Audio: Michael reads 2 poems from his new collection, 'The Sound of Water Searching'.

To The Slaughterhouse, Klimt Moment

Autumn Aria

 

The tree,

aria

on a pedestal,

coloratura.

Autumn

performance;

the wind carries

fire.

To The Slaughter House

 This is a re-edited version of a poem I posted some time back. When asked why I wrote/posted this poem, I was a bit stumped. I am not a vegetarian. I used to see this years ago in my childhood; it was ugly, but we took it as normal life. It's not a scene many are likely to see now. So the answer: I think it tugs at a deeply buried conviction that animals have greater awareness and understanding than we have ever given them credit for; and the only logical upshot to that is that our brutal treatment of them needs to end.

To The Slaughter House

White-filled socket, eye twisted; its contorted,

steaming body straining away from that room.

At the end of a rope taut to the straightness of cane,

haunches working, legs thrashing, sliding in shit;

and men flat out, dragging, pushing the heifer

towards the slaughter-house doorway.

Roaring, terrified as humans are; that same recognition,

same fight, same blood gut muscle response, same horror;

and men, angular to their brutal task: dragging, pushing, hauling.

At the end of the rope, its head straining upward; the tongue,

extended from its mouth, tasting the stench of death,

and the horror of its flagging resistance.

Goya

Goya from The Disasters of War

Goya

Of course not!

Of course no one that ever cracked open a head

has seen a symphony pour out.

No executioner has seen the flow of an amber fireside

with its intimate and tangling caresses 

drain from the split skulls of lovers 

 nor have soldiers who shoot dark holes 

 seen rafts of memories spilling, 

 carrying the children, the birthdays, the orchards, 

 the dances. 

 When they shot the poet, Lorca,

 the bullets sailed in a universe, 

 yet when the blood spurted it was only blood 

 to them.

Bluebells

 

Bluebells

in memory of Peter 1929 ‒ 2021

We had watched the bluebells arriving

in ones and twos, clusters then crowds;

their lights switching on like houses

on the hillside settling in for the night.

We’d watched the blue covers extending

down the fields, and the Castle Caldwell trees

bathing ankle-deep in those waves.

We filled our eyes with the beauty,

harvesting it for thinner days;

the day the brilliant blue light dimmed on the hillside

was the day it went from your eyes.

We stopped the car to see it quenched

like a plantation felled or the bay’s muddy floor at neap tide,

and thanked God the granaries of our memories were overflowing.

Silver Birches

Today I came on a stand of birches

dazzling in late evening sunlight.

A tableau of, maybe, a dozen nudes;

splendid, shameless.

Torsos of Elginesque splendour,

arms twining upward in Grecian gracefulness;

statuesque beauties

nonchalant in Olympian lasciviousness.

Feichín's Response to the Women of Omey

On hungry mornings, Feichín became a cormorant,

dived deep into the Atlantic to retrieve miraculous numbers of fish.

On the rocks of Omey, he often caused commotions, standing,

arms extended, skin stretched tight over bones, naked as a newborn chick,

drying his body in the wind.

When, once, the women of Omey delegated one of their number to go to him

to chastise him for his sinful displays, which, their souls being jeopardised,

must be the devil’s work; he, upon hearing their complaint, reached up to a shelf,

took down the bones of a meal and asked,

“Do these bones offend you?”

“No”, she replied.

“Was I not more clothed than these?”

and with that he took a switch to her and sent her running from his hut.

Days of our Lives

So we’d have a coffee, maybe two, then off

into town by the side streets, looking for

red-brick houses with lilac doors and yellow

window frames. Drop into the IFI, sit over

another coffee, browsing the catalogue with half interest,

the steady drift of film-goers and idlers with more.

On down Dame Street to College Green,

enjoying our navigation of ever-shifting crowds,

the dexterous manoeuvrability of ourselves.

In Hodges Figgis we’d scan the poetry

shelves and the art books, those names and titles

settling in our heads like we were travelling the

world: Heaney, Mahon, Carver, Balthus,

Kahlo, Lorca, Basho, Holub ‒ dabs of fresh paint

and print to keep us informed for a month or two ‒

before returning to Grafton Street to knit crooked stitches

through the crowds, stop a few minutes to hear a busker

play a saw or slide guitar then around to Tower Records

to be tempted by some new ECM arrival in the jazz section.

George’s, Aungier, Wexford, Camden, Richmond Streets;

the diminishing scale of a city’s architecture, and

the backwards walk down the telescope to the landscape

of our normal lives. Crossing the border at the canal, with

its familiar vista down Rathmines Road to the mountains

beyond; we, like fish, breathing easier in our own habitat,

saw our hurdles flattened, but, perhaps, never recognized

the days of our lives?

That beautiful odyssey: Saturdays, mid-morning to mid-afternoon;

or maybe it was just one Saturday,

or, maybe, it wasn’t at all.

Klimt Moment

We’ll sit where we sat before, above the stream,

watching the golden eels of sunlight dart and shimmy

above bronze coloured stones to the sound of water searching

out all the possible solutions to the conundrum of strewn rocks

while somewhere beneath us a hollow-sounding tock tock

drums our time away.

Let us weave time and stream into a cloak, a Klimt creation:

magnificent flowing, yet enveloping us in a precise moment

of pleasure. Let us hold it in our eyes so we may see it, wear it

when times are harder, these moments scarcer and the glint

of gold more precious.

A Poor Man Offers Unlimited Treasure

It’s a paltry thing that sparkler on your finger,

when, on a sunny morning, I will present you

with ten miles of dazzling lake almost to the door.

Or an emerald, when my house is sitting at the bottom

of blazing green fields, and the same all the way to the sea,

two counties to the west, three to the east.

Or amethyst, when the boreen is crowded with foxgloves

ringing their bells for the attention of bumble bees who’ll be losing

their heads in nectar from May to September.

Or rubies, when the hedges are brimming with myriad constellations

of fuchsia; even the ash, high on the hill, outshines them with its harvest

of late evening sun gathered in sprays of blood-bright berries.

And that gold bangle on your wrist, how dull it will look beside the daffodils

under the beech trees not a hundred yards from my house, or June’s irises

with blooms like laughter among the flaggers opposite Scanlon’s old shed.

Over by the privet hedge, you’ll have all the pearls you could wish for

come the end of January; snowdrops, promising the year’s beauty,

will be yours every January, if only you’d come live in my cottage.

The Saintliness of Feichín

A sea mist clinging to the rocks, dunes, stone huts;

vague dawn light; occasional screechings of sea-birds;

insidious dampness slithering between the stones,

under doors, between blankets and bodies; bodies huddling

closer; breaths’ clouds condensing on faces hard by.

Suddenly the shriek of a man; again and again,

each on the lightning slap of a tong on flesh,

so all, now awake in their huts, are bolt upright, listening,

and suffering the strokes of flails embedded with thorns;

marvelling at the saintliness of Feichín.

After a long agonising period the lashings cease;

the waves are again lapping on the shore, the gulls are screaming;

from Feichín’s hut come quiet moans and latin supplications:

“in manus Tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum”; it is Good Friday,

in mid-afternoon the skies will darken and the temple veil shall be rent.

At mid-morning, he emerges; shock-eyed scare-crow

with shroud covering his body, a scream of blood;

the brothers kneel; thanks is given to God; Feichín is safe.

Already wild flowers are colouring the fields, soon the swallows will come

and bees will make honey to their glorious chant.

Feichín's Bliss on Omey

In the play of sunlight and ripples,

that dance of the lake’s finery,

Feichín sees the splendour of Heaven

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the fish, silver treasure of the ocean,

the plenty that graces his table,

Feichín enjoys their steam-play with his nose

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the carpet of brightly coloured flowers,

bee-droning machair near the shore,

Feichín antcipates the sweetness of honey

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the uninhibited song of the lark,

sky-high notes from among the dunes,

Feichín feels the joy of God’s presence

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

Giorria

Noiméad ar a shuaimhneas,

ina thiarnas ciúin, folamh.

Go tobann ag ropadh tríd an scrobarnach

mar a bhí mé í láthair.

Draíocht an nóiméid,

é ina shuí ina áit féin,

imníoch, ach an méid atá nádúrtha dó

í dtús Aibreáin, é ar faire ar chnocán féarmhar.

Agus draíocht a éalú,

an aclaíocht sin agus an diongbháilteas;

treo áirithe aige, an cinneadh agus an bhogadh

déanta ar an bpointe.

Transl.

Hare

One moment at ease,
in his quiet empty dominion.
Suddenly flashing through the undergrowth
because I am present.

The magic of the moment,
him sitting in his own place,
anxious, but the amount that is natural to him
at the beginning of April, him on the lookout on a grassy hillock.

And the magic of his escape,
the agility and the single-mindedness;
a particular direction, the decision and the movement
made in an instant.

I love You

This is an updated version of a poem I posted about two years ago.

I love you

The chives’ purple heads standing on their bottle-green stalks

were June’s bright soldiers above the dun-coloured sandstone;

beyond them, on the hillside opposite, the soft pile forestry

was our wealth, especially in the rich glow of evening sun.

I moved closer to you, held out my hand to find yours already there.

to be links in this chain of beauty; and then I said, ‘I love you.’

It was not just the moment, but the magnificence we were part of;

happiness was bubbling,  the words came like breaking into a song.

Minnows

Compass needles

in current,

still

as thought.

Flint arrows,

they darted linear,

abrupt angles sparked

and quenched

Euclidian

in execution.