Séan Hewitt
I watch them for a long while,
the pair rising and courting the field
in daylight, the strange geometry
of their faces funneling the air,
and everything – their whiteness,
their sense of having slipped
through from another world,
their focus on the hunt –
in the end it all comes down
to their silence –
the way each feather disperses
the air, how each wavers –
and I wonder what omen it is
to see two barn owls hunting
in mid-morning, so quietly
secretive, for surely
there is something in the slow
spread of the wing, the moment
of inverted flight, the living thing
pulled from the earth and lifted.
Seán Hewitt‘s debut collection of poetry, Tongues of Fire, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2020. It won The Laurel Prize in 2021, and was shortlisted for The Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award, the John Pollard Foundation International Poetry Prize, a Dalkey Literary Award. In 2020, he was chosen by The Sunday Times as one of their “30 under 30” artists in Ireland. His memoir, All Down Darkness Wide, was published in 2022. He is Poetry Critic for The Irish Times and teaches Modern British & Irish Literature at Trinity College Dublin.