Raving Noontide
I have slept for ten winters, I have married
an onion. Forty leagues I have swum and never
once thought of running. In midnight paroxysms
I’ve wandered quiet as clouds, and while tin drums
were pounded I set scraps out for gods.
Now down the rain comes, like blue pools of frogs
steeping the world-tea in its tenement bogs,
and still I carry on, raving noontide chitter-chatter,
treading water while the soldiers’ slim phalanxes
scatter. So come not near me with your feints
and your wiles, your overcharged cards and your
cascading smiles. I’ve peregrinated with rhinos
in Pleistocene dumbshow, swatted gnats with a swatter
just for swarming my window. But if you want mad
swearing love, moons swooning round Neptune,
gamboling tritons in sea-green ringed pontoons,
then slip me your hand, and let’s call out a warning.
With all due respect for the dawn of creation,
our fingers interlaced spark universal radiation.
Eric Brown is Executive Director of the Maine Irish Heritage Center. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in Enchanted Living, Rust & Moth, The Ekphrastic Review, Mississippi Review (first prize, Hamlet issue), The Galway Review, Constellations, Star*Line, The Frogmore Papers (shortlisted for the 2023 Frogmore Poetry Prize), and elsewhere.