Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday

The Suffering

You leave the car on the lip of the wild

Atlantic way and climb, cautiously, down

to where the sea, in its rage and fury, batters

against the rocks and the rough-hewn face

of the cliffs; you are come, in recurring need,

to touch again on your handsel of truth, the joy,

the wonder and the suffering, that make a life;

you sit, top of a boulder, lone, seeking that inner

silence. Its depth. How you suffer it.

                                                                        The sea,

here on the western coast, is bewildering

in its perpetual agitation, flinging at times

its spray high to unseat you. You know that,

out there, there are unfathomable continents

of dreamlike wavering meadows, exotic flowers

and weeds, the savagery of sharks, streeling

of jellyfish crossing the dark like galaxies.

                                                                          But now

your gaze is inwards, waiting for that quiet

within, fearing disturbing presences at your back –

the shifting multitudes of the slaughtered,

the innocent, the children, drowned refugees

while you sense, at your shoulder, a profounder

presence, the one who knew to his bones the full

anguish and limitations of our humanness,

the one who is a burden to you, and a consolation.

John F. Deane is from Achill Island in the west of Ireland. He is founder of Poetry Ireland and its journal, Poetry Ireland Review. In October of 2023 Carcanet published Selected and New Poems, a generous choice of poems from earlier years, together with a substantial sequence of new work. In 2025 Guillemot Press published the third “bookling”, The Red Gate. Also in 2025, a selected poems in Norwegian Translation was published, translated by Jostein Seboe. A new collection of poems, Jonah and Me, is due from Carcanet in December of 2025.

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx