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.