Four Poems by Sean O’Brien

Beneath the Lamp

Beneath the evening lamp, the desk
becomes the outpost of a faith
in long decline. Here at the end of days,
when disbelieving priests maintain
the hallowed forms and mysteries
dry-mouthed in the secular desert,
what reason is there to renounce
the work of print and ink and diaries?

This place lies beyond the reach
of all distinction and applause.
Here envy turns to dust and those
ambitions that first led you here
no longer hold the interest,
while egomania begins to sound
like modesty achieved by via
negativa while not even looking.

Irresistible to mourn the self
yet hold it in contempt, at once
deny its claims and suffer them
in every petty consequence,
enumerate its sins and find them
wanting in sincerity without
the final grandeur madness might
confer on all this paper, all this ink.

Admit it. You’re still waiting for
the click that follows when it’s over
and the casket’s sealed, when poetry
at last escapes its own occasion,
free to lie in perfect ignorance,
unread forever, perfectly attuned
to the oblivion where music
starts, and ends, and needs no hearing.

Music

Here is music, whereby sorrow
seems a consolation in itself,

the rack of loss an ecstasy
wholly gratuitous. Lay hands

upon the instrument, upon
the air itself and make it sing

to our condition, distracting
time from time when time

is all we are, our dream of order
claiming immanence to free

the songs of stones and water,
sparks as they fly upwards,

air, that lingers when
it’s over, shadow of a sound,

a breath of old, unhappy
far-off things made perfect.

By the Hour

Some people feel insulted by the furniture
that lies in wait, possessed by someone else
who happens not to want it now, e.g.
a dressing-table mirror which prefers
to keep its face averted from the facts,
e.g. that giant walnut wardrobe meant
for higher things. Both are fated to enjoy
an attic view of chimneys, though alas Madame
this afternoon the sea is otherwise engaged.

But others will divine perfection
in a draughty hour, as the wardrobe
counts its hangers, breathing woodnotes
in and out, rehearsing for a climax
endlessly postponed. Embraces claim
there is no history but here and now
among the tangled underwear and shoes,
the laying on of hands that neither kill
nor cure, but ease the soul towards eternity.

The room will keep its counsel afterwards,
and in between we disappear, we die,
then in a coup de theâtre rise again
to play this matinee and re-assess
the claims of ecstasy, until it’s time,
when she will perch before the mirror
naked with a hairbrush and her lipstick
to compose another face, as though
there should be other rooms to wear it in.

Sheds Revisited

Not every man has a shed in his garden.
in September, at slow sad Michaelmas,
Sheds are dismantled. Sometimes they burn.
Sometimes women take against them strangely.
To think of all the sheds that never were…

Shedless, I take off my cycle-clips
in my spiritual home in the Fifties, and squat
on the upturned bucket where my shed should be,
toasting absent sheds with some awful concoction
distilled out of hedge-bottom scrapings,

before I disrobe and, in defiance of the bye-laws
dance round a bonfire to summon
the god of the garden and his entourage
of nymphomaniacs. I stand before you
naked and craving a boon, Lord Vertumnus.
Not sex. You can see I’m half-dead. Gizza shed.

Sean O’Brien’s twelfth collection of poems, The Bonfire Party, was published by Picador in January 2026. With David Wheatley he edited During the Late and Long Continuing Cold: An Eightieth-Birthday Tribute to Peter Didsbury (Broken Sleep). In November his pamphlet Back of Beyond will appear from Red Squirrel, and he will begin the Back of Beyond Tour, visiting a bus shelter near you.