Mark Lawlor
Writer / Visual Artist
Mark Lawlor
Mark is from Cavan, currently living in Sheffield. M. Phil at TCD, and studied at the RHA.
Recently he has been awarded a Hawthornden Fellowship and poems have appeared in the moth, Cyphers, Blackbox Manifold and Skylight 47.
His Visual Art has appeared in galleries in Cavan, Bray, Dublin, Sheffield, Poland, Italy.
The conductor abruptly opens our door, checks our tickets and whispers, 'I wish I could come with you.’
Aliens by Mark Lawlor.
PHEASANT
You come up in the field out of nowhere, a bright colonial present, a foreign language, in a lake meadow.
Wattle-eyed, rust rushes you need in the marsh, an echo of home.
A rusted bucket ablaze with embers on a windy day.
You are a samurai, your camouflage sword holds behind you.
Your scrape and bow, leaves a scar of soil on grass, a misfired gun.
You come nearer and nearer, a two-footed scorch all gold, copper on the scales, lustre green and white.
You survive as a mistake in the borderland between two estates. The life in you brings guns.
You step into me, a vibrant whack of take off.
OLIVE AND OSIP (For Leland Bardwell)
beach tang brings us away in time as the wind howls an accordion tune; terrible to bring you here I know Olive, and I can see confusion in your eyes – the big wind scrapes the back door of the house and we are holed up in the house’s calm momentarily.
Back among your things, you walk between dresser and table, touch items with lovely unseeing hands, you steady yourself, the house is underwater, and you don’t recognise photographs of yourself and laugh and check your pockets for tobacco.
Then I thank you for everything and give back to you for a second time the tan book of Osip Mandelstam – you are the reason I met him in all those years, at your house, do you remember how he is in another room eating soup, nothing of the poet about him (all my ideas shatter) as he takes some bread and you, Olive, ask him to reveal his poetry for me and he rolls up his trousers to show a mass of fine blue lines in Cyrillic Alphabet tattooed on his legs, how he holds the fabric and nods his head, smiles to lift his hands