2 poems by Mark Granier

Aside

from demographic slices of North Korea,

American Samoa, Eritrea,

The Federated States of Micronesia

and a few isolated holdouts –– monasteries

and convents that observe the old traditions

of silence, fasting, apartness ––

almost everyone now has a witchy, black

chip off the old monolith, fixed

to the anatomy securely as a third eye,

an eye that you stroke (something

puzzled children have been seen to try

when given an actual book):

child-laboured cobalt, rare earths, a phantom itch

wherever we stand, walk, sit

or roll over, making space in the bed

for that face that consumes our own: uplit,

touched by the restless skin

that has slicked over everything, our hurry

into geology, silence, the fine black sand

that will, one day, be the boundary

of all we are and do and say.

Christmas Casuals

Exit 9 heading North on the M50,

just off the Red Cow Roundabout,

the Google map solidifies into a grid

of blank, rain-shadowed walls ––

business parks, bus depots –– places

familiar to lorry and bus drivers, where work

proceeds ––around the clock, between bright

breathing spaces –– in gulps.

*

A new math: sets and subsets: boxes

into boxes, the biggest

being the windowless, flap-doored ‘hub’.

*

A broad-shouldered girl with hennaed hair

plucks a parcel I could barely lift,

hefts and shrugs it into a larger box

as if it were light as the air

of a tune already forgotten.

*

The scanner guns we use are dead ringers

for the Star Trek phasers the Enterprise crew carried,

the ones you could set to ‘stun’.

*

Boxes into boxes. A man with a downturned mouth

has stopped scanning and lifting. He leans

forward to stare for a lengthening moment into

the outback of his mind in a cardboard interior.

Seeing him, another man pats his shoulder:

‘No worries Bob, ten minutes till break.’

*

Something else moves among the reflections

in the hot canteen: a wind-gripped birch

outside the window, trembling in a swarm

of street-lit rain. A cup of tea, a sandwich. Look

at the time. It is astonishing to be alive.

___________

Mark Granier born in London, England, is an Irish poet and photographer based in Dublin. His sixth collection, Everything You Always Wanted To Know, was published by Salmon Poetry in 2025.