There is very little wisdom I can give; I’ve lived
long enough but seem to have learned little, and
looking around just now, that may be a human truth.
I am holding whatever happiness is in this moment;
my loves, dreams and wishes are blossoms now;
tomorrow: who knows! The future is a brittle vase.
We give our gods human shape;
they suffer our failures and weaknesses,
indulge in our desires.
And we believe ourselves god-like
with the right to dream of more,
infinitely more.
No surprise then, we meet them
on the nth storey of Babel,
staring at us; mirrors.
Years drift
languorous as smoke.
Those I knew
insubstantial now
as the memory
of their voices.
How we waft
on the gentle current
of time.
Waving
Age hides itself
until you need a new passport
or bump into a childhood friend.
Then the frantic effort
to find some familiar landmark
in that landscape:
eyes, mouth, smile;
digger life has shifted the earth
and you are lost.
Sometimes it's the voice
you remember;
its call from the depths.
Sometimes, in the eye,
turn of a mouth, you find
the key that was lost in the grass.
And now, face to face,
with the truth of your own age;
you must smile and lie.
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.
