Spaces Poem by Seamus O' Brian

There are spaces between the words

Intervals of Quantum silence
Pixels blank whose whiteness
Heavier than meanings forced
By language clumsy, coarse.

A sigh. A glance. A hand
to the chin of a face averted.
No pithy phrase, no clever rhyme
Can bend the fabric of the soul
Quite So much as a breath exhaled
in slow surrender...

When restrained by the gravity
Of life, the prisoner of a chair
Unseeing though constrained to stare
Wordlessly pondering
As life passes by
the window beyond
In the spaces between the words.

The crescendo of angry men
The bravado of fiery youth
With an urgent cause borrowed
Or burned into their yielding breasts
By the cruelty of injustice
Or the greater cruelty of misfortune.

A mother heaves her anguished sobs
Into the arms that surround her
But cannot comfort her; cannot
stanch the blood that runs
through slab gray streets red
like the tears of God.

In the spaces between the pain

In the spaces between the hate.

In the spaces between the words.


A man grips his camera lovingly
Calloused hands bruise the child
whose walls of cloistered innocence
are breached by filthy pulchritude
To be peddled like soap or magazines
To weasels decomposing in their seats.

And the gray rain streaks my window's pane
Like the tears I do not cry
Like the words I do not have
Like the worlds of pain between each line

In the spaces between the words.

Have mercy on us all, O God
Breathe a draft of love upon
The walls of hate we build between
What we are, and what we ought to be.
Take our words and throw them all to hell

But give us spaces small but filled
With love, with grace, with tenderness.
Like the space between the words
You wept.