Sinéad Morrissey
Posted in 2015-2016 Readings and Talks
November 10, 2015
Seminar 5:30 PM | Lannan Center (New North 408)
Reading 8:00 PM | Bioethics Research Library (Healy 102)
& Forgive Us Our Trespasses
—Sinéad Morrissey
Of which the first is love. The sad, unrepeatable fact
that the loves we shouldn’t foster burrow faster and linger longer
than sanctioned kinds can. Loves that thrive on absence, on lack
of return, or worse, on harm, are unkillable, Father.
They do not die in us. And you know how we’ve tried.
Loves nursed, inexplicably, on thoughts of sex,
a return to touched places, a backwards glance, a sigh–
they come back like the ride. They are with us at the terminus
when cancer catches us. They have never been away.
Forgive us the people we love–their dragnet influence.
Those disallowed to us, those who frighten us, those who stay
on uninvited in our loves and every night revisit us.
Accept from us the inappropriate
by which our dreams and daily scenes stay separate.
—
From Parallax: And Selected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2013)
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