Issue 9: March 2005
Ian Duhig | Annie Freud | Mark Granier | Heather Holden | John Stammers | Matthew Sweeney
MARK GRANIER
Girl In A Wheelchair Dancing To U2, Lansdowne Stadium 1997
In a clearing near midfield
she is tossing her hair, waving her arms,
catching hold of, taking for a wild spin
a new constellation, The Chariot.
The Centre holds. Big wheels rattle and hum.
Sparks fly from her.
For Dust
Sleepless on my mother's bed, in the tall
room of our Bournemouth hotel (outside,
red squirrels in the dim pines)
I listened, for the first time,
to my own mystifying heartbeat,
a word, a word in my ear
I could not decipher. Squirrels,
auburn flames, darted, flickered,
flared into a dark road, headlit,
a child in the passenger-seat
startled by a fox, a dusk streak —
one of those passwords for passing —
finely sharpened, vanishing
into the ash-cloud of its tail.
A Halt
Someone (or more than one) laid
hands, again and again,
on this rockface in Patagonia
and somehow blew or flicked on it
a delicate overlapping spatter
of ochres, soot and rust-coloured
shedding of hands.
Shuttle
of onlooking moons, suns, sandstorms,
whatever winds twitch
that continent's tail.
The hands
swim, perhaps nine thousand years,
in the stone's pulse, draw to an arm's length all
that eerie echoless lightfall:
our wandering gaze
stopped
by the face of all distance, this wall
waving at us.
'Girl in a Wheelchair' from Airborne (Salmon, 2001).
Mark Granier's poems have been published widely in newspapers and periodicals in Ireland and the UK, and have been broadcast on RTE's Lyric FM. Awards and prizes include a first prize in the 1997 UK New Writer Poetry Competition, an Irish Arts Council Bursary in 2002 and the Vincent Buckley Poetry Prize in 2004. His first collection, Airborne, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2001.