by Ciarán O’Rourke
More and more inhuman, every day.
I feel just like an animal, squatting,
squalid, in the corner, my chill-blained feet
foot-sore, among the rubbish and the dirt.
There isn’t any choice: shit will out –
whatever my disgrace or shame. Of all
the high humanitarians, in Dublin, London,
distantly, the ones who keep their counsel
while we rot, the pious quietists…will any
designate our torture, say its name?
The suffering of the hungry will go on.
In fourteen months, I’ve not once walked
the open air, breathing in the sky:
I’m living by the minute, growing grey.
Today, a meticulous and petty dispossession,
known as “cellular confinement”: my worldly
goods – three burly blankets, the chamber pot
and mattress, all a-swarm with lice – were churned
about the room, then flung beyond the door,
a turgid ritual. It’s frightening, to put it plain,
to see young, brawny men, like me, who
just two years ago were strong as horses,
shrivelled now, and brittle, shrunken down,
reduced to ragged emptiness, worn out
by this – the customary modus
of colonial disdain! The language
here, among the “blanketmen”, is
Gaeilge: the speech of silver Ireland
re-born inside the cell. To spend eight
million pounds on carceration – when
children live in gutters through the North,
a regal slum! Someone, a modern bard,
should write a verse: upon the tribulations
of the prisoners. I would myself, could I
but see the close. To most, a few stray birds,
a vagrant moon, the running, restless wind,
are barely worth the noting. To me, they mean
existence: all there is. I’ve whiled away my time
in longing for the lark, our liberty, to fly
and sing. (Somewhere, I know, the spring
is on the move.) Lying here, on what,
I’m sure, will be my dying bed, I listen
even to the raucous crows, with love.
