Smithereens Press Chapbooks The Sea Path by Ciarán O'Rourke | Page 40

The Prisoner
(Photograph of Keith Douglas)
The photographer
has shot too soon,
so you’ll stand
like this forever;
unappeased,
reticent,
your uniform heatcreased, eyes widened
for the rain
that may fall daily there
to burn a thrumming life
to dust.
Finding you this way,
opened onto
on a page your diffidence defies,
the past becomes
what later
knowledge lacks,
the fact
before the story
of the fact, perhaps,

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