My Advice This November Day

Don’t be too fond of owning,  my little love.

As you fly;
let your head be full of the magic of flying
and happiness will be yours.
Be light as a leaf  among the millions;
such exhilaration!

This flight is your life, darling;
unique, incredible, finite.

Rain Fell

 

Rain fell.

It was not a dream,

but your voice

from the far side of the years,

sounding like sunlight on water.

If only I was prepared,

if I’d known such a thing could happen,

I would have walked out

to meet you.

November Poetry

 

In the park, the leaves of another year have turned

to rust, fallen, rotted and been cleared.

The flower bed at the centre of the lawn is bare,

as is the children’s playground; the coffee-room

is boarded up and a film of water has darkened the colour

of everything: tree trunks, foot-paths, benches.

November’s beauty is not great splashes of primary colour

nor nature’s pretty embellishments, but the textures

that lie beneath them, even the lowered sun throwing

shadows from the unevenness of the ground.

My mind too is shaded by November.

Less distracted by obvious beauties, I search with narrower eye

among the austere denuded trees for patterns

of growth along their barks, of bud-beading,

of the varying strategies in the splay of limbs to capture sunlight.

I have a more artful eye, that bends more quickly to deeper thoughts,

turning sod and light inwards; 

I rework the detritus of the passing year, 

work those textures into words.

Meeting at Nursing Home During the Pandemic

I must make an appointment

though we set the pendulum of our lives;

I must meet you through glass

though our breathing was one;

I must talk across a distance

though our words and breath were one;

I must put my hand to the glass

though happiness was the heat of your skin;

I must go away

though you are my home.

Silver Birches

Today I came on a stand of birches

dazzling in late evening sunlight.

A tableau of, maybe, a dozen nudes;

splendid, shameless.

Torsos of Elginesque splendour,

arms twining upward in Grecian gracefulness;

statuesque beauties

nonchalant in Olympian lasciviousness.

The Old Man's Song

The old man loves to sing, but has a cracked voice;

when he sings he cracks the song;

a song not written for old men.

And the composer may, indeed, take umbrage, as singer,

word after word, loses footing on crumbling notes.

But the old man, singing his song,

takes his listeners along a less frequented path; he’s singing

defunct dreams, wispy happinesses, worries and triumphs.

Fissures open between the words, and there, sure enough,

is the other song: the song of life passing.

The Old Men in the Day-Room

A picture of institutionalized men from about 1970. A nineteenth century room, dark but for a smallish window that allowed afternoon sunlight; bare, bleak and empty for the most part. Dickensian. 

The Old Men in the Day-Room

A rectangular pool of sunlight mid-room;

shadow-clad men on wooden benches around the walls,

features lost in the dark recesses of their faces,

bodies rolled, slumped in sack-black coats;

fingers splayed skeletal on the crooks of walking sticks,

breathing like tide gurgling at the backs of sea-caves

eyes peering from below the surfaces of shallow pools.

Those were the men of the workhouse

in the mid-afternoon gloaming of their day-room,

in the late evening of their lives.

Silence between them, between them and us;

sitting there, boulders in the passing world,

their ears no longer tuned to the pitch of life.

Slaughter House

White filled socket, an eye twisted, with its contorted,

straining body, away from that room. At the end of a rope

taut to the straightness of cane, haunches working, legs

thrashing, sliding in shit; and men flat out dragging,

pushing the heifer towards the slaughter-house doorway.

Roaring beast, terrified as humans are; same recognition,

same fight, same blood gut muscle response, same horror;

and men, angular to their brutal task, dragging, pushing,

hauling to death chambers. At the end of a rope taut to the

straightness of cane, a tongue extending grossly from a mouth.

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.

Monday Morning in Kamiyacho, Hiroshima

(Aug 6th, 1945.)

8.15 am,
a woman is sitting on the bank steps, 
waiting for opening time.

Though early; already weary of the heat,
she is happy to sit for awhile.

8.16 am, 

a silhouette of a person 

is etched in the steps outside the Sumitomo Bank;
it  seems the person was sitting there.

Aug 6^th, 2020.

Her shadow sits the days through, though no longer in the sun.

Museum visitors file by; she has no memory;

she will be here for a long time, maybe forever;

it was men that granted her this eternity.


She pleads to all that pass to end this insanity, and all, 
moved by the horror of it, are convinced. Not enough though, 
the shadow-makers of the world still rule supreme.

Feichín's Response to the Women of Omey

On hungry mornings, Feichín became a cormorant,

dived deep into the Atlantic to retrieve miraculous numbers of fish.

On the rocks of Omey, he often caused commotions, standing,

arms extended, skin stretched tight over bones, naked as a newborn chick,

drying his body in the wind.

When, once, the women of Omey delegated one of their number to go to him

to chastise him for his sinful displays, which, their souls being jeopardised,

must be the devil’s work; he, upon hearing their complaint, reached up to a shelf,

took down the bones of a meal and asked,

“Do these bones offend you?”

“No”, she replied.

“Was I not more clothed than these?”

and with that he took a switch to her and sent her running from his hut.

Days of our Lives

So we’d have a coffee, maybe two, then off

into town by the side streets, looking for

red-brick houses with lilac doors and yellow

window frames. Drop into the IFI, sit over

another coffee, browsing the catalogue with half interest,

the steady drift of film-goers and idlers with more.

On down Dame Street to College Green,

enjoying our navigation of ever-shifting crowds,

the dexterous manoeuvrability of ourselves.

In Hodges Figgis we’d scan the poetry

shelves and the art books, those names and titles

settling in our heads like we were travelling the

world: Heaney, Mahon, Carver, Balthus,

Kahlo, Lorca, Basho, Holub ‒ dabs of fresh paint

and print to keep us informed for a month or two ‒

before returning to Grafton Street to knit crooked stitches

through the crowds, stop a few minutes to hear a busker

play a saw or slide guitar then around to Tower Records

to be tempted by some new ECM arrival in the jazz section.

George’s, Aungier, Wexford, Camden, Richmond Streets;

the diminishing scale of a city’s architecture, and

the backwards walk down the telescope to the landscape

of our normal lives. Crossing the border at the canal, with

its familiar vista down Rathmines Road to the mountains

beyond; we, like fish, breathing easier in our own habitat,

saw our hurdles flattened, but, perhaps, never recognized

the days of our lives?

That beautiful odyssey: Saturdays, mid-morning to mid-afternoon;

or maybe it was just one Saturday,

or, maybe, it wasn’t at all.

Klimt Moment

We’ll sit where we sat before, above the stream,

watching the golden eels of sunlight dart and shimmy

above bronze coloured stones to the sound of water searching

out all the possible solutions to the conundrum of strewn rocks

while somewhere beneath us a hollow-sounding tock tock

drums our time away.

Let us weave time and stream into a cloak, a Klimt creation:

magnificent flowing, yet enveloping us in a precise moment

of pleasure. Let us hold it in our eyes so we may see it, wear it

when times are harder, these moments scarcer and the glint

of gold more precious.

A Poor Man Offers Unlimited Treasure

It’s a paltry thing that sparkler on your finger,

when, on a sunny morning, I will present you

with ten miles of dazzling lake almost to the door.

Or an emerald, when my house is sitting at the bottom

of blazing green fields, and the same all the way to the sea,

two counties to the west, three to the east.

Or amethyst, when the boreen is crowded with foxgloves

ringing their bells for the attention of bumble bees who’ll be losing

their heads in nectar from May to September.

Or rubies, when the hedges are brimming with myriad constellations

of fuchsia; even the ash, high on the hill, outshines them with its harvest

of late evening sun gathered in sprays of blood-bright berries.

And that gold bangle on your wrist, how dull it will look beside the daffodils

under the beech trees not a hundred yards from my house, or June’s irises

with blooms like laughter among the flaggers opposite Scanlon’s old shed.

Over by the privet hedge, you’ll have all the pearls you could wish for

come the end of January; snowdrops, promising the year’s beauty,

will be yours every January, if only you’d come live in my cottage.

Married Couple in the Pandemic

I noticed our fingers: grown old,

bones and knuckles;

my face sort of similar, hers is fuller.

We got so used to our own ways,

hard to live to someone else’s tune;

old habits are comfortable.

The house is empty, there’s no company;

I make noise to hear noise,

talk out loud a lot.

Her fingers on the perspex, that small distance

brought the whole distance home;

I would have liked to touch them.

The Saintliness of Feichín

A sea mist clinging to the rocks, dunes, stone huts;

vague dawn light; occasional screechings of sea-birds;

insidious dampness slithering between the stones,

under doors, between blankets and bodies; bodies huddling

closer; breaths’ clouds condensing on faces hard by.

Suddenly the shriek of a man; again and again,

each on the lightning slap of a tong on flesh,

so all, now awake in their huts, are bolt upright, listening,

and suffering the strokes of flails embedded with thorns;

marvelling at the saintliness of Feichín.

After a long agonising period the lashings cease;

the waves are again lapping on the shore, the gulls are screaming;

from Feichín’s hut come quiet moans and latin supplications:

“in manus Tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum”; it is Good Friday,

in mid-afternoon the skies will darken and the temple veil shall be rent.

At mid-morning, he emerges; shock-eyed scare-crow

with shroud covering his body, a scream of blood;

the brothers kneel; thanks is given to God; Feichín is safe.

Already wild flowers are colouring the fields, soon the swallows will come

and bees will make honey to their glorious chant.

How Feichín Got His Other Name, Moéca (Backslider).

Feichín stumped out of Clonmacnoise fuming,

the argument a burst blister in his head.

That cur, Ciarán, had, for the last time, demeaned him;

may his feet blacken with gangrene, may a nest of ulcers

prevent wine ever passing his lips again.

All day Feichín had tended the oxen while it poured and hailed

and him without the merest fortification of a drink.

He made ribbons of his arms climbing through a hedge of briars,

stumbled up to his neck into a stand of nettles, fell through the bridge

over Abha Bán where the rotten timbers ripped open his leg.

Lumbering on now, he growled at shadows, sent the stones of the road

into the bushes with delicious kicks he imagined on Ciarán’s arse;

but suddenly, breaking his reverie, the detested voice was ordering him back.

He grumbled, fought with it, cursed God, but having no choice,

walked backward so as not to look that accursed saint in the face.

Feichín's Bliss on Omey

In the play of sunlight and ripples,

that dance of the lake’s finery,

Feichín sees the splendour of Heaven

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the fish, silver treasure of the ocean,

the plenty that graces his table,

Feichín enjoys their steam-play with his nose

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the carpet of brightly coloured flowers,

bee-droning machair near the shore,

Feichín antcipates the sweetness of honey

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the uninhibited song of the lark,

sky-high notes from among the dunes,

Feichín feels the joy of God’s presence

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

From a Child's Window

The child is at the window; he is there every evening

at this time, as the clouds of the world are catching fire. He knows

the fields behind his house: the hay-shed with the tunnels through the bales,

the wrecked car under the elders where some of the hens are laying,

the field with the maze of pathways through the furze.

Beyond that, the railway line where the lesser known world begins.

He has been there, where the fields are wide and there are no houses,

to the water hole where the small fish dart from weed cover to weed cover;

that’s where the prairie begins, where cowboys travel alone.

To the left, the railway line cuts straight to the white gates;

he has seen the gates; beyond them trains travel days, weeks

across parched deserts, open steppes, past wadis, oases. The passengers

seldom look: tuxedoed gentlemen with glinting teeth are tipping whiskeys

lit by a million lights in crystal glasses to feather-boa’d women

whose champagne drinks sparkle back from the tips of their slender arms.

He knows the station is to the right, and there’s the bridge he loves to stand on

when the four o’clock is coming through. The excitement as the engine appears,

slowing to the platform, then starts up, and the carriage roofs passing beneath him,

he loves that; then the last of it, the tail slithering away from the station.

Where to? He does not know. It goes into a place he has no thoughts on;

the evening train into the hours he sleeps through; that is where darkness is.

International Incident in Local Pub

Early twenties, long fair hair, blue-jeaned, Dutch I'd guess. Camping on the beach probably; sitting now with her travelling companion at the next table. 

I’m in the only bar in the locality, Friday night, thronged with locals enjoying the weekly music. The two girls have a different style, they’re noticed, but that’s the height of it; you get summer visitors in these parts.

At the bar, shimmying, the local Ronaldo. Thirty-five-ish, pint in one hand, massaging roll of  belly between tee-shirt and jeans with the other; he’s outlining a game-plan to three acolytes: ‘gwan horse!’ 

But the girl’s spread-eagled on his cross hairs and the performance is for her. He’s watching, every few minutes his eyes travelling over to her table.

And suddenly he’s off to her table. He’s full-sail on the open sea, and that’s noticed too, but that’s the height of it.

He asks her to dance.

On the dance floor he’s doing a jive-waltz-dribble sort of thing, interrupted occasionally to lob the odd word down her ear-hole. There’s twirl, lots of twirl, and twinkling feet; the locals know the story, little smiles on their faces, the pair are the only ones dancing.

Back at the bar, anticipation-pricked, he’s warming the lads; shimmies becoming daintier, more intricate like; he calls another pint......and a glass.

The glass crosses the floor, the pint with it.

Stool patted, down goes the arse and it’s chat, chat, chittidy, chattedy, chit-chat; he massages his belly and then another pint.

“Glass ?”

“No thanks.”

 Back at the bar, horn-filled, brimmin; Rono, ya beauty!

But they bolt. The two girls gone. The discovery takes a moment or two. 

He roars, runs after them,  across the lounge, out the door, slams it shut; leaves the lads scattered, astounded feathers behind him.

And the music, as they say, played on.