A Café in Mullingar
by Jimmy O'Connell -
Howard Jones’ ‘No one is to blame’
pipes through a café in Mullingar
in the beat and thrust of electronified
syncopation. Am I the only one here
stopping for coffee and a blueberry muffin,
reflecting on Rembrandt’s painting
of a sun-deprived, grey-jaundiced
Jesus nailed to a pitch-singed cross
of cheap carpentered wood? Where within
the frame of shrouded silence he realises
his own abandonment, his fear-paralysed
eyes and gnarled screaming mouth tasting
the anguish of hope lost; this same cry
unheard in the agonised etching in an earlier
self-portrait wherein we too become
the Dutchman who has surely painted
the symbol of man as artist forsaken
between speech and dumbness, between
a God absent and the brittle belief in a
rolled-back stone and an empty tomb.
His Christ hangs bereft at our casual forgetfulness,
our walled-out emptiness now brimmed
with desires unfulfilled, and spent treasure
wasting. Is he with us now watching out
for Summer Sales and supermarket trolleys,
this café filling with shoppers and wandered-souls,
heedless of piped music in relentless loop?
Jimmy O’Connell was born in Dublin. He is a graduate of UCD. Jimmy has been writing and performing his work for many years in the Irish Writers Centre, Sunflower Sessions and other venues. His poetry has appeared in The Baltimore Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Stepaway Magazine, Flare 7 & 10, and Poetry for a New Ulster among others. A collection of his poetry Although it is Night was published by Wordonthestreet in 2013. He has recently published his first novel, Batter the Heart. He is at present working on a play based on the life of Margaret Cusack, The Nun of Kenmare.