A Café in Mullingar

[Jimmy O'Connell]

A Café in Mullingar

A café in Mullingar pipes Howard Jones’
‘No one is to blame’ and other 80s synched
and electronified discotheque sounds wafted
through a beat and thrust of persistent fevered
dedication to relentless consummation that
drives economies and political penumbrations;

no one here, stopping by for coffee and blueberry
muffins, as I do now, reflects on Rembrandt’s
painting of a Titian inspired body, flesh,
sun-deprived, grey and white Jesus nailed
to a pitch-singed cross of cheap carpentered
wood, and in the frame of shrouded silence

know his own abandonment, nor in his fear-
paralysed eyes and gnarled screaming mouth
the anguish of hope lost; the same cry unheard
and etched in a charcoal self-portrait wherein
down the centuries the Dutchman becomes us
too, an artist giving report of his understanding:

this is the true symbol of man, not the neon-promise
of a naive Arcady nor the seven gardens of plush
delights; Ecce Homo forsaken between speech and
dumbness; between a God absent at the precise
moment of need and comfort and the brittle belief
in a rolled back stone and empty tomb. He hangs

bereft at our needed forgetfulness, the walled out
emptiness now brimmed with desires unfulfilled
and spent treasure wasting; left now to watch with
us for Summer Sales and supermarket trolleys,
this café filling with shoppers and wandered-souls
listening to piped music in relentless loop.