Traffic

 

I'm four years out of Dublin now and live in an idyllic part of Donegal. The change wasn't quite as dramatic as it might have been as I've been travelling up and down for years, spending weekends and holidays here. To say that the quality of my life has improved is an understatement and I have not regretted leaving, but I have lost something which I think this poem addresses.

Traffic

I awoke to the usual rumble of city traffic

and then realised it was the sea two fields away

and for the first time felt sad

for all that is past and all that will never be.

That crash of people was the myriad possibilities

daily breaking on my shore;

the roar of their conflicting energies:

the screeching, bellowing of breaks, exhausts, pistons.

The cacophony of the streets sparking blood flow;

the city a pumping heart;

I turned on my side to hear the traffic in the sea

but there was none.

Bejewelled

 

Fingers dripping diamonds,

arching under their weight.

All summer long the yellow tips

blossomed abuzz with bees;

now, in the slow drawl of time

following an August shower,

gleaming white with rain drops,

some spectral in the sunlight;

a once green plant in the trug

outside my window

now bejewelled

as Fabergé might have dreamed,

as would have coaxed Mughal emperors

away from their Peacock Throne.

Coming In

 

White light

sluiced from trillions

of anemones’ mouths,

all open prayerful,

free-loading on the shoulders of breakers.

Gulls’ wings it flies and crashes,

pours into ravenous bays,

slaking cathedral thirsts

whose morning, pin-shaped eyes

high up on the cliffs have turned corundum

with waiting,

wanting.

Once Green

 

Even now,

with only vaporous memory of you,

I hear the clank of the shovel against a stone

as you dig the ridge,

see the manure on the graip

that you’re about to mix into the soil,

smell the groundsel whose roots

release so satisfyingly from the clay.

And cigarettes that would be the end of you,

I see the spiralling of their smoke

from your fingers

like each was a little dream

or the pipe lit and re-lit,

the friendly glow near your mouth;

the hobbit-cosiness;

those once green hours spent beneath the sky.

In the Clouds

 

The archipelagoes of a boyhood’s imagination:

the exoticism of islands so far east

they are unexplored expanses of the far west;

beyond them, flame-bright horizons, dreamers’ infinities.

Last evening, before sunset, beneath a sky, charcoal-blue,

Himalayan; above a misty-grey sea;

molten-magnificent and littered with low-lying islands

I found myself, again, looking out over those same South Seas.

That same enchantment, buried under years, unearthed;

a reminder that the age of exploration has not yet passed,

the excitements of childhood not yet spent;

an explorer may find limitless the wonders among the clouds.