This needle,

my mind balancing on it;

its mercury glint

a painful ecstasy.

She fires words

 

She fires words

spiky as hail;

I shoot them down;

they’re unwelcome in my heaven.

But the same words go off

over and over;

some see you out,

shovel in the clay.

Truth is words are clouds;

I don’t shoot them;

I shoot at them.

Now, Then and Forever

 

When their bodies are cold and stony,

we lay them among the boulders on the hillside,

a resting place within sight of their homes,

fields and children; in the company of their parents, ancestors.

We leave clothing, corn, arrows, bone knives by their sides

and align them with the returning sun.

Our prayers flutter on strings, clicking for the attention

of the gods who gave birth to the mountains,

rivers and stars; chattering till we, ourselves, arrive.

They expect us, and all the generations coming;

we are currents, the stones oversee our passing,

September Swallows

 

Knots on the wires untying themselves,.

rise into the sky

like crochets escaping staves.

September swallows, restless,

must shed nesting order

as commas might abandon sentences.

Their Autumn selves must unfurl,

wheel, sweep and swoop; for tomorrow

they will trace lines of longitude.

His last tune

 I've tried to get this right before, my father on his hospital bed after suffering a stroke. A moment that has stayed with me, poignant and beautiful. My wife arrived to see  him and that's where the poem comes in.

When he was beyond talking,

close to dying, you visited.

For want of words he could not form

he hummed a  tune,

unrecognizable, tuneless; 

and never was a tune more beautiful.

Cirrus

 

Cirrus,

dolphins of the high heavens,

sing the light

harvested

from the deepest sky-ridges.

ikeanisation of office spac

 folded in a roll

above shoulders

the cape

with fabric loops

to hang light-weight

plastic stool

down human back

over fold-up table

and drawer

of ultra-light material

rotational

for mealtimes

above the waistline-

mounted laptop

After Hiroshige

 

A peacock on a branch,

waterfall.

                      Along the Tokaido road

                      a wave,

                      landscape rearing above a lake;

                                                            

                                                              a display, magnificent,

                                                              like a peacock on a branch.

Autobiography

 

Here’s the wind that brought me;

here’s the day that sang;

here’s the grass that was my mother

and there the trees that taught me.

Here are the hills that were my dreams;

there’s the river that aged me

and this is its silt upon my face.

Here’s the bay that sought me out,

the mountaintop I must climb is beneath it;

that is where I’m headed.

from a bus window

 

He’s standing on the corner,

a busy city junction;

he has walked from his house,

but………………...

and doesn’t know why he’s there

nor his way home,

recognizes no one

so….………….…….

he’ll stand there

where four streets disappear into a fog;

there's one he must take;

which………………?

Bohreen

 

Bohreen*

Burgeoning spring growth,

the hedgerows of hawthorn, hazel and elder

ankle-deep in profusions

of primrose, celandine and vetch

bowing towards each other over the bohreen,

claiming the light if not the tar.

Swallows, sleek as fighter jets,

bulleting down the narrow corridor,

skimming our heads,

wheeling behind us to come again.

Bends along the way revealing curiosities:

a bed-end stopping a gap,

moss-covered walls along cow-dunged lanes,

an ivy-draped ruin, pre-famine cottage

featureless but for the fireplace,

and those potato ridges on which blight-

blackened leaves once signalled starvation

still there, grassy corrugations in destitute fields.

Cattle with chomping jaws lift their heads

to watch us pass with quizzical stares;

all around beauty crowding into our eyes

birdsong and the sounds of fields filling our ears

and yet, behind it all, even now,

there’s the held breaths of the departed.

*boreen or bohreen from the irish word ‘bóithrín’ meaning a narrow country road