Dr Arthur Broomfield is a poet and Beckett scholar from County Laois, Ireland. His work has been published in Acumen, Agenda, Orbis, North and in the US, Ireland and India. He has been writing Surrealist poetry for the past two years, inspired by the English surrealist poet Hilda Sheehan and by the writings of Andre Breton.

Meditating to Miles

You turn your palms to Sirius,
under your head a blithe pillow.
 Eyes closed. Drapes defy
 the birdchat
of a spring morning.
Strains of ‘Round About Midnight’
bidden by your breathing.
 
 You who know so little
know it’s Miles on trumpet,
John Coltrane before
“A Love Supreme”
on tenor sax.
You listen to Red, it’s not the piano you hear
and Paul Chambers, assuring you notions
of time and space lie to the Almighty,
the phoney tales of rhythm and rhyme
pal with the devil’s holy plan.

The phosphorus path
beguiles, each step
distils marshmallow seeds,
jasmine scent fuels the trip.

Shattered, the lived-in conditions
imposed on experience -
bread and death,
birth and consecrated work,
the rising moon,
an Islamic mosaic on a fritillary
the entangled photon –
through filtered light signals,
a raindrop from a neglected cloud.

Poised, on a breeze-tossed thistledown,
you see, beyond
the setting September sun,
you, on the edge
of  the star-pierced curtain,
the cat of the sacred sign,
through a defence of February fog.

In the Beginning was the Word

After Caravaggio’s “The taking of Christ”.
 
You would call them an undisciplined lot,
out of pique, understandably,
you being the son of man.
There you are
hands washed and folded,
 in denial,
the out of luck tycoon
at the tables.
 
 Low-fat light highlights
the deadpan wrinkles
on your tell all brow,
moon-blind man of the black night,
gone your pumped-up pomp.
Flat as Martha’s pancakes
you cling to the hot-wired
post box lamp post
that turns water to wine.
It’s hard to swallow.
 
Look! look around, look!
implores the weather cheeked,
hay bale hardy-handed,
brow furrowed in 26” potato drills, one,
who manhandles you.
[He’ll pay dear for this].
 
They’re looking through you
as if you were somewhere else,
you’ve bored them with your
tales of the expected
and early morning walks on water.
 
Your time has come to go.
So, slouch off to Bethlehem.
you’ve lost the dressing room,
they’ll flog your boots
to the highest bidder.
 
This Hamlet to your Horatio, who compels
farmers, fishermen, cold clad soldiers and policemen
to renounce their laws of men and Gods, sees,
in the clarity of the silent Judean night,
so beyond your five loaves
and three small fishes,
 
not as sun, stars or candle anywhere,
beyond black and moonlight and somewhere,
the pure light of the pitchfork shine.