Kitty Fenlon's Last Day

          

 

          That day Kitty Fenlon,

 

propped up in her bed,

was staring at the bedspread.

 

Snow melting in her eyes

fell, tiny bells,

into the valley far below.

 

Suddenly, arms spread wide,

a blizzard of hair,

she swept outward

 

off  her ledge,

into the sky

across the room.

 

We stared at her

non-plussed face,

the four pillows tucked behind her.

Happy

 

In the morning she opens,

bay windows to the sun

 

and dances

on the brim of the day.

 

All day long flying,

jets for feet;

 

at night-time snuggles up,

a cockle shell with dreams.

Trains in a Child's Night-time

  The Boy Who Watched For Apparitions.

  Goodnight to the twin moons

  stretched along the railway tracks

  outside Roscommon.

  My night-time window halved

  with those trains rushing across the glass,

  strips of film filled with their own lives:

  adventurers and bon-vivants,

  whose strings of lights recreated as they passed

  the grassy slope, the elder bushes,

  the buffer with the hole in the side;

  strangers oblivious to such little worlds

  and to the boy who watched for apparitions

  from his bedroom window.

  And in a moment they were gone,

  leaving the darkness darker and the boy listening,

  trying to gauge where the sounds 

  finally disappeared into the wind.

 

  What lay beyond that window-world ?

 

  The station to the right,

  the white gates to the left,

  and then..........

 

  Now I remember those film strips

  sailing through that pitch emptiness; 

  sometimes they were only ruffed impressions

  when the window was full of pouring rain.

  I remember how my imagination filled like a can

  when all that was left was the headlight's beam

 over the trees of Bully's Acre.

  And there is often disappointment in these poems;

  the disappointment of that place beyond

  where the rhythms of trains were reclaimed by the wind.

Waiting in the car

Rain Street  is probably 80% Main Street, Roscommon  and I'm a child waiting in the car while my mother is 'getting the messages'; 20% some Dublin street back in the 60's.

I've tried to catch the scene a number of times in different poems, but have never succeeded. There are differences between  then and now,  mainly in the lighting. Back then a fairly basic pub might have a bare 100 watt bulb lighting the bar, it gave a tea-coloured glow through the rain, a single customer might be hunched over a pint of Guinness. A barber's might have a neon strip light; through the window you would see the barber clipping away in hard enamel white.

And, of course, most parking was on the street, a street of small shops, so a number of shopkeepers could be watched going through their paces: the butcher in bloodied white, grocer in his  brown coat, the be-suited, hush-puppied draper. 

For a while the rippling reflections of  neon signs and street lights  would  engage a 10 year old, people flashed from doorway to doorway, collars up like Hollywood gangsters; as a local, I knew the cast, I knew the conversations, rain threw them into an altogether new focus. Later, however,  the fogged up windows reduced the view to a peep hole in the condensation, and boredom was never far behind that.

   Rain Street

   Down the street

   rain lights running

   drizzling concrete        

   sizzling lake.

   Flashes red flashes

   running in rivulets

   yachting cartons

   crowd in a grate.

   Umbrella shadows

   with foot halo splashes

   shirt collar drippings

   shoes under siege.

   Gutters play bongos

   for galvanize tappers

   tyres make clashes

   spangling streams.

   And faces in windows

   unravel down panes

   their cigarettes burning

   their signature stains.

   Then squinting bus queue

   like socks on a line

   become runaway legs

         legs like twine

Marrying the Sea

'Marrying the Sea', Declan O'Rourke's haunting ballad: a beautiful acapella rendition by Elaine O'Dea.

In a Bog Hole

The chill scenery of an Irish bog in Winter is unexpectedly moving. When the sky's artic colouring appears, reflected in a bog hole, and I see myself  in pristine sharpness, I am suddenly engulfed in melancholia.

There,

 

laid out on water;

preserved to sharpness in  the December chill.

 

Fluid mosaic of sky and cloud,

Michael shivers like a flag.

 

Evening, extinguishing the bog cotton,

will find him alone,

 

treading visions  in this bog hole’s bottomless black.

A Famine Scene Remembered

 

November, month of charcoal cloud

slung low to the earth;

labourers hunched double,

grubbing for the bright potatoes

that scuttle, like mice, back into the sodden soil.  

Scrabbling fingers chase each fugitive light

 with the desperation of the starving. 

I rest a moment on the spade,

my fingers on the shaft  

now rough with working the same soil;

my fingers with their DNA inside them.