To Fear the Multitude
By Oisin Breen
As the spruce wood of the oars cracked in my hands,
And splinters found sure footing
Beneath my pores, the gudgeon, too, they rose,
A horror cloud behind me, metres wide,
For though one gonk alone measures but four inches long,
Beneath each near-translucent lake-bed fish,
Another glassy carp did swim,
And so vast was their number, the water shook,
And they became a strange new centrifuge in play,
A terrible shoal spooling out a vortex: an analog
For flowers crushed beneath stampeding feet.
And the gudgeons’ speckled skin of blues and greens in patches shone,
Swaddling the dark blotches on their flanks in a new-born darkened light,
And with each breath of mine, these torches pulsed
– distended colours, pinks and auburns too –
And with each pulse, they left me spirit dazed,
Those river-scourers, homelymost among the dead.
And though they lay their eggs in drowned tree-roots,
Between April and early May, they saw in me,
I now know, a murky human host –
a wild shell of dirty water,
in which to hide and feed,
a wanton shell
in which to rest and breed.
Irish poet, doctoral candidate, and journalist, Oisín Breen, a multiple Best of the Net nominee and Erbacce Prize finalist, is published in 121 journals in 22 countries, including in Agenda, North Dakota Quarterly, Books Ireland, Door is a Jar, Northern Gravy, Quadrant, Southword, and The Tahoma Literary Review. Breen has two collections, the widely reviewed and highly praised Lilies on the Deathbed of Étaín, a Scotsman poetry book-of-the-year, 2023, (Downingfield), and his well received debut, Flowers, All Sorts, in Blossom, Figs, Berries, and Fruits Forgotten (Dreich, 2020). Breen’s third collection, The Kergyma, is slated for 2025 (Salmon).