Thursday, April 30, 2020

Spring Music



Kay’s at the window playing concertina to the Bluestacks,
Clar, Donegal town and the sea, a grinning guitar string beyond.
The wind’s taken up the rhythm, playing the birches;
and the pampas plume, no dancer himself, is jinking to and fro;
a kill-joy stem jerking him earthward over and over.

There are birds on the wires  spaced like a code, clouds perched 
between them in shades of white to cream, ivory and pearl.
A plume of smoke rising diffuse in some distant trees
is solidifying, where the sky begins, into molar Ben Bulben,
and all is plush and wonderful in Spring’s fresh greenery.

Tuesday, April 28, 2020

Giorria




Noiméad ar a shuaimhneas,
ina thiarnas ciúin, folamh.
Go tobann ag ropadh tríd an scrobarnach
mar a bhíí láthair.


Draíocht an nóiméid,
é ina shuí ina áit féin,
imníoch, ach an méid atá nádúrtha
í dtús Aibreáin, é ar faire ar chnocán féarmhar.


Agus draíocht a éalú,
an aclaíocht sin agus an diongbháilteas;
treo áirithe aige, an cinneadh agus an bhogadh
déanta ar an bpointe.



Transl.

Hare

One moment at ease,
in his quiet empty dominion.
Suddenly flashing through the undergrowth
because I am present.

The magic of the moment,
him sitting in his own place,
anxious, but the amount that is natural to him
at the beginning of April, him on the lookout on a grassy hillock.

And the magic of his escape,
the agility and the single-mindedness;
a particular direction, the decision and the movement
made in an instant.

Saturday, April 25, 2020

I love You



This is an updated version of a poem I posted about two years ago.




I love you


The chives’ purple heads standing on their bottle-green stalks

were June’s bright soldiers above the dun-coloured sandstone;

beyond them, on the hillside opposite, the soft pile forestry
was our wealth, especially in the rich glow of evening sun.

I moved closer to you, held out my hand to find yours already there.
to be links in this chain of beauty; and then I said, ‘I love you.’

It was not just the moment, but the magnificence we were part of;
happiness was bubbling,  the words came like breaking into a song.


Wednesday, April 22, 2020

Childhood.





A cloudscape that forms and deforms
one carefree afternoon when you’re in your back garden.

A warm sun; lying on your back gazing at the sky;
change as remote as care.

But infinite time that it is, it flashes by,
childhood changing shape without ever having had a shape.


Sunday, April 19, 2020

Minnows




Compass needles
in current,


still
as thought.


Flint arrows,
they darted linear,


abrupt angles sparked
and quenched


Euclidian
in execution.

Friday, April 17, 2020

Dunbrody Abbey




If whole, Dunbrody Abbey would be astonishingly beautiful.
As ruin, it stands, vestige of a medieval past, stripped of context;
its magnificence magnified by isolation, a gemstone outcrop
in a pasture, now lichened to the colours of the Irish sky.

Occasional flourishes in the stonework coax imagination’s
wooden scaffolds, ladders, ropes and pulleys to be assembled:
ribs must fan across vaulted ceilings, capitals must crown the columns,
grotesques and gargoyles must emerge, trespassers from the walls.

And though a melancholy breath pervades the ruined passages and doorways
from the devastation wrought by men, now smoothed by centuries’ weathering,
and the ceiling of sky that portends change and the eventual passing of all things,
its splendour prevails, and like sun dazzling on water, the old walls enchant.

Tuesday, April 14, 2020

Eternal



Rivers running over the land:
slivered sky and light
tress-like;
fish and ripples one,
alive.

Clamouring in high places,
lisping in low;
spry in youth,
sedate in age;
always journeying to their end
to run again.

Thursday, April 9, 2020

Once



The abandoned house I told you about, thrashed;
walls broken through, windows gone; no longer
the separation of outside from inside that makes it a house.

Everything’s strewn around: magazines, books, records;
now scattered jigsaw pieces of a life from the seventies 

except  a towel rail in the kitchen: three dish-clothes
still folded crisp as the morning newspapers,
beside them a pair of scissors hanging on a string.

Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Love deepened by beauty



Leaving the mountain track, we strolled down to the lake;
it was a still evening, neither wind nor nature stirring;
a summer’s day with softest breath drawing to a close.

We had already stopped conversing but hadn’t realised it
by the time we reached the water’s edge; there the high cirrus
was blazing from our feet to the twin mountains beyond.

We watched them, dumbbells on the surface, shoulder the sun
down through the gleaming chasm into the earth between them;
the sky darkened, the flames died and eventually turned to ash.

We had not spoken, but had become part of the stillness,
the sunset even; anything said would have rippled the surface;
we were part of the beauty; it began at our feet.

Saturday, April 4, 2020

Today's Crucifixion Scene



Disgusted by the selfish approach of Trump, portraying himself as Christian, hoovering up resources without due thought and consideration for the world outside his high gate. 

Today's Crucifixion Scene

The hills fold landscape into view;
on their summit windmills make a crucifixion scene.

Crosses tall and stark
with back-cloth of barrelling black clouds;

the earth beneath them with all the doings and apparatus
of mankind reduced to miniscule insignificance.

The crosses without bodies; sleek and empty
like our twenty first century doctrine.

Wednesday, April 1, 2020

Wartime Deaths




What is this war about? What are these deaths for?
Certainly not a stretch of land, nor a belief, nor a freedom.

They will have died for our understanding:
the days of America First and Brexit are numbered;
the planet is too small, too small for separations

now that a man who sneezes in China can fill the hospitals of the world,
that a face mask in Tehran can just as surely save American lives as Iranian.