Pratik : From Pratik's Archives: Irish Poet Steven O’Brien's new poem, "Nimue"

Tuesday, September 29, 2020

From Pratik's Archives: Irish Poet Steven O’Brien's new poem, "Nimue"

STEVEN O’BRIEN

Nimue

Dark is the loom tide of the lake.

I have flickered through blind fathoms

To the clear still shallows

Of the water-fasten that holds

My country apart from yours.

I bring a wish blade made itself all of water

To the upper world

Hammered from deep cold stone water

In the springs of midnightwater

And the higher I reach the more it becomes.

I have nursed it for a moon time;

A silver fin etched on both sides

In a hoar frost tongue of blue verglas -

‘Take Me Up’ it says and ‘Cast Me Away.’

Skim-ice along its edges clave

The pitch of the currents as I rose.

Now it shears the surface of the pool

That was unbroken by rain.

This man approaching

Has walked a holloway of alder and willow.

His face eddies like a lily,

Wary eyed, as if he is questioning his journey,

This proffered treasure.

Well might he hesitate,

As I hang among the trout glades

With the washed steel singing above me,

Its point biting my palm.

For all his life will be a racing torrent

Like a mountain beck in the spring thaw.

When first he draws this sword

It will shriek like an eagle

And dazzle his enemies.

It will also bind him and he will forever

Be a man wading the marches

Between waking and dreaming.

This is the gift.

Yet now

It is enough

To see how the hairs on his arm move

As he reaches to take the hilt.

And then I sink.

Steven O’Brien is a poet, novelist and mythographer. He has been editor of The London Magazine since 2009. He leads the MA and PhD programmes in Creative Writing at the University of Portsmouth. He is also a Trustee of the Vatican Patrons of the Arts.