Beaten by life

I had a friend who was beaten by life.  A keen poet once, by no means a great poet, but most extraordinarly honest and brave; think of a gay man publishing poetry that expressed his sexuality without inhbition in the Ireland of fifty years ago.

My poem refers to this man disapointed and despondent in his later years; fight and spirit gone, he was good company, but  kept all that he had been locked tight deep inside himself.

The Poems Are Past.

The poems are past;

goodnight, au revoir.

And life, handed over like a cheque;

good luck, all the best.

Still: an adjective for a man ?

Still ?

Think of rain, bucketing down,

sunshine caught in its strings;

that's how I think of you:

a rainstorm in June; gentle subversive .

Hallucinatory

“Hallucinatory”, you say! Sky, earth,animal concentricly ringed.

Lives: stone, stone and river, river, human.

Hallucinatory: spirals, zigzags, chevrons, sunbursts!

Yes, I see the vortex you travelled through,

I see the serpentine trace of the Boyne,

Knowth, Dowth, Newgrange along its path;

the lozenged pattern of fields through which it flows;

the arced hills, chevron forests of trees.

Earlier, I saw the angular graph of human worries

side by side with the eternal turning of Gods’ backs;

the cardiograph pattern that reads mortality

next to the celestial manifestations that measure out lives.

I have seen the sundial that marshals the symbols into their system,

an assignation with mathematical precision;

I have seen them liquefied to become art,

much as Van Gogh painted the night sky.

(The Sundial Kerbstone at Knowth is a remarkable piece of work.  Is it the earth's oldest sundial? One way or the other, it puts many of the motifs in celtic art into a scientific framework. Google an image, if you're not familiar with it.)

Bird Bones and poetry

AvantAppal(achia) 5 is now online; it gives me the perfect reason to repost this photo; see why at https://www.avantappalachia.com/ 

Number 6 is due in December. The submission details can be found at the above address.

Childhood, religion, fear.

Sunfire

sunset raging in the western sky meant

Hell was out of control beyond the Galway Road.

Clouds, carrying the flames eastward,

threatened our house.

I, scared witless, kept my head under the blankets,

knowing God’s sun had been swallowed by that fire. 

I heard a fly buzz

"I heard a Fly buzz – when I died – 

………………………………– and then

I could not see to see –"

                                           Emily Dickinson

There was a time when the tv picture, turned off,

Diminished to one bright spot on the screen,

Lingered awhile, then quenched.

All that action condensed into one bright spot;

I marvelled and dwelt on it and saw it out.

How magnificent that last buzz must be?

How marvellous the smallest manifestation of life!

How magnificent that last stirring of life:

She turned her head, her head;

She turned her head.

I Love You

The purple heads of the chives standing on their bottle-green stalks

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

beyond them, the soft pile forestry of the opposite  hillside

was a kind of wealth to us, 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 a chain with this beauty; and then I said, ‘I love you.’

It was not just the moment; it was the magnificence of the view below us;

I needed something that grand to put the words into.

Beads of Rain

Beads of rain made blinking eyes of the water,

thousands of strings unravelled, the pond filled,

became agitated.

It was for this I came to the park. To see the day crease,

to assure myself that your death would not pass unnoticed.

The day was a dark mood but the strings transported the sky’s light

into the pond’s sulking despondency,

and suddenly I was feeling better.

Old Man

Oh, that’s not who he is,

age is just the cap on his head.

And cranky: it’s what he’s been holding

since youth, his rebellion.

We should listen, but, only the old can know

what the old know.

Love then

I’ll be somewhere far away by then.

The silhouettes are for you;

they are the silhouettes of us as lovers.

There were stars all around;

they’re still there,

but we  moved on.

Street Dweller

He lives in a doorway,

finds privacy facing away from the street;

his back is his outside wall.