Poems by Sean O’Brien ​

Come Like Shadows
In that archway in a corner of the courtyard,
one step down, on whose stone lip
rain gathers and moss ramifies –
 
in that mere hole in the air
left over by the late regime, whose shade
you’ve never bothered looking into,
 
something cold is standing now.
You lay the book aside. A chill
has breached this private corridor.
 
Your silence too is altered.
Watch how underneath the arch
a last light is withdrawn,
 
how cold and darkness gesture
at a figure, figures, a design
where you appear to have no place
 
and might have never been.
But are you not the sun
in whose regard this kingdom lives?
 
Supposing the conspirators
discreetly gathering had faces,
would you know them? Suppose
 
you did - so what, since knowledge
got too late is ignorance? Your creatures
come like shadows now.



Deluge
Long before you feel it, you can hear prolonged applause
as from a concert hall across a square, intensifying steadily,
then in a moment everywhere. It is not the épuration,
only rain, which everyone has always known,
to which there can be no exceptions, rain
known also as desire, manifest in sudden pools
and urgent gutters, in the silver-pewter gleam of cobblestones,
in the sealed-off courtyards of the rich, and in the Seine itself
that for the moment lies accepting what must be.
Although the heart longs at such times to be cleansed
of its sins of omission and lust and all the occasions of sin,
life must go on. The murderer shaking the rain from his hat
ascends by elevator to his crime. A dancer must take a whore’s bath
in the backstage sink and bicker with the pianist over money.
She was offered Monte Carlo once, remember. New York.
She dresses, puts on kohl and leaves as if she has decided
once for all, tossing the curls that helped to bring her to this pass.
It is desire, when the clock beside the bed is close to death from waiting
and the rain is beating on the fanlight. You will never see it all – the city
with its million needs and sorrows, but you know at least
that happiness is relative: to sit at home and read the paper
while Madame is sewing and the radio brings news
of further executions is enough. It must be. Or what else?


 
Impasse: For Jules Maigret (Hercules Editions, 2023).
The Bonfire Party (Picador, January 2026)

Sean O’Brien’s twelfth collection of poems, The Bonfire Party, is to be published by Picador in January 2026. His books have received awards including the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and the E.M Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His translations include Dante’s Inferno, the poems of Abai Kunanbayuli and Corsino Fortes, and plays by Aristophanes and Lope de Vega. He is Emeritus Professor of Creative Writing at Newcastle University and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

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