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.