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Sean O’Connor

Hands

dream in a long night
my dead friends and I
dancing in tree-tops

In the black of night, woken by the calls of my father; he has borrowed the voice of The Wind God, yet I recognise him, his reaching cries. He calls me by my forever name; the one I had before mother and father were born.

Naked, I move through the window, then the hedge outside, feeling it brush me, soft as lanugo. Over dew-forming grass I walk, following his appeal, until I feel him and know he gestures for me to bow down low, crawl into a tangle of briars whose thorns do not cut, but somehow salve and ease me through a tunnel of dense growth above rough earth. 

I straighten up, my father’s Wind God voice always before me, the ground dropping downwards increasing my speed, till I am running and faster propelled by a gravity beyond the pull of earth. I feel no more the pound of ground, and nothing around me, but darkness, air.

black winter moon
unseen waves crashing
the taste of sea spray

Flung out, falling, a sense of heaving water way below. Eyes stream in the salty air and, thumbling forward, the coming into focus of hands reaching up to me, out of the ocean, the hands of everyone I ever met, who died. 

Young Kevin’s hands, Mikey’s too, Old Man Grace and the fiddler Donaghue. The hands of grandparents, uncles and aunts already gone; cousins, school friends, buddies and lovers, the longed for, the lost.

Watanabe-sama, felled by cancer; the girl who dropped from the Seto bridge, broke the inland sea, and her stillborn child, never named. The hands of dead patients whom I washed in mortuaries. All of them and each of them, reaching up to cushion and comfort, so I may be free from fear to answer the call my father makes, on his and their behalf.

into the non-moon
warm on the horizon
our ship of ghosts

About the Author

Sean O’Connor is the founder and editor of The Haibun Journal, a judge of the Genjuan International Haibun Contest, and has been writing haibun and haiku for 30 years. His first solo collection, Let Silence Speak (Alba Publishing, 2016), was shortlisted for the Touchstone Distinguished Books Award 2016. His latest book is Fragmentation (Alba Publishing, 2021). He currently lives in rural Ireland.

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