Drift

 

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.

For Mother's Day

 Waving

 It was not the wave from the door, but,

when she’d turned out of the gate, looking back,

mother was still there with a second wave,

that, like an exchange of vows, was love

declared, over and over, with the simplest gesture.

Great milestones of her life started there;

her ever-growing steps towards independence,

all blessed with that wave, a warm pullover of love

to wear wherever the steps were going; and knowing too

that those waves were always tinged with sadness.

Faces

 

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.

Carrowkeel

 

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.

On Peter's Day Out

 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.

100 Best Poetry Blogs and Websites in 2025

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/

The Brotherhood of Stone

 

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:

 

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

And all dyed in seaweed

 

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. 

.

Mother

 

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.

My View Of The Zelensky Trump Blowout

 

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.

In the Gloaming

 

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"

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.

The Race

 

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.

Am I the stairs or climbing it?

              

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.