No lyric ever stopped a tank – Seamus Heaney

From the moistened surface of my tongue 
attend this crafted gift to instil faith.
No battle tank ever blocked a poem, no 
armour-piercing round ever shattered 
a stanza word by word. Architecture, 
statuary, paintings, snared in the gaze 
of a scope’s reticle, all fragment 
to pounded dust. But phonemes, syllables, 
glottal stops shard through brains smoother 
than shrapnel. Poems, shielded by their lack 
of atomic stuff, resist a Merkava’s 
mortal, kinetic venom. Shoot and blast 
and fire all you want, you cannot annihilate 
the circulated thoughts of man, of woman;   
not the kevlar-like thought of a lyric’s
reticulated words and beaded chimes.

Patrick Cotter lives in Cork. His latest book is Quality Control At The Miracle Factory (Dedalus Press, Dublin, 2025) www.patrickcotter.ie

Poetry submissions to [email protected]