Bohreen

 

Bohreen

 

Bohreen*

Burgeoning spring growth,

the hedgerows of hawthorn, hazel and elder

ankle-deep in profusions

of primrose, celandine and vetch

bowing towards each other over the bohreen,

claiming the light if not the tar.

Swallows, sleek as fighter jets,

bulleting down the narrow corridor,

skimming our heads,

wheeling behind us to come again.

Bends along the way revealing curiosities:

a bed-end stopping a gap,

moss-covered walls along cow-dunged lanes,

an ivy-draped ruin, pre-famine cottage

featureless but for the fireplace,

and those potato ridges on which blight-

blackened leaves once signalled starvation

still there, grassy corrugations in destitute fields.

Cattle with chomping jaws lift their heads

to watch us pass with quizzical stares;

all around beauty crowding into our eyes

birdsong and the sounds of fields filling our ears

and yet, behind it all, even now,

there’s the held breaths of the departed.

*boreen or bohreen from the irish word ‘bóithrín’ meaning a narrow country road

Untitled

 

Your exit corridor is a snow-white Carrara;

by the time you were walking it, our goodbyes

had already echoed themselves to silence.

Your feet on that floor must have lisped,

for all your faith, you would have had questions,

but who was to answer?

Outside, we watched and listened till you stopped;

suddenly there is just the body

and soon it too is a cold marble.

What to Say

 

In memory of my mother

What to say,

as she breathes fitfully,

the last minutes of her life.

We struggle

to find the best way of saying

we love you,

be happy to be on your way

to the God of your life-long devotion,

to put love, comfort, encouragement

into our uncertain, dismayed voices;

words worthy of a lifetime

of love and care.

Her breathing weakens;

doubtful that anything

is penetrating the fog of her condition,

we must still try:

words to carry

as she steps off the ledge.

Her Fingers, Piano and Light

 

Her fingers on the piano keys:,

nails red as rose-hips, 

                                                                                   

in net of cigarette smoke filled 

with afternoon sunlight.

Notes like sequins

falling inside the canyon of childhood;

                                               

brass, silver and mahogany,

ashtrays and antimacassars,

Liszt her gold tooth, she smiles; 

the music climbs jangly from the piano,

filling the room till the walls fall and she 

dissipates in deforming contours of smoke. 

I write to catch it,

but may as well be catching steam.

City Nature

 

I am walking the canal

in the dim light of a December evening,

settling my mind to its flow.

Ghostly on winter glass, swans,

bright as lit matches, are gliding

over the oarweed of traffic lights,

towards Harold’s Cross Bridge.

Oblivious to rush-hour commotion,

and blind to their own beauty,

they pass silently along,

out-pacing me and leaving nothing,

but a set of low chevron-shaped ripples

in their wake; while above them

two lines of cars fulminate continuously

to the iodine-murky sky.

Gold Mining

 A poem based on Sebastião Salgado's images from the Serra Pelada gold mines in Brazil in the 80s

I am a hoist, component of:

sack of mud and ore;

my bones, levers,

haul gold

out of the hole.

Valueless:

thousands pour

out of the earth;

mud-covered chains

continuously turning

upward, downward

head sack thorax

legs feet

head sack thorax

legs feet...

When the band shines

on your finger,

we are

the ants crawling

down your arm.

Wiser

 

Older now.

Do I dare say old;

yes, okay, old.

And wiser?

Each night the events and words of the day rotated,

a sluice gate opens

and more knowledge is allowed to escape.

You ask my advice;

I give and am wrong ‒ again;

there are experts, historians on both sides of every conflict

and still it is the old wars that occur.

Because, in the end, everyone follows their now

no matter the age-old mistakes

and when, again, you ask my advice, I will keep mum

until I give it.

Perspective

 

I’ve been seeing January migrations of geese in the powder blue sky above Dublin;

arrows sign-posting exotic, faraway countries.

Now a full-stop moves from the text into the blank margin of the page I’m reading;

I watch it moving upward, wondering where does it suppose it's travelling to;

at the top it turns right, making for the gorge between the two pages;

its slow progress suggesting rough terrain: clints and grykes, uneven pavements.

Just then, a newscaster’s voice cuts into the moment:

95 people dead on a street in Kabul;  

I lose sight of the full stop;

how high up must one be for our atrocities to be so small that they appear incomprehensible.

With your face

 

Evening soft Autumn light;

the year’s foliage 

becoming humus,

new soil;

smell of decomposition: 

mossy,

next year's fertility;

you standing,

foot on shovel, king of ridges;

colour of ripeness 

heading towards rot;

unknown then

your lungs discolouring,

hardening

as Winter hardens.

Today, standing

in  dank November

preparing the soil

for next year's growth

with your face

but older now

than you ever were,

thinner;

watching the  years pass

in  tides of  growth:

the relentless march

of seasons pulling

me after you;

seeing the soil

as home.

His Mind

 

His mind sparks explosions in four cylinders, maybe six;

pistons rise and fall, connecting rods turn the crankshaft,

clutch flywheel disengaged a moment, gears shifted and

torque in the wheels altered. His engine purrs; he mulls 

turbo with or without variable compression, and always 

finds that quadratic equations and poetry hinder performance.

Hard Labour

 

Never been so aware of the lungs as bellows;

how basic it becomes when, in dying,

one is reduced to breathing and we are

watching each breath

like you are lifting shovel-fulls

and so alone in the effort 

and we so useless.

When The Devil Came To Omey

 

A hare, whiskers taut, eyes bulging,

scouring the mainland

in the grey hour of evening

when demons go searching for souls.

Sitting sentinel on day’s shoreline,

digesting the seen and the half-seen,

reining in phantasms,

deciphering commotions in the air.

He senses, suddenly, a juddering of molecules,

some looming presence, 

an approaching darkness darker than night, 

and an ice-bolt hits him.

With the flesh creeping along his flanks,

he kicks back his hind legs

and bounds through the tussocks,

to the church in the hollow.

The bell’s baleful clank, strange at this hour,

draws shadowy figures out of the night

into a bedraggled huddle

in the sanctuary of the church.

Feichín, now man,

the hare’s wild gaze still in his eyes,

turns to them gravely

to announce the arrival of Satan on Omey.

It is not just his works,

but the devil himself will walk among us;

be wary of every soul on the road,

every animal in the fields.

Speak the name Jesus at every turn,

a flail to his ears;

let your minds be tabernacles of the Lord

so he finds no space for evil there.

Feichín’s brethren left no soil

on which the seed of evil could be sown,

no patch of ground to build a hut;

made Omey inhospitable to him who rules Hell;

and so it is to this day.

It was as hare, Feichín saw Satan leave the island,

felt the agitation fall from the air,

and the twitchiness in his nose subsided.

In the Lives of Feichín and his Followers on Omey

 

St Feichín Takes His Followers To Omey

Let us leave the wooded Glen of Fore,

for men must shun trees;

their lives be lived in the full gaze of Heaven;

to Omey where trees are shrivelled to the earth,

and thorns are the ocean driven on wild winds,

gorse to lash our backs. Let us go far from these trees

that conceal our transgressions.

And they went to Omey, leaving the gentle Glen of Fore;

built their monastery among the sand dunes

where the winds rode the dragons of the ocean,

and the rains were nails;

as the granites were hump-backed on the shore,

so were they

beneath the charcoal sacks of the sky.

But if they forsook the bountiful harvests of the Glen of Fore,

the Lord lavished them with fish for their tables,

shellfish, seaweed and they were blessed

and in the dim light of their church, they sang

to the glory of their Provider;

and still asked that they might bear greater hardships,

for the sins of others weighed heavy on them.

And if, in sleep, they dreamed themselves back in the Glen of Fore

feasting on deer, boar, pheasant and grouse,

come morning they purged their night’s gluttony, kneeling

hours naked in the freezing tide and waiting for the end of day

to marvel again at the light of Heaven

as the sun sank beyond the edge of the ocean

and the splendour of God was manifest on the island of Omey.

A Child At A Window

Still gathering and editing from the last six years of Poetry and Miscellaneous Yap. The years of Covid has given me a lot of drafts of poems to consider. This is a simple enough poem; those Sunday afternoon matinees on the tv opened my childhood mind up to a universe of imagination, they embedded and have fed my efforts at poetry right up to my present.

A Child At A Window

It’s nighttime, the sky’s my screen. Laurence Olivier is fleeing

through a forest, dark fronds clutching, clawing at him;

a gothic tale full of the drama of black and white.

The forest is vast and he must run blindly through it,

somewhere behind is the story I haven’t seen, and

somewhere ahead is a border with a land no one knows.

I am at my window, the land I know is quenched;

above, across the inexplicable expanse of the Heavens, is adventure;

I watch it, take it to my bed, knowing tomorrow colour will return.

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.