battles for review
though the beginning and the end is always
Eylau in the fog and snow. ‘What a massacre,’
said Ney, ‘and no result.’ From which the Emperor
derives no lesson other than that peace
is boring, worse than boring, an absurdity
when half the golden clocks are carried off
by traitors to improve their drawing rooms.
Upstairs the bicorn weathervane shifts
infinitesimally, with intermittent screeches:
time is not ended, merely waiting,
while the mirrors in the light-room, he infers,
must soon go mad from too much seeing,
and on that day the world will ask for him again.
If not to grant him immortality, why else
would they have left that bicycle chained
to the railings below? The readiness is all.

Ryan: In The Rainy Season

‘It was as if the ground, and its cargo of corpses, was sinking.’
Nicci French, The Favour

‘I have often wondered about the consciousness of animals, how
it must be more shadowy than ours, more dreamlike and
fleeting, small thoughts like half-burned candles, their outlines
never fully formed. And perhaps that is also the case for many
of us who must strain to think with clarity.’
Benjamiń Labatut, Maniac

My kind lack the background when the rain is real
like this, when the rain comes seeking not
our inconvenience but our extinction.

These gingery days when the leaves come down
at last, and heavy-lidded manholes weep
for Bazalgette and all his works,

the rain is creaturely, implacable
and sudden, in a range of formats.
This should be our tragedy, a time to act

with pure irrational righteousness,
to put off politesse and do some smiting.
Baseball bats and razors, fine, but fauna better –

yet which of us along these sinking streets
could access insect larvae for insertion
in her lover’s ear, emerging only when

they’ve laid their eggs to drive the bastard mad –
as fanciful as Fortunato waking
in his bricked-up tomb, and yet for some

the boredom of the teenage years recalls itself,
and they will find themselves back in the attic
searching for the crate of special stuff

to read again beneath the streaming skylight
deep into the afternoon. From that concealed
curriculum we learned that sex is death

and the reverse is true, up to a point.
For this engorged enlightenment, bestowed
by all those sweating pages, we must thank

Van Thal among the connoisseurs of cruelty
and evil. How could politics compete? How could
the drowning world? Or love? Or anything?

Read your evil nonsense, yellow page
on page so mouldered now the thumb
with which you hold it flat will pass right through.

The mind is stupefied by rain and evil,
confined to one locality. Sewage comes
slithering out of the manhole and over the step

to meet itself emerging from the cellar
and then take the stairs at a lick. Now
what can you hear from inside the rain

in your chambers of rot? Tales like these
with their whispering filth. Be not afraid,
since history’s a reservoir of corpses.

If we were really men, true gin-sunk
Haileybury washouts, rubber-planting stoics,
chaps the snakes are always watching,

we would need no telling. We would know
the world is only ever scenery, a tale,
and this last inundation, this surrender

to the overbrimming glass of gin and bitters,
to the flood, and to the seething residents
within the deepest passage of the ear

who blindly tunnel to the brain itself –
all this is fate, a sick nobility conferred
upon the undeserving as a gift,

as mould emerges from a wall, the spawn
of time and damp, digesting its estate.

Sean O’Brien’s twelfth collection of poems, The Bonfire Party, is to be published by Picador in January 2026. Other forthcoming publications include Eye of the Island, an expanded selection of the poems of Corsino Fortes, translated with Daniel Hahn (Poetry Translation Centre); a collection of supernatural tales, The Long Glass (Postbox); and a pamphlet, À la Carte (New Walk). O’Brien’s work has received awards including the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes. He is Emeritus Professor of
Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.