ANTARCTIC YELLOW Australian Antarctic Territory You’ve come all this way for the Southern Lights but they’re on strike again. Then someone says let’s go see the snow petrel, the cute white dove that bathes in the snow of the continent of peace, and on the way you wonder if you could belong like the petrel.… Continue reading a poem about belonging
Category: Poems
Poem: Omens
I should have known from the retching crow that passed on my way to the station that morning. The signs were there in the sprinkle of chocolate on my cappuccino, in the graph of plunging share prices hidden in the newspaper’s entrails. She’s gone; I should have known. The signs were there this evening as… Continue reading Poem: Omens
Poem: The Night
Alone together just this side of dawn, you asked the questions and I traced my answers on your smoothed body parchment with just enough paint and inspiration to reach the end of a line before turning back, ready to start all over again. I wrote my hope on your shoulder blades, feeling the muscles taut… Continue reading Poem: The Night
Poem: Necromancy
From one day to the next, I never know when the face will show itself again in a mirror or a pan of water, as if unearthed by the ceaseless, circling plough of my mind. It’s always the same; a happy, younger me, long gone, the dead returned to speak with the dying. I wonder… Continue reading Poem: Necromancy
Poem: Waiting at the Water’s Edge
Another day of hope and nothing slides into evening’s apologetic grey; I’m in love, but I don’t know who with. Somewhere, upstream of love and poetry’s floundering strokes, she’s sitting as fine and clear as the first gasp of oxygen. It’s getting dark and once more no one’s turned up; every day’s just a poor… Continue reading Poem: Waiting at the Water’s Edge
Poem: Thursday
And rose. And fell. Once more. Something at the corner of my eye is thrusting its bony fingers into the gaping cracks of my life, pushing its stained fingers into the empty spaces where my life should be, where all my principles and goals, my reason for being should be safely bedded down. I rose,… Continue reading Poem: Thursday
Poem: Pilgrimage
After that, it’s all a blur, just a mass of people rushing past to get somewhere that seems important, and I’m the only one going the other way; twelve years of elbows in the ribs. Places I’d seen countless times through the grimy windows of speeding trains began to seem interesting, to offer the chance… Continue reading Poem: Pilgrimage
Translations of Italian Poetry
A small archive of translations of Italian poetry, including Pasolini, Ungaretti, Saba, Carducci, G. Rossetti, Cavalcanti, Corazzini, Pascoli: https://scflynn.com/translations-of-italian-poetry/ Previously published in Modern Poetry in Translation and Acumen.
Poem: From the Notebooks of Poet J XIX – XXII
XIX. TRUST ME I sat for hours creating a poem in my head It was so complete, so perfect that I didn’t need to write it down XX. MULTI-PURPOSE POEM [Written in black marker pen on a kitchen sponge] When a sad poem is required, immerse in water, read and… Continue reading Poem: From the Notebooks of Poet J XIX – XXII
Poem: From the Notebooks of Poet J XV – XVIII
XV. CLOSE-UP A plain black page might say nothing, or it might be a close-up of a fraction of the first letter of the book that tells you everything XVI. FOCAL POINT [Written on the middle pages of a blank exercise book] How small the things that occupy us … Continue reading Poem: From the Notebooks of Poet J XV – XVIII
S.C. Flynn 