Damien

 

He’s got a gimp;

it throws his suit

like the buttons are one button-hole out,

and the shirt falls

below his jacket

on that side.

He walks faster to blur it;

speeds through the city throngs;

that adeptness pleases him;

the gimp’s

in his talk

too.

He tells you straight;

tells you

he’s telling you straight,

to remember what he says

or get used to 

being kicked around.

And always checking behind

or glancing into doorways

like he’s in debt

all down the street,

then turns a corner like he’s

trying to lose someone.

He keeps his right hand

in his jacket pocket;

the fingers are walking too;

I think it's because some woman told him

that constant movement

is freaky.

He won’t mind my

telling you;

he’ll enjoy been written about,

and feels he’d be good on tv;

he knows they wouldn’t have him;

their loss.

Betty

Betty,

the world is a marble;

getting smaller daily;

its mildews and viruses

have spread,

and they are at your feet.

I wanted to say something

reassuring,

for, at the very least, a child

should have hope

and till corrupted,

the child is beautiful;

but, what is there to say:

this has been destroyed.

Betty, 

the world is a marble;

there is no stopping it;

its mildews and viruses

are  spreading always

and they are at your feet.

.

September Swallows

 Some poems refuse to be written, over and over. This is a rewrite of a poem that seems to have a hold on me

September Swallows

September swallows

Knots on wires unbinding,

as though their true selves,

too long furled,

must hone their aeronautics.

They lift from the wires

into giddy flight,

like crochets escaping staves

for the grander arias of global skies.

Career, dip and wheel;

a restlessness in their DNA

compels them; tomorrow,

they’ll be arrows, Morocco-bound.

Care and Love

 

Behind those children playing,

I see a grandmother smiling;

she remembers

the blur of children’s play

but it’s not that memory,

it’s their place in her heart.

These moments of happiness:

she has seen them before,

knows the thin bone china

they’re made of;

her smiles are carefree

as the children

but are of this moment;

she has lived through many years.

 

These books are steps;

climb,

climb,

climb for a better view.

The ladder

 

How impressive the ladder looks from the bottom,

disappearing, as it does, into the clouds.

How those rungs invite;

how everyone encourages you to climb,

so you do.

And all the way up: yes, up, up, up

and, at the top, no more rungs:

space, just space;

they invited you to climb to a space.

Perhaps, I think, this may be Heaven;

maybe, set my molecules free 

to wander through Heaven.

Perhaps, the thought is Heaven;

perhaps such a moment is eternity.

Legacy

 

Like earthworms,

like the carcasses of all animals,

we darken the soil,

enrich it.

In their turn,

our children will rise,

live in the sun

till they, too, revert to humus.

Our gift to them,

to those coming ‒ grandchildren,

great grandchildren:

a poisoned, decaying earth

and, as a tree nourishes its fruit,

this earth must feed its children

all that has collected around roots,

all that is unseen in water.

Internal strife

 

You see it in his eyes.

He drowns it in incessant yap,

conceals it behind constant activity;

answers nothing,

but is forever asking questions,

filling his life with places and people;

always on vacation from himself.

His travels are to distraction.

In my Grandmother's Kitchen

 

Your hands, gentle,

resting in their usual place

on your lap,

listening to our conversation.

Fingers interwoven,

a basket for your thoughts,

the shape of caring,

the warm nest you made.

How wise those hands,

saying nothing

but alert in contemplation

and ready, always, to open.

The Wanderer

 

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich

Climb to the summit;

come closer to your soul. 

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.

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;

an almost hobbit-like cosiness;

ah, those  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.