Fog, it’s the mountain’s breath.
We arrive at the first cairn,
looming out of nothing:
fog ‒ colour of limestone;
fog made into stone.
We breath it;
breath in their spirits;
mountain of fog;
we enter the cairn;
enter a womb.
Crouched inside;
in no place, no time;
stone, air, water speaking
the language we have forgotten;
we must be reborn to hear it.
1.
Peter, looking across the car park
for some trace of his family home
inside the Guinness complex on Thomas Street;
finding it difficult to pinpoint exactly
where the house was, where the garden began,
where the enclosing walls were,
sees the pear tree against the office wall.
In all that development, the only trace of home,
the only greenery on the site, the solitary survivor
from the greenery of his playing days:
that pear tree.
With memories unexpectedly unrooted
and he a witness with short years ahead;
he resorts to stories
which is, eventually, the fate of all lives.
2.
At lunchtime Peter and I repair to a pub;
we sit at the counter with sandwiches and pints;
he refuses to be photographed.
At some point, I catch a view of his face in the mirror
behind the bar, between the bottles; he does not notice.
A man, home after a lifetime abroad; old now, alone,
even from his past and unwilling to view his face;
how time has run over it,
how it obliterates the past.
I have a lot of poetry anthologies; I dip randomly and often. Variety keeps you and them fresh. I tend not to read a lot of one poet's work together; it clutters your head. Better to give poems breathing space; what starts as a bud, latter blooms, assuming of course, there's enough in it to bloom.
The 100 Best Poetry Blogs and Websites works that way. Dip and travel; different ideas, styles, formats; different sensibilities. It's not just the poems, but different presentations, blog to blog. I was going to suggest a few favourites; but much better to drop in unexpected and see what you find.
Like magnetic words on the fridge, the randomness has a mind-extending effect. Try it. https://bloggers.feedspot.com/poetry_blogs/
When I tell you, the man who lives on those hills
is made of the same limestone ‒ grey, white karst ‒
he stands on; the same rock that butts through the thin
grass cover of his fields; that is the material, he and his
forefathers, back to neolithic times, used to construct
the labyrinthine network of walls thrown, like a fisherman’s
net, onto the western landscape; it’s not a poetic conceit.
I have seen him standing in spring-limpid sunlight,
extending upward, undifferentiated from the bedrock; legs and
arms outstretched, trellised by briar and blackthorn, and
the language of that place, in a script of stonechats, robins and
chaffinches, rewriting itself over and over across his body.
I have seen him weather as limestone weathers, an outcrop
indistinguishable from the others; with the flight of sky above,
the rolling earth beneath; he, on that interface, also remains
undisturbed and unchanged. I have seen that the flow of water has
shaped him to his place; the hindrance that might have been,
smoothed now to a belonging, to a brotherhood of stone.
Soldier: the army’s smallest mobile unit; equipped
with assault rifle e.g. HK416 and 300 rounds, pistol
e.g. M17 and 40 rounds, 4 grenades, combat knife.
Organised into groupings of increasing size:
squad, platoon, company, battalion, etc. to army;
all designed for maximum manageablity within
the hierarchical system employed by defence forces.
Kitted out with combat helmet, body, hand, eye,
ear-protection; medical, survival, navigation and
communication gear; length of operation and supply
also considereations; additional or alternative gear
as may be required for special missions e.g. sniper
optics; demolition requiring explosives and detonators;
i.e. soldier as much a tank as a human can be.
Increasingly now, their targets are those engaged in their
daily chores.
 |
| Kahle Kollwitz: Woman with Dead Child |
I have heard this music and I’ve seen it
where the small houses are strung high and low
around the spring-line, on tussocky hillsides
above the coast; quavers, semi-quavers.
I’ve seen it in the rise and fall of the walls dancing
on those wild fields strewn with bald, granite heads;
where the road above Bunowen, bright as water, plays,
a fiddle string strung between showers.
The clouds dash, Grand National-style, across the sky
and over the slivers of lakes between the mountains;
lakes that beam back bright notes, sweet cascading
sunlight, as the sun too is wheeled across the landscape.
I’ve heard the music streaming along the wires, piping
through stone walls, lilting in pine needles, whistling
under barn doors, humming around the corners of buildings;
and always to that great booming drone of the Atlantic.
Treble clef, fragments of conversations speckling the music
like raindrops; voices, with the accents of uileann pipes,
in the mosaic of sound carried on the wind: the screeching gulls,
piping oystercatchers, a curlew's faraway keen.
.
In one hand a cloth,
in one hand a hammer,
in one hand a tin whistle,
in another an oar,
in one hand a tin of beans,
another a knife,
in another a baby’s bottle,
another a pen,
another holding a book,
another holding a pillow,
another a shovel,
and a hand holding a map
while her family rests in her arms.
Appalled at the treatment of President Zelensky by President Trump and Vice President Vance in the Oval Office yesterday, I cannot but think that their lack of expertise in diplomacy and politics was glaring; it was depressing and, above all, extremely worrying.
Why am I entitled to give my views: because, nowadays, the world is a small place; no country is remote; the international is local, the local international.
The fact is America has voted a hotelier to manage their country; where then education, foreign affairs, health, defence, arts and culture, welfare. His is a profit and loss mentality. His empathy with and understanding of ordinary individuals appears close to zero; how else can you account for his Gaza vision; to empty a region of the people whose home it is to create a Riviera for those wealthy like himself.
A man who has little grasp of the world as lived and experienced by the billions. The pettiness he showed in his interaction with Zelensky, who is engaged in a war in which death and destruction are all around, was mind-blowing. The issue of Zelensky’s clothing, which was appropriate for one leading his people in an existential struggle, was pitched out of ignorance; “he’s not speaking loudly” ‒ embarrassing, childish. He demonstrated the same lack of empathy for wartime heroism in his relations with John McCain; his reaction to those buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery ‒ ”losers”.
A Canny English Conservative, Margaret Thatcher, once observed, “The United States is a friend, but it is also a nation that sometimes forgets that its friends have their own interests and their own pride.” And a quotation from British historian, Paul Johnson: “The United States is a nation of immense power and generosity, but it is also a nation that sometimes confuses its own interests with the interests of the world.”
These quotations highlight important issues: those plainly stated and the questions and who, now, are Americas friends and is America still generous. These last two have only become doubtful with the arrival of Trump and Vance.
Martin Hayes playing a road’s river-silvery sheen
in the dying light of a November evening, north Clare.
Karst’s grey, slough’s lush greenery the last colours
before the nightly closing; a wind blowing angry off
Galway Bay, spitting splinters of rain, paring the skins
of the Burren hills above the loping dogs of electric wires
and the congealed pitch of conversations running alongside
every road. A single yellow-coloured window in the murky
hulk of a hillside at once inviting and shivering; a lone human
habitation - whisper from a fossilised sea-bed.
His
notes flowing, drops of rain streaming along the underside
of those wires; wind’s metal scraping through that empty place
and the ear of God five miles out to sea.
Listening to "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"
in memory of Roberta Flack
Memory of elated youth; of an idyll
before the years eroded openness
with contrivances and constructions.
A holiday romance, an incidental coming
together on a summer beach, in fire-light
beneath the stars, across the bay from flashing
beacons, to the calls of sea birds haunting us
from over the strand and barnacle-encrusted
granite knolls. Hearing all the time the drum-rolls
of waves coming ashore from the Atlantic darkness
and the cymbal swish of their lace spreading onto
the land’s margin, into the spiral shell of my cochlea,
to echo there forever.
There’s a woman
on the opposite footpath
20 yards ahead
bag on my back
on my way to school
I'm gaining on her
her lead reduced
pulling closer
she’s eyes ahead
total concentration
passing mabel Kelly's
I’m still gaining
her lead halved
passing Kiernan’s
she in the inner
lane I must step up
almost level a
stride in it
I’m level
pulling to the
front no she’s back level
a slight lead it’s going to be
a photo
the phone kiosk just ahead
back level
it’s a hair’s breath
she’s in front
we’re level
the kiosk
ahead by a sliver
my outstretched leg
I’ve won.
I’ve won.
Having moved through the years like clouds;
reached a crescendo, passed through it,
and still travelling to an ending.
Upward or downward?
It seems like the perspective of height;
the weighing up of the steps that have brought me here,
each built one atop the other,
but sometimes contrary like Escher’s stairs,
labyrinthine, incomprehensible like a mind;
maybe I am.
A low February sun is accentuating the straight edges of the patio bricks, the uneven
surfaces of the stonework in the pillars beneath the lamps, the darkness of the shaded
sides of ivy leaves and limbs of winter trees. From a clay-blue sky, it is casting its gold-dust
light across the abandoned railway siding, out over the bay to the mountains, Sliabh League
to Killybegs, casting them in a distant, gauzy mysteriousness.
The friary bell-tower shows above the trees, a pitched roof and bare metal cross.
From here, it might as well be deep in woodland, abandoned, overgrown even;
not so, it stands beside the road with lawns and parking spaces to the front, elaborate
grottos; in red brick, a modern take on cloisters leads from the church to the house;
on Sundays cars line the roadsides; the priest’s voice drones from loudspeakers.
The heathers in the flowerbed are in full bloom, gleaming shrubbery leaves suggest recent
rainfall but they are dry, the sun reflecting back, a million lights; and into my eyes,
a clear shining liquid ‒ exhilarating sunlight ‒ life brimming and uncontained; as though
this world was a bottomless well, a never-ending source of happiness, and still, to know
that around the curve of the earth, a five hour flight, the sun is shining on darkness.
Sailing the shifting geographies of the sky,
I captain the wind. Travelling with the ocean within my wings,
scanning the churning seas, I defy its rearing cliffs,
bloated-bellied monsters, fly beneath their drool-dripping teeth;
all contained in my eyes, their heaving guts, I soar, glide and swoop,
pull the jewels from their pockets.
On flattened wings I sweep from the edges of continents;
pulling the tides in my wake; see the sun over the horizon and follow.
be blind
white out
the space
be psychedelic
grow tropical,
melt it
be brutal
slash, cut
til small is big
be gentle
nurture
your demons
