Tadhg Larabee
History (Below Marconi Station, Mizen Head, Ireland)
I. Stone
I am nude atop the naked rock.
My skin is dirt. My body
breathes the copper
scent of water blown in
from sea, the smokey taste of salt
meets sky.
My mind is slow. Full of
sweet sloughing. That being,
unmade and made anew
by every wave. Now again
beneath a soft and shifting fog,
wind whispers cold in me.
II. Flesh
I am my own sown child
and I awake into
the screaming voice of ocean.
My mouth is hot and thick.
My throat, my nose, more
clotted up with earth
and sinking, salty loam:
my father’s plough-faced
dream for all he loved.
I fall asleep again in fits and
starts, my breath the silt-veined
beat of pickaxe into bone.
III. Metal
My fingers are not quite grass, silver more than green:
those plants that climb
from ploughs and scythes and fall through knocked down walls.
My eyes are suggestions of steel,
half unburied, and I see in turning arcs of color: centuries
of blue and tongueless black, then
the loudest, reddest rust, a flash
of leather. I am what wears a dress
of silicon. What sings across the sea.
Tadhg Larabee is originally from Rockville, Maryland. He is a freshman at Harvard.