Aubade
The expanse of silence remains unguarded
and the parable to our truest state.
4AM and the dead hush of somnolence
makes sound the sentry to unerring fate.
Underfoot the floorboards creak, there
is a laboured rise and fall from my mother’s
room. Is this how God sees us, contemplating
the vulnerable, loving life rush in,
so delicate, so dear?
What is it about the time before the sun
has risen, or the blackbirds chirp, that breathes
sincere uncertainty? Why does the dark escort
devout fragility?
Day breaks with no answers—just facts.
And now by tombs so old, they stoop;
I begin to pray. These souls are kindred
to the quiet and serve its longest sentence.
And devotion to fate is devotion to silence.
Seashell
Coiled like a cochlea,
or conic, convex,
you bore the arms
for abalone, whelk.
Until your calcified
trunk became discounted,
or your spiral sucked
of its flinching
flesh, left you—
the cracked sea-litter
to our coastal drift,
the smoothed reaction
to decomposition.
You, the deep-sea
landlord to the Hermit Crab,
the off-track armour
to its supple meat,
or clutched to my ear,
a locked-up whisper,
a repository of sound—
an unmarked fleet.
F. C. Andrews is a writer from Dublin, Ireland. He is currently a student on the M. Phil. in Creative Writing programme at Trinity College Dublin. His poems have appeared in Drawn to the Light Press, Hot Pot Magazine, The Hemlock, Icarus and are forthcoming in Eunoia Review.