When all the world was young

            Oh for the days of childhood, when the sun was always in the sky, ice-creams came in wafers, we skated on the pond all winter long, men whistled on the way to work, Christmases were  knee-deep in snow and the neighbours invited you in for orange squash and bikkies. Nightime was curl up cosy in front of the blazing turf fire. Oh dear, if only!               

 

 

 

                            Eleven

 

          I am eleven;

my eyes are overflowing with light

from the spangling stream,

ears brimming with its chattering

sprays and runs,

my back lush with the magnificence 

of  Summer sun. 

 

I am in a field of cowslips,

the colour butter ought to be;

in the distance a bell is chiming

but I have no duties.

I’m lying on my stomach on a wooden bridge,

my eyelids shut, my fingers fishing for splinters.

 

Live Recording of Day-long Reading of 'Paradise Lost', Trinity College Dublin, 2012

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”
 

Here is the link to the live reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost as recorded at Trinity College Dublin on the 14th of December, 2012. http://paradiselostreading.wordpress.com/the-recordings/

It offers a good opportunity to put voices to Irish poets you’ve been reading for years. Among the many notables that took part in the day-long reading were Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Macdara Woods, Philip Coleman, Brendan Kennelly,  Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Iggy McGovern, Harry Clifton and Seamus Heaney. I read my lines from Book 9.

A commemoration of John Berryman’s Dream Songs is being planned for this October. A collection of newly penned Dream Songs is in the pipeline; I expect there’ll be an online recording of that event before the year is out.



 

Powerful Imagery

 

 

Francis Bacon’s Head VI can quickly inspire a poem. The claustrophobia within that cage, the tassel that suggests he has been interred with a hornet. That  grotesque scream, unmitigated by eyes. Is he caged for our protection; his protection; is it representative of a state of mind or a metaphor for his position; is it pain or aggression?

So many of his works are raw emotion; for me, no other artist hits the gut with such power. All those possibilities carry a different poem; I keep a collage of some of his and other images on our box room wall.

 

 

The Wind Claps The Slates.

 

 

The wind claps the slates;

all night they are hooves running berserk,

all night the wind is inciting them;

all night.

 

At twenty past two and twenty past three

and twenty past four I am looking at you;

how I would love to have hooves to come

crashing through your sleep, to burst into

your solitude.

 

And there I would, for better or worse,

demolish the muzzled years with as much

violence as reverberates beneath iron shoes,

as  causes such a frenzy in stone that slates

stampede.

Following Rousseau

 

 

I'm not sure this does follow Rousseau, but the idea came from his painting 'The Sleeping Gypsy', it's a revised version.

 

                                           The desert has no



throat

to crease the silence;

wing

to ruffle the air;

leg

to displace a sand grain. 

In the desert

I am

atom, planet;

as massive, as minute.

 

 

November Leaf

 

That maple leaf had all the colours I saw in you,

a pronouncement hung on a web of veins.

I found it, a star in the debris, at the river’s edge;

somehow it seemed right.

 

The greatest beauty is the fragile beauty;

it reminded me of you,

with the blue barely clinging to your irises,

your smiles precarious as November leaves.

A Memory of My Father

Shaft of Sunlight

 

Sunlight,

reflected off a million specks

of dust,

fed his face with lines and grace.

 

Soft light

paints old faces the colours of sweet

Autumn apples.

He talked on; I looked in.