Field Guide to the Dark

Peter Fallon

You word it into being,

the worn down, a spoken

verdict on all that was,

to worn out. What you thought

was cracked in fact was broken.

Now the house of sorrow

is a site

of quarantine, so many stay

away. But stars are forged

in the smithy of a night.

You will be what lasts

of what is lost,

who can endure

what you know will end.

You estimate the cost

of joy’s prospect. There is,

in a city of suffering, a tree

on each of whose bronze leaves

is etched the name of one

who died, an immortality.

There are no manuals

for grief. On a back shelf

in a back room they lie unwritten,

unopened. But they begin,

Lesson One: First you save yourself.

from Still the Heart (forthcoming)

PETER FALLON lives in the Irish Midlands where he farmed for many years. In 1970, he founded The Gallery Press, Ireland’s pre-eminent literary publishing enterprise. He continues to edit and publish Gallery Books and to work on poems and translations. He is a member of Aosdána.