Dusty heat day.

 

Hedgerows sagging;

buzzes disappearing into shadows,

droning 'oh my God its warm';

cows, still statues, contemplating

but not quite remembering what

and the house of gables with the wicker fencing

seemingly empty

but there’s a bedroom window gaping

with a lush darkness within.

Sometimes the art of poetry

 

Sometimes the art of poetry is too much:

the poem moulded to magnificence;

its message, with an oh so scrawny neck,

strangled inside it.

Donatello's Madonna of the Clouds

 

Madonna of the Clouds

As the sea moves, clouds move;

life too,

from the arms

that surround childhood.

Heaven drowns,

lives struggle,

smiles are upturned;

but that early solidity saves us.

Ballindoon

 

Ballindoon Priory is on the shores of Lough Arrow in Co Sligo. On a warm Summer's day it is a place of delicate beauty and calm.

Ballindoon

Grazing

cattle,

barely moving.

Mid-summer torpor;

even the sycamores drooping a little

and in the shade beneath,

random stirrings

accentuating the peacefulness of the place.

At the edge of a meadow, a ruined priory;

its white-lichened walls

glowing in the sunlight

like a soul released. 

Its ostentation shed, now filled with sky,

stained glass the greenery of June;

no longer cooped up in medieval half-light

but arms filled with glorious creation.

Universes

 

In my hands, this head, close to sleep

is a universe closing;

to burgeon in the morning,

to be again an infinity of possibilities.

I marvel.

And how many universes have been sent to war?

How many sleepy heads have emperors cradled?

You'd Cook Love

 

You’d cook love;

I’d prefer it raw.

You’d put it on a plate;

I’d lick it off the floor.

You’d be moving onto afters;

I’d be craving more.

Descent

 

Zong,

falling into the lake

light

half light

gloom

darkness

Dling, dling,

a chain

of silvery white

bubbles

following it

down

Dwn

medals

spinning the light

descending

softly

sftly

into weeds

The Irish Language, Fundamental.

 

Weathered, the language

of North Atlantic gales and fleecing rain;

of bare granite, stunted thorns, tongue-red

roan-berries and rugged wild rose.

Of meadows, richly butter-cupped;

rickety fences, bed-end gates, stone walls

and their builders’ hands.

Of sodden bogs, the skies that douse them;

the hands that stacked the turf;

sparks rising into the sooty darkness,

nights by fire-sides,

the stories that kindled there.

Of the waters that plummet down mountainsides

then haul, barge-slow, silt through the midlands;

the hands that guided the tillers,

ploughs,

scattered the seed,

dragged needles through oceans of cloth,

harvested the carrageen and dulse

from freezing seashores.

The language of famine,

of jigs, reels and slow airs,

of high-fielding footballers, deft hurlers;

resistance to occupation;

devotion to saints or saints’ shadows;

myth and legend,

ghosts of ever-changing skies

and a restless earth.

Of flush green hedgerows,

their sudden stirrings and rustlings;

deep shadows, half-light and shade,

the known and unknown that exist together there.

Of orchards and dances,

factions and battles,

weddings and funerals;

the stitch and weave,

the words native to that soil, climate

and people;

the words that give name to it all.

Ancient Village

 

An avalanche of white thorn

hanging above our heads

in hazel twilight.

The night lights of bluebells

thick around our feet,

faint silvery gleam of lake

between the trunks of trees,

birdsong everywhere.

These ancient walls whose stones

are moss-softened green pillows

are the skeleton of a lifestyle that once was.

Hand-built scripts of lake-side dwellers

vanishing in the evening light,

in the centuries’ accumulation

of humus and leaf-litter.

Cryptic now, fragmentary; 

no longer connected to their meanings;

too remote from their builders to carry 

the poignancy of their passing;

we stop a moment 

to admire a bend on the pathway: 

white-petalled, luminous.