Clifford’s Tower
for the Jews of York
Have we forgotten the astringent
voice of Silkin, on frigid conscience
stupefied? Its queue-badgering ghost
must shake the iron-ribbed ceiling
of Leeds train station, the student
dives, places words choose to fester
under the skin. Plates of ice barge
the Ouse; two gulls ride convections
of air, mewing like remnant heralds
of some old Norse saga. The heart
brims over. Incongruity is shorn
of terror; hobby Vikings at Costa
warm their close-braided cheeks
with the cups. Malebisse sounds
like morning mist, halitosis low
over the stray, the derangement
of light so that there comes easy
to the imagination some deity –
its immense hands over us –
bending light pink and green
(though whether in design loving
or unloving impossible to say).
Conscience, we might well think,
is a kind of bad debt. Shake it off.
Heap ashes on it. To conclude
this weekend’s jolly, Clifford’s
tower burns again. Illuminations
lave the cold stone face, sparks
streaming down gilt-golden like
hyperactive tears; and afterward,
a girning skull vomiting smoke,
lobotomised. All applaud.
What can steel in us remembrance
of the freezing blade on shoulder
-blade, fear’s stone-encircled echo
and fire: its hunger, sad, satiable?
What can render love at its limits,
real sexual love, hounded by hate;
and in that northern walpurgisnacht,
true horror of their final non-choice?
Karl O’Hanlon grew up near Purdsyburn. His first pamphlet, A Strange Fashion of Forsaking, is to be published by Guillemot Press.
NB: This poem has previously appeared in – Stand, and in Eyewear’s Best New British and Irish Poets 2016.