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 