Market Square, Five Years After
by and published in Edition Six of Pomegranate
1
On Market Square, six protestors sway in a line:
Don’t attack Iran! Don’t attack Iran!
Opening our hot baked potatoes to the air,
we laugh at them from our bench, sneer,
“we weren’t going to.” We are no Cahun
and Moore. I am shamed when you remind me
of my five-years-ago self, suggest that the protest
I marched on then may not have stayed that war
but stopped this one. Is the world safer, then?
“No. It’s not safer in Iraq.” — Hans Blix.
2
Later I stand in the hotel shower
shampooing my soul over and over
because I’m worth it. When I step out
of the shower it’s so quiet I wonder
if something has happened outside while we
are in here, if everyone has gone away to war
or died. We will march out together
past the empty reception desk, the automatic
doors parting to allow our passage,
the roads cleared of traffic. We can fill
our rucksacks with food from abandoned
stores, may have to move from hideout
to hideout, or start our own farm. When I step
of the shower, you hold out your hand.
I drop the towel to shake it.
Ailbhe Darcy
Ailbhe is 26 and from Dublin. She has published poems in Ireland, the UK and the US, in magazines that include The Wolf, Seam, Brittle Star, Chroma, The Stinging Fly, Horizon, The Cortland Review, Burning Bush, Smoke, Boston Hub, Crannog and Revival. She has taken part in the Poetry Ireland Introductions series, and also read at Limerick’s White House, London’s Keats’ House, the London Irish Centre and the Poetry Cafe (in The Shuffle.) Until recently she lived in London and Cambridge; she’s just moved to Indiana to do a PhD in contemporary poetry at the University of Notre Dame. She co-edits an online journal of new Irish art and writing, called Moloch.