The Fare Forward Poetry Competition: Second Place
Immram (A Rowing Out)
By Colm O’Shea
After a long aching haul
the heavy oak oar grows light in my hands.
My back bends easy, blisters fall away,
and grey mist shimmers gold. Water ripples silver.
Boat ribs creak bronze. Every emerald fish aligns
to see me forward. Sapphire birds shriek the way.
This is not like any voyage the myths told tell of,
except that there is much moving West.
No exotic islands, no monsters.
Only rowing, and the shimmering mist,
singing always in syllables, never in words.
Something about all this light, and syllables,
makes it devilish hard to remember if I’m running away
or toward. From. To. Prepositions are blisters—they sting
and fall asunder. Row. The oar is so weightless now
like light itself. Something else is pulling it for me.
Maybe it was always so. The syllables quicken,
cooing in waves. Some beacon beyond the mist
is bidding me speak, teaching my long-forgotten voice
with a mother’s patient tongue.
Colm O’Shea teaches writing at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts. His work has been anthologized in Voice Recognition: 21 Poets for the 21st Century (Bloodaxe Books) and Initiate: An Oxford Anthology of New Writing (Blackwell). His recent books include James Joyce’s Mandala (Routledge), and the sci-fi novel Claiming De Wayke (Crossroad Press). He was also a finalist in Singapore University’s sci-fi flash fiction competition run by the Center for Quantum Computing.
