The Snowy Owl

Over the heads of the firing squad

flew a snowy owl, who oohooed twice

just before they pulled their triggers
and as the woman slumped on her ropes,

blood splattering her white dress,

the owl landed on her shoulder,

oohooed again, and swiveled its bigeyed

eyed gaze over all the uniformed men,

one of whom raised his rifle

but the captain knocked it away

while the owl pecked at some blood

on the woman's breast, smearing

its own breast feathers, then glared,

it seemed, at the transfixed men,

before swooping off, barely missing

the head of one, making them all

turn to watch it glide away, and hear

one more oohoo echo through the sky.

*****

The sweatmark

The sweatmark on his tee-shirt that day
made a map of Ireland, not the map
you d see in a current atlas, but one
like the ur-map that hung on his wall
at home - where it never got this hot,
not in a hundred years. He wiped
his leaking brow with his half-sleeve
and held the base of the tee-shirt out
 to look at the sweatmark again.
 It was Ireland, all right, even seen
upside down. His own county,
Donegal, was over his right nipple.
Kerry kicked towards the liver
while Dublin was nowhere at all.
He sleeked down his warm hair
with his fingers. What did this mean,
if anything? He got sweatmarks
all these days, but never a map before.
Was it a signal calling him back?
Why else was the tee-shirt only marked
in that spot, unlike every other time?
He wondered should he phone home.
Then that voice in his head he hated
told him to take the tee-shirt off
and shove it in the laundry basket.
If it really was a map and a sign
it would survive the launderette -
which it didn't, not that that proved
anything, he afterwards thought.
But that sweatmark never reappeared.

Matthew Sweeney, poet, prose-writer, editor, was born in Donegal in 1952; he studied English and German philology at the Polytechnic of North London and the University of Freiburg. He has returned to live in Ireland recently, having previously been a resident in Berlin, Graz, Timisoara and, for a long time, London. He made his poetry debut in 1983 and has published since then nine more collections including one for children and two fiction books for children. Translations of his work have appeared in Germany, Holland, Mexico, Romania, Latvia and Slovakia.