Growing Up

Shortly you will trace lines,
leave,
join the herds,
leave your trail among the trails
meandering over the hills.

We are part of some eccentric’s
geometry;
I wish I could tell you more,
my little love.

The Happiest Days

The happiest days were the days before worries or responsibilities, before time was important; summer afternoons at home in Roscommon, childhood days,nothing to do but watch swallows circling and put the eye low to the lawn, imagining.

This poem was included in an excellent anthology, edited by Niall MacMonagle,"Real Cool, poems to grow up with"(Marino Books,1994). This is the anthology I would recommend to anyone who is dipping their toes into poetry, an inspired choice of poems from editor Niall MacMonagle


SUMMER ORCHARD EVENING.

On an evening
when apple was eating the worm,
tree grating the sun
with some clouds, dusty birds;
the green cloth
was spread to the orchard wall.

I watched bees collecting post
while cat was a tea cosy
with dozey trip-wire eyes.
Suddenly dog alarm in the hedge
comes bursting from the undergrowth:
big game hunter
and cat gone steeplejack.

Then dog winks
and we stretch out,
and I go back to being a microscope
eyeball deep in daisies.


Another poem I've posted previously comes from the same time:


Where The Poetry Comes From


Fathomless blue;
Blue sky.

Two swallows proclaiming it
Are extravagant

Dancers in an empty ballroom.
A church bell chimes

Two, three, five o’clock;
No matter;

Tracing curves to unending time;
A route to south Africa?

Fathomed true;
Blue sky.

The baby in the tree

The baby in the tree
is screaming.

High above the pathway
near the black tips
of the sycamore branches
he is gaping,
white membraned luminous.

How did he get there?

He blew there in the wind;
it took him
like a flag from his cot
till he was stretched
across the boughs
like the wings of a bat.

And who sees him?

I do;
all his hopeless writhing,
too high for the passerby.
And his screams:
too high,
too high for the passerby.

In Mayo

Some places remain in your head all your life. Not intact, but fragments that still convey (broadly) the appearance of the place. So you return, and your geography is completely off but the essence is right.
As a student of Geology, I spent a week mapping in Finney near Lough Nafooey in Co. Mayo. A wonderful time and a wonderful place. The fragments have stayed with me ever since. When I wrote a poem “In Mayo” sometime around 1990, it was Finney I was thinking of.

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/ruthann/sets/72157600099944683/ for a range of photos from this beautiful area. From “Sunfire”:


In Mayo

The sky:

rags on bushes
in a wintry gale.

The barbed-wire fence:

a lunatic's music
sprinting down the valley.

The mountains:

tossed heads
with their silvery sheen.

Telephone wire:

daisy-chained voices
humming out of tune.

The lake:

a shirt that blew
off a line.

Rowan tree:

tongue on the mountain
shaping high C.