The Tuesday Poem: Words for Samuel Beckett

It seems that from your quiet plot,

gin-clear, a voice maintains.

What struggles for expression past

four strikings-out, your final scrawl

and what the language means —

is nothing. A kind of simple

genius touch, a gallows knot

that’s rendered in this home-not-home

to silence, lint, occasion, dust.

We will repeat your Au contraire:

unmist the glass; turn back the tape;

restart the heart — until your stroke

cleanly reveals from studies deep

as yours, one item more

that loosens to the shape we like:

the fledgling and the failing hands

still better in their failure,

manoeuvred from pure silence

where now Belacqua, who atones

unbothered on his ledge,

or even the skinheaded

modern of Autolycus, may,

no matter how refined or raw,

still demonstrate noblesse oblige

while clutching the shortest straw.

I almost want to say, be dead,

lie back down in your bones.

Dean Browne is an undergraduate of UCC and lives in Cork. He won the 2011 Cuisle National Poetry Competition and has published poems in periodicals such as The Penny Dreadful, The SHOp and Southword. This poem is taken from New Eyes On the Great Book — a new miscellany of Cork poets.