Questions.

Questions from my young children, And like a year, there's sweet and bitter; but I'm wishing you a very happy new year the very best for 2019.

Questions.

Dad, can you make our car fly?

Is there a wizard's castle outside Roscommon?

Do dreams have wheels?

Can I taste your Guinness?

Does Superwoman eat cabbage?

Is Ritzy a boy or a girl?

Has Santa come yet?

Did the man put the fart in a bag?

Dad, will I die of cancer?

Christmas Flowers

All those words:

hey, welcome, happy Christmas,

we’ve missed you,  wonderful to have you home,

happy new year, I love you.

And the following, inevitable

take care of yourself, safe journey, be safe,

goodbye, we’ll miss you, ring.

Christmas flowers:

the bright blooms with their thorns,

colouring the season, bloom in your heart,

bloom beyond the decorations, into Spring,

and still when shafts of April light are gathering heat;

when  the bright space of Summer is widening around you.

Childhood Garden.

Here again;

my eyes tulips,

fists apples, 

feet groundsel.

Garden my mind,

spade spark stone,

bindweed's brilliant flowers,

clouds notions,

and all you said now clay,

my dears, my memories.

Turf high,

rhubarb hibernating in straw;

ridges ridges

my dear soul;

light on the lawn

and from between black clouds,

oh God speaks;

burst football under the privet,

rusted tins,

empty shells

and

snowdrops;

magnificent snowdrops.

With a very happy Christmas to all.

On Seeing Cnoc Mordán from the Clare Coast

I have a notion of beauty that is a wild place;

a grey desolate lake beneath a craggy ridge,

a windswept landscape of stunted thorns,

strewn boulders and scattered outcrops,

furze blooming out of season, dun-coloured reeds,

bronzed bracken broken double by the Atlantic gales.

But it is not the place, not really, it is the girl that lived beside that lake,

in the streaming Connemara gales that swept  her hair,

gave the colour to her face; sallowed her skin

so her eyes shone sharp as needles; gave her the same grace

as the reeds by the water,  slender and graceful. That’s how I saw her;

and now I see the ridge across Galway Bay forty, closer to fifty years later.

Unmerciful time; the place is unchanged but I am old,

and she is old, and the dreams that were young and beautiful

are now like the bracken broken double by the Autumn gales.

But it is not the girl, not really, it is the notions in our heads still hanging 

though November has come, and the sunlight on Loch Con Aortha,

long past summer, full of the cold clarity that comes with Winter.   

Passion

                              Pared down

to tongues and mouths,

we became one.

One moment.

The following moment

steals the previous;

and so it goes.

Kavanagh and I by the Grand Canal

Sodden in driving rain,

watching our  lives

bobbing on the water

while the colour-drained city

shivers backwards;

the two of us lamenting the sins

we never committed at all.

But you outdo me

having made this place your own;

ducking with the waterfowl

into the city’s murk,

claiming no part of it,

and always happiest

when the rain’s flaying.

Fine Art from Spain

When I saw this painting by Regina Carbayo, a Spanish artist who has been living and working for a number of years in Cork, my immediate (gut) reaction was ‘wow’, and still is; undiminished.

The painting has a classic, timeless composition and palette. The faces are Spanish, and, as other Spanish artists have been known to do, the painting playfully cocks a snook at itself and the whole genre, through its subjects’ exaggerated hauteur and feigned disdain.

Here they are, bound to classic portraiture by props that would for long times past have suggested learning and aesthetic high-mindedness, trapped in that age-old  format, formally posed and extremely self-conscious, faces melting downward as only  the faces could be permitted to move within the strict composition.

Those expressions draw you in to rich fun of the image, hold your attention, and call you back to look again and again.

The Swan

Evening light;

you and I walking beside the river;

the gold coins of leaves littering our path,

the world around us turning quiet and serious

beneath heavy clouds lost in thought.

Then a swan lights like a match;

its wings aflame over the water, in the water,

magnificent as magnesium burning.

We stop to marvel, and find ourselves wistful;

the swan is us, our souls' yearning for beauty.

Last Circle

Congregated in a circle in a field in Cork,

backs hunched dark against the driving rain,

heads covered, faces hidden, unfathomable

presences humming low

-- the sea coiling inside a mountain,

the wind trapped inside a hollow oak,

gale stuck in the high stone tower

all day, all the rain long --.

Incantation, tumulus and ditch, tumulus and ditch

concentrically droning outward,

draining into the earth’s pinna, swallow-hole,

the whorl of light, green and time.

Fatal Impact

A word of thanks to Thomas McRae for sending his recent collection of poems 'Fatal Impact' (iUniverse). For information : https://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookSearchResults.aspx?Search=thomas%20McRae

I give you

This tree's dripping fruit

to place in your mouth

to ripen your tongue.

The water guttering down

these green leaves

to be a trellis of fingers

about you.

This soft drizzle of sunlight

to fall gentle as the petals

of meadowsweet on your cheeks.

This bindweed and all tendrils

to hook and bind

                   our desires together.

Statement

My demons know no boundaries;

I am a propeller

blinded by my own agitation.

When I come to

I’ll be devastated,

and stamp out fires that never burned.

Passing

An old man with pipe and stick

is sitting on a kitchen chair

beside a rick of turf

in the field before his house;

there is a mountain in the background.

One Summer’s day, passing,

I watched a curlicue of smoke rise

from the man’s pipe,

gyrate in front of his eyes,

then disappear

to become part of the nothing,

the blue sky not far from Achill Sound.
A moment,
one of the fleeting series,
the passing that is a lifetime.

After The Bucketing Rain

After the rain's

  bucketing,

    plaiting fingers                    

     flowed,                            

      long limbs                     

        lisped                            

         and fat drops                           

         

          tock tocked                          

           enchanted rhythm

            on brimful

             barrels.

              Beneath blue clouds'                                                    

             electric light,

            dumb drops                         

           exclaimed                         

           

          tipsy seconds

         to every

        listening ear:                

      after shower             

    magic

   tock ticking            

           suspended time.              

Iceland's Banned Ad

Banned by the UK's broadcast code for advertising practice (BCAP) for carrying a political message. But, just a few weeks on from the WWF's  chilling  Living Planet Report  in which it was  stated that there has been a 60% decline in the size of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in the last 40 years (a staggering 89% in South and Central America since 1970), wouldn't it be brilliant if some more supermarket chains delivered the same message? 

If we have any thought for the wellbeing of our children, grandchildren and their children to come   this along with climate change must be addressed now. The Report can be downloaded at https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2018?link=txt2

Take a look at the ad, and post it on.

Social Work

  

Do you remember our hospital visit;

he asked for his present?

Present !

And dying the only life

left in him.

There we were, the two of us,

at the end of his deathbed

and our hands,

great big empty sunbursts.

Certainly, we were young;

but I thanked God when he died.

and then he was dead;

(remembering my father's death)

and then he was dead;

breathing stopped;

eyes closed;

still warm.

I stared at his face,

for the first time

without life inside it.

I stared and knew:

that body

was never him at all.

The Man-Owl

A man imagines himself an owl and perches in a tree.

All summer unseen, in winter completely exposed;

sitting; eyes closed, open, closed; otherwise still.

A group of children have collected beneath him;

they are throwing taunts, then sticks then stones;

he makes himself smaller, like a hedgehog in a tree.

The townspeople have now gathered beneath him.

A dim view was taken of the stone-throwing,

they have called fire brigade, ambulance and police.

Two ladders extended, one each side of the man-owl,

and two firemen straightening, one by one, his fingers,

talons he has hooked around the branch over his head.

It was considered wise not to have a view of the garden;

the window of his room faces the opposite wing;

a television, left on 24/7, masks the sounds of the wind.

Storm

The storm is keeping me awake;

the dogs, discordant tuning forks,

and

the whine of lost souls

in the electricity wires.

Tossing, a mobile in the gusts,

waiting for the light to clank

back

but knowing it’s beyond the gap

where the wind is crowding in.

Your unhappy face turning away

to hide the tears,

and

the storm banging on that nail

all night, the whole night long.

Encounter

When she gave me her hand, I was instantly struck

by the elegance and grace of her movement.

Her hand was slender and magnificently gloved

in white blossoms that had tinges of pink

near the edges of its petals, and they were falling,

falling so thickly that a doily of snowflakes

had formed around her feet.

She held me enchanted in the centre of her smile;

I took her hand, never noticing the thorns,

and my blood dripped crimson bright berries down.

Sometimes it takes a long time to see the real person

In sickness there was only you 

  

light as a feather;

relieved of the weight

of position and pride;

neither bluff nor brashness

nor the strength

to be more than your dying self. 

She came to test me.*

Did her hair flow bright as honey down her back? 

Was the wild rose the blossoming of her cheeks? 

Or, was her face was a web of soil-filled furrows?  

Were her eyes flinty with the cunning of age?  

  

I passed the test of kingship, I did not falter; 

She came old into my eyes, but was young in my arms, 

With fingers flowing gently over my temples,  

Breath sweet in the full bloom of her mouth, 

Voice rich as the blackbird’s on the highest branch of an oak.  

For a king must be one with the spirit of the land 

whether it be dressed in the bare, haggard bones of January,  

or the lush green coat bejewelled in May. 

*The high kings of Ireland had to lie with (or marry) the Hag to show that they were beyond being seduced 

by the easy things in life.

Blue-veined old hands :

I never saw them coming

till they were spread bleak

as the limbs of Winter trees

across vacant heavens.

When I said I loved you

I whacked at the wall

with a stick of oar weed

picked off the strand.

Cantankerous old fool :

never saw him coming

till words I spat out

fell like lightning turned

to twigs of rotten wood.

New Poem

I have set myself up to write a poem

and am sitting set before the screen

and

Forgetting

Mosaic of sunlight,

gold and russet leaves;

becalmed now in memory loss.

A moment:
another leaf falling

with a sound that is not heard.

That pile of  leaves growing;

the heartbreak:

soon this maple will be bare.

The Stars

The stars are tossed across the drumlins of the sky.

I am looking to see the road you’ve taken

And I think I see it, and  you;

Andyou are singing Bring back my Bonnie

And you are laughing, and looking back

Over your shoulder.  Yes I think you are.

And now I am singing; we’re all singing

Bring back my Bonnie, and the road is getting longer

Behind us, and you are handing back sweets, and I ‘m smiling

And you sing Ten Green Bottles; we  all sing

Between the rolling fields of night, and then

You have rounded some bend, and are singing,

But smaller and smaller and smaller and
and I cannot see

just the stars.

Once by the Sea

Once I sat by the sea around midnight

with too much drink in my gut,

watching the play of tide and moonlight

crash into a crescent of land;

the rhythm of the waves hitting my oozy brain

like ‘This is Your Life’.

I stayed there to discover what it was telling me;

to distil a loneliness

that would inform me about myself.

The light and sound and smell of the sea and shore,

the darkness behind me, the round sky,

and myself tight as a nut at its centre.

I stayed there long enough to imagine myself lonely,

confirm my right to be on those stirring stones,

to be clear sighted beyond sight,

to implicate the world, the universe, and yourselves

in the unhappiness of my moment;

and I was intensely happy.

Slow-Moving Clouds

Slow moving clouds never ran away with love,

but left lovers dreaming in their wake.

The sky is where the hearts of lovers roam,

since the earth is not big enough for their dreams.

The baby in the tree

It's surprising where ideas come from. There  was a white carrier bag snagged high in a tree on Leinster Road.

         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.