Untitled for now

 

Here is the first part of a poem that I can extend in a number of ways. So, for an early 2026 project, this is the decline of a living room that I used to know.

Cushions flattened, upholstry thinned,

chair legs cracked and broke.

The piano grew old, gap-toothed, jangly;

soon its notes refused to sound.

Upholstery ripped, horsehair came through;

floorboards creaked; curtains hung

like jackets on hooks.

Grime-covered windows greened,

the weather stole in;

a board placed in the gap

but weather, like bees, found another way.

The floorboards warped, rotted;

one day an ivy shoot poked a pair of leaves.

through a crack in the window frames.

I remember green-tinted glass vases,

photographs of yankee cousins

and space that the fire could hardly heat.

And though there was light; I remember

the faces dim like fish in a river;

and the growing resonance of voices

in that emptying room.

Almost

                                                      

                                                      Love made arcs of us,

and as water dreams

of droplets,

we dreamed the perfect circle

and might have found it,

but the curvature we brought,

unfortunately,

could not achieve it.

Unroll your pack;

set up home.

From The Well

 

Far down; a glimmer of light

from inside the earth;

a wonder to our young eyes.

We lowered the bucket

through the ferns and darkness

to collect magic

and drew it up, into daylight:

pristine, icy; we drank

what we believed to be purity.

Her Hair

 

Her Hair

 

Her hair

fell, entwined tresses

down the length of her back,

down past her knees.

Morning sunlight found it

and nested there;

I was at a window

entranced.

It was just a moment,

an interval in the journey of clouds;

it was not yesterday,

nor even twenty years ago

Today I stopped to admire patterns

of run-off water on the strand;

the hair of Celtic goddesses

as will be remembered in stone.

Beneath Our Feet

 

Lives: we think of people.

Life: we think of the distinction

between organisms and inorganic substance.

I walk the beach; it’s littered with shells, billions,

remnants of dead organisms and I marvel.

Barely more than blobs of protoplasm; yet their shells

beautiful, fine as china, now beneath my feet;

an unfathomable scatter becoming sand.

We ask the purpose of life;

I look at these with same question;

the intricacy of the interactions of living things;

their sequestration of carbon, recycling of nurients,

building of habitats; even now fragmenting to sand.

I think of all the beaches worldwide;

and these stars we walk on;

their infinity, if we permit it.

More Revision

Today

Can you spin a cloud onto a stick;

collect sequins of sunlight from a river;

walk the moon’s pathway over the sea?

There are times when happiness might belong

in this list; I thought so today when you cried

and we were not there to put our arms around you.

Happiness seemed very remote just then;

you might as well have tried to fill a jar with blue sky

and I could swear I heard a hollow clank from the universe.

Donegal Changes

 Six years now in Donegal, six years retired from my teaching job in Dublin; there are defnite changes in my writing. Perhaps it's no surprise to find myself more aware of nature now, with a large garden to tend to and struggling to keep on top of the job. But also much more walking as I live beside the sea and on a country road that links into a vast network of  unpopulated roads stretching off eastward across the border, through hilly and often empty lands into county Fermanagh.

The hedgerows, linear forests, teem with flowers from the early snowdrops into primrose season, foxglove onto fireweed of early Autumn; it's a succession I could not have named until I found myself living in a rural setting. And the land often rushy, lush with other plants, just as beautiful; a different palete of colours, a different atmosphere, a different set of feelings.

 

Fireweed, Montbretia, Swallows and Me

It’s past mid-August, and the year, measured in flowers, is turning.

The foxgloves gone, they faded quickly, followed the iris, that

followed the garlic out of season.

Now that fireweed floods the roadsides with carnivals of colour,

and bonfires of montbretia are raging gloriously out of control

the swallows being skittish, flying broken circles about the house,

we enter the season of apples reddening, pears yellowing, plums purpling.

Yearly, I get this feeling of sadness as though programmed into the cycle;

it’s not the passing of beauty; beauty just changes its cloak; it’s time

stealing a gift that only time can give.

New Draft of "September Swallows"

 

September Swallows

September, swallows

suddenly in a frenzy

as though too long furled,

their true selves

must out;

fly from the wires

like crochets escaping staves;

hone their aeronautics ‒

wheel, sweep and swoop ‒

for tomorrow

they must swap wires

for lines of longitude

as though they were scored

down the centre of their brains;

be pulled south

as surely as iron filings

must fly to the poles.

The Romantic Heart

 

The enamel white moon made a ladle on the water;

Li Po, a tick full of wine with a romantic heart,

rowed his boat up the long handle towards the bowl.

It was a gentle night, the air was warm and all was still;

he, with the fondest memories of all his lovers, sat

awhile, allowing himself to be enthralled by this beauty.

He became ecstatic; alone with the universe, colossal

therefore, and filled with the dream of love, he fell

into the water with arms wide to embrace the moon.

It was sudden, chill and lightless;

deceived by his love, he fell past euphoria

into the dank cavern that is the final knowing,

while up above the moon continued to beguile

all the wine-drinkers with love in their hearts,

all those who would drink their dreams into reality.

An Updated Draft of an Unforgettable Moment

 

Sing Love

A memory from my father's last days

On his deathbed, when speech was gone,

we deciphered incoherence

and muddled on.

I remember she, visiting, took his hand

and for want of words,

he sang to her

so tunelessly, it was not a tune,

yet, still, in all his life

he never sang so beautifully.

Passing Time

 

When I was a child,

time stretched beyond sight,

out over the curve of the earth;

Summer days deliciously slow,

mid-afternoon stalled in the sky;

the drone of bees the lag of seconds.

Life.

The daily events well worn,

the cobbles of living smoothed;

time slips over them with accelerating

ease and I, past seventy, looking at its blur

like a train-passenger with glazed eyes seeing

the years speed by like telegraph poles.

At the military cemetery

 

At the military cemetry, I am struck

by the myriad patterns of the crosses;

marvelling at the precision over and

over as I walk into new perspectives.

In death, the soldiers in this postumous

parade still creating the most beautiful,

mathematically correct symmetries.

The precision: clean, uniform, orderly;

identical crosses stretching into the

distance to the glory of the dead, to the

glory of the army. Individuality un-

observed; humanity absent; an army

of stones.

City Voice

 

A powdering harangue ‒

the city's voice over unkempt pavements.

The footfall at 5.30,

the lighting up apartments;

desperate masses

rushing to close their doors

on the daytime hours.

That voice

gusting along those surfaces,

propelling them;

behind those cigarette-moment windows

they fold.

A Poem on the Pointlessness of War

 

Perspective

Lately, I’ve been seeing January migrations of geese in the powder blue sky above Dublin. Those ever-shifting arrows sign-posting exotic, faraway countries are in my thoughts when a full-stop moves from the text into the blank margin of the page I’m reading.

I watch it moving up, turning right at the top, making for the gorge between the leaves; its slow progress suggesting rough terrain: a karst’s uneven pavements perhaps. What purpose, I wonder, can so small a creature have in undertaking this journey; where does the mite think it’s heading?

I might have found out, but at that moment a newscaster’s voice cut into my thoughts  ̶  95 people dead on a street in Kabul.

I lose sight of the full stop; for you are there, somewhere in that city at the height of the violence and you would not confess to us the dangers you face.

How high up, I wonder, must one be for our atrocities to be so small that they become ludicrous?

Dancing in the Early Hours

 

Dancing in the early hours

to Leonard Cohen’s oak-aged voice

swaying drunkenly to his words,

arms slack as streams of poured wine,

eyes soft as the vowels he intoned;

her feet uncertain, stepping cautiously

over the cobbles of song;

hearing each word a moment too late,

singing one beat behind;

the wine glass tipping precariously and

still the wine defying gravity

like her life was about to spill

and still it did not

a genie above a lamp for so many minutes,

holding the room expectant but 

as suddenly as appeared was no more;

it seemed a spotlight went out.