nectar for food

a rabbit speaks:

he wrote poems about me

before i was kitten-born

black ink, no taste, smell

on paper, tree-like, thin

rustles beneath feet.

i did not hear them.

i lived, green fields

slopes

field banks

burrows dark, warm.

but i sensed what he said

he gave us names, lives

singled us to

within our kind.

now i am alone

live lone life.

myxie, he calls me

poem words

rabbits sniff, smell

butt blind, sickened

rabbit from my home.

i will die.

i eat bright colours

garden dark, dawn

petal flavoured scent

i am king, god

nectar for food.

"Jerusalem Maybe" - A poem by Padraig De Brún

Jerusalem Maybe 

"I wrote some of this on a ladder. It didn't wobble."

I made Britain from what I saw,

Sanding paint, breathing toxic dust.

It shaped before me by chance hand,

Stubborn remains of what had been.

And its edges, coloured and ragged,

Jutted from land into a sea 

Of cold, clean, sand-smooth, grey plaster.

And then the island shape was gone,

Cleansed from sight, like imaginings.

And I painted anew, slow, white,

Deliberate strokes, spread even,

Equally flat, smooth edge to smooth.

And what I created as God,

King, painter, was a plain, white wall.

I wondered then, my labours done,

If this new land, formed above dust,

Perfect, Jerusalem Maybe,

Was the space we might occupy,

If one day, all that makes us real,

Different and original,

Is allowed forever to pass.