EGYPT AND OTHER POETRY by Martin Mc Carthy
The New Stylus: Issue I
Egypt for Shannon Among the mind’s high pyramids, your youthful wisdom often exceeds the ancients’, and I find myself wondering what makes you so intuitively wise, why your thoughts inhabit timeless chambers where exquisite artifacts are preserved for eternity. I find myself wondering what your soul bears from bygone days, before this lifetime … days when you counselled Nefertiti?
There’s More to You
There’s more to you than this
pragmatic girl who has made an art
of saying nothing of the bliss
and dangers that await the unchained heart.
There’s more to you than you
have ever dared to show
to those who impose a curfew
on the familiar world they know.
There’s more to you than this
mere mannequin who seems
to have embraced the safe abyss
of one who has given up her dreams.
There’s more to you than you
allow the shore patrol to see,
as you paddle your own canoe
to the place where you’ll break free.Erato
White word-sheets are being filled,
like mirrors of the muse,
as a woman is reflected
in leg-revealing dresses.
Sometimes I desire her,
sometimes she eludes me,
but mostly – we climb stone stairs
together, to gently clasp the stars.Eulogy for Eva
Eva, I worshipped you. I worshipped something beyond you. But how can I explain? How can I explain in the language of this earth, a different language, a language of souls on their eternal journey? Souls become travellers in time, choosing flesh again and again in the perennial pursuit of perfection.
Yes, how can I explain the unexplainable tale of a druid and a teenage priestess, who lay naked on the sand, and became part of the foam of some great ocean of love, until chilly midnight broke the spell, and we looked around and saw nothing, only the shore, the moon, and far away—our lamplit hometown.
God, wasn’t eighteen a great age to fall in love! To be so trusting and innocent, and have it all. Oh, what a gift! And what a gift to lose! To lose, and stand all night outside the house where you were born, and wonder if you ever existed.
And that’s the key to mysterious life – that we forget who we were in order to become who we are, in order to choose a new path forward. But Eva, I won’t forget one single, solitary detail about you, not in this lifetime anyway. And how could I, even if I wanted to?
How could I forget the girl who would stay up all night, until first light, reading Lord of the Rings, then fall asleep, exhausted, in my arms? Or the girl who would run naked along the shore, scattering the surf wildly with her feet. Or the young priestess, sitting cross-legged in a bay window full of sunlight, on summer evenings, watching the mackerel boats coming ashore, the shrieking gulls in pursuit. And beyond them, the sand dunes, where rabbits and wild foxes lived, and lovers made love, after marvelling at the wreckage of a coal-ship, broken by a storm on a fearsome night in winter.
Then, of course, there were the outrageous coloured earrings from Woolworths that matched your shoes, your dress, your underwear, or all of them together. Just how in the name of God did you think of such things? Such funny, appropriate, crazy things that mean so much in your absence.
No, I won’t forget you. I can’t forget you, unless I forget myself, and all these images and memories that make me who I am; and through which I summon you now to rise again, in some new form among the living, where you will live forever and ever, Eva.
Martin Mc Carthy lives in Cork City, Ireland, where he studied English at UCC. He is a contributing editor to the American poetry website, The HyperTexts. He was shortlisted for the Red Line Poetry Prize, and is a nominee for the 2023 Pushcart Prize. He has a personal website at mccarthypoet.com and a Substack website at martinmccarthy.substack.com/
The Perfect Voice, his epic Sound Cloud tribute to Bob Dylan can be heard here. A limited signed and numbered print edition can be purchased in the store at mccarthypoet.com
Eros and his Mother can be difficult gods for the poet to serve. But Martin McCarthy's reflective lyrics are a contemporary Trionfo di Afrodite. His tender and insightful poems seem to stand firmly in the long tradition of erotic elegy.
Martin's poems, with directness and dignity, celebrate love and its nakedness. He recognizes that love is naked and and seeks out nakedness to complete the circle of reciprocal desire.
I have learned to admire poetry which is grounded in tradition, and Martin's poems are grounded in a tradition as old as the Roman elegists who celebrated beauty and lnowledge in the nakedness of self and other.
that we forget who we were in order to become who we are, in order to choose a new path forward...
Here and throughout this group of lyrics Martin stands with St. Augustine of The Confessions and his phenomenology of memory and forgetfulness, the acknowledgement that we are able to create and renew through remembrance made possible in the crucible of forgetting.
I wish to thank Shannon Winestone and The New Stylus for publishing four of my poems. I feel very honoured to be included here among the most outstanding poets of this present era, and I'm certain that Issue 1 will, in due course, be a hallmark poetry publication.
Shannon, in my opinion, is not only a gifted editor, but she is also a gifted poet in her own right, and I'm reliably informed that one of her own poems will be posted next. I can hardly wait to read it! In the meantime, I've dedicated 'Egypt' to her. Shannon, you're a real marvel in this age of falling poetry standards.