“A big unit”, the pundit on the radio referring to a footballer.

Came into my mind after seeing a unit lying on a footpath,

his head on a plastic crate.

I’ve been drunk myself, lying on the road, head spent and

body out of sympathy with my plan to walk home.

Like a boulder in a stream, he’s bypassed as a matter of course;

lying unmoving in foetal position;

glanced at surreptitiously,

totally unacknowledged by those most discommoded.

Undesirable unit;

wouldn't a civilised society offering alcohol in the quantities we do, 

provide seats for crashing out?

At least, of course, if we weren’t units.

Face

Face in my memory,

precarious as a droplet hanging from a leaf;

my longing to hold on to it

the greatest threat to keeping it.

How fragile everything is.

On the green ocean

On the green ocean,

stone ships, wrecked rudderless,

drift

like broken fronds.

I hear the voices,

torn rags

still attached to their rigging.

I hear their words

but no sense;

unpeopled,

they are but yearning yawps.

I see their toil, lives‘ cares,

green now,

green forever

their wakes’ ripples.

No Surgery

The appalling shooting of Jacob Blake has left its bullets in every right-thinking person's mind. But beyond the horrifying crime committed on Mr Blake is the crime committed on his family and particularly on his watching children. His mother's very moving and extraordinarily kind-hearted speech gives an insight into the type of person Jacob Blake must be; it highlights, should there ever be any doubts, the inappropriateness of the police actions taken.
I wanted to write a poem that focuses on the crime done to the children; its effects, I hope can be minimised, but, in general, I think the callous disregard for the effects of violence on onlookers, particularly children, is itself another crime with appalling consequences. I use the word 'they' for the shooting, because none of this would be happening if there wasn't some level of belief that the system accepts it.





No Surgery

When they shot him, they shot his children,

shot them in the eyes.

No surgery can remove

the bullets lodged in their brains

or retrieve the life that should have been:

ball games on the lawn, barbecues,

car rides, the casual banter

and horseplay of families.

No surgery can restore to them the full expression

of their father’s love;

the myriad communications of his body:

healing gestures when words fall short,

the subtle messages of love

from his unhindered face.

When they shot him, they shot his children

with bullets no surgery can remove.

The Wild Atlantic

I think of the sea nosing, whitely sputtering in the crevices

between limestone beds; the chunks of earth’s crust gobbled

by Atlantic’s hunger: headlands shaped by sea’s incursions,

broken headlands, sea stacks with those wild tongues still

rasping up their vertical walls; the insidious creeping through

landward fissures, eventually worm-like slithering to extremities

beneath unwitting green fields; hearing the great gulping yowls

at the backs of caves driven deep into cliffs that should repel like

fortress walls but reverberate with the constant thumping of siege

machines. The frenzy of an ocean contained, but mad to possess;

its ferocity and menace, its harnessing of the universe to drive the

onslaught; its eventual re-shaping of the familiar; this map altered.

Turner's Moods

The cantankerous man throws his wild skies

across the canvas.

Livid tantrums flaring from his heavens

whip the clouds to screaming,

infuriate the waves

so they bash the boats that ply his seas.

And later, when all is becalmed in sunlight,

milky behind gauzy clouds,

that gentleness of his, even tenderness,

will still presage another, approaching storm.

A Painting of Home, Roscommon

On a frosty way to school,

our breaths condensed into word balloons;

the cows had word balloons,

so had Feeley’s donkey (even though he was a loner),

and Browne’s dog, Darkey. We all had.

They all said ‘Mornin.’ when we passed;

we said ‘Mornin.’

and the cows, eating chewing gum,

watched us head on

with a kind of distracted sympathy.

Childhood was that way, we all got on.

I had friends who were trees and streams;

picking mushrooms was part of our friendship,

cows said ‘thank you’ after milking,

trees regularly joined in our games.

I lived where country became town;

the frost came gleaming across the fields,

right to our back doors; we were all part of the magic,

ourselves, trees, cows; all in the painting,

chatting and looking fine.

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.

Questions for a Tired World

See our children just born;

after all the suffering that's been, must they 

inherit the legacy of  hardheartedness?

See our children just born,

whose  first instincts are to  be happy; can we 

not make their ongoing happiness our goal?

See our children just born;

can we not love enough

to make love their currency? 

See our children just born:

will we teach them to coexist

rather than live in houses fortified 

against the world?

See our children just born;

will they be brought up to see nature 

so alien that all else should be killed

but that which feeds their cities?

See our children just born;

will we pass on to them the joy of being

or cravings for unattainable lives?

Fireweed, Montbretia, Swallows and Me

It is past mid-August, and the year, measured in flowers, is turning.

The foxgloves gone, they blackened quickly, followed the iris, that

followed the garlic out of season.

Now that fireweed floods the roadsides with carnivals of colour,

the bonfires of montbretia are raging gloriously out of control

and swallows have become skittish, flying broken circles about the house,

we enter the season of apples, pears turning red, plums purpling.

Yearly, I get this feeling of sadness as though programmed into the cycle;

it’s not the passing of beauty; beauty just changes its cloak; it’s time

running away with something that I can never quite identify.

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.

The Exultation of Larks

And what a stream is to the sound of water,

are larks to the air.

Their effervescence all around

as though life just discovered;

the intricacy of their trills,

far beyond the capabilities of any pianist’s fingers,

is exhilaration.

In the light and colour of a summer’s day like this,

far from vainglorious cities,

their song reaches deep into the soul,

finds the excitement that is our birthright,

draws it, shining, upward into our day:

life rediscovered

amid the exultation of larks.

Mount Rushmore

When as now, a president asks

what a country can do for him,

looking longingly for a place

among the exalted,

my best advice is:

turn the bible right way up,

go to Matthew 23:12 and read,
“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled”

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.

Hey Darling, there’s something I wanna tell ya.

I was coming out of the Big Boulder pub on the edge of my desert;

there was a trail in the sand like someone was dragging a bag or

somethin’.

I saw that it zigzagged up yon dune, so I

followed it.

Over the shoulder

and onto the next, and the next,

and the next, then a gravel track that led to a stretch of open scrub;

more dunes, up and down,

past chalky skeletons, rusted motors, hoary old tree stumps;

I guess there was a change of climate out there.

A donkey’s head on a post laughed as I passed;

sometimes it’s hard to know if donkeys are laughing,

but this guy wasn’t all there.

I followed the trail for hours; at sunset, lay down and slept,

slept solid.

Next morning I followed on, over a sea of sand,

later some dried out riverbeds,

until, guess what,

I arrived back at the Big Boulder.

I’ve gotta tell ya, I’ve had this half-molted anaconda

skin hanging from my knees for ages. It’s a total drag.

And you?

How about you?

How’re things in your desert?

White Space

Tramping this white space, over and back, over and back,

craving encroachments:

mildews, moulds,

suggestions, shapes, anything that is not nothing.

It becomes clear that space spawns its own confinement:

a compulsion to fill it.

Soon enough the junk comes flying;

and it becomes, in fact, a very dangerous place to be.

To Think

We sail a wedge into the space

between sky and ocean;

in turn, while one sleeps,

the other holds the sky aloft.

I strike my thoughts against

each other, but there is no straw;

so I sing to distract myself,

though, in truth, I am no singer.

Earrings

On the summit of K2

I will build a cairn, steady the longest step-ladder

in the world, and climb to gather the purest, finest, most

perfectly faceted ice crystals the high skies can deliver, to

make you a pair of earrings. Two arrays of crystals, in which each

one is measured to a round fraction of the next, like a minuscule set

of tubular bells. Then I will ask you to come north with me to where

northern lights pulse, for there the earrings, resonating, will hum

stratospheric into your ears, notes so indescribably beautiful

that you will forget the crush of this world around you,

experience loneliness so exquisite that your return

will be almost unbearable.

beAuTiful asSyMetry

Five fish in a pond looks better than six,

as do five beech trees on a lawn.

I’d

rather not have tulips dotted regularly around the borders, thank you,

and I’m thankful the icebergs in Greenland are

not all cubes.

For

that matter, I’m beginning to tire of perfectly straight teeth.

A play of spotlights perhaps

 

August winds jostling the clouds along,

springing random blooms of sunlight, outbreaks

of vivid green fires along the mountainside.

Brilliant illuminations of colour with irregular margins

interweaving with the darker stands of fir and spruce.

The smile of playful movement brimming over the ferny

slopes, down to small emerald fields below the foothills,

down to the bay, where the gleams are returned,

like water, to the sky.

I am a Swallow

I am a swallow,

a living arrow.

I cut straight through air,

flash down country lanes,

hedgerows fluidify;

I wheel in an instant if you are before me.

I am a scissors:

I cut arcs through the blue sky,

see the glint of my passing.

I am the big hand of time;

the earth is my clock face.

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.

Well

It was a barracks of an old house, the upper stories

well on the way to ruin, the lower a little way behind.

The eighteenth century kitchen flagged and dim;

its only light, through a small grimy window,

fell grey and listless onto the floor. When the back door

was open, a small out-house threatened to tumble in.

Outside, a cobbled yard that backed onto a wood of beech

and oak; itself threatened by briars and nettles; home to one

item of modernity, Tom’s black bicycle, leaning against the wall

with the air of just having come from or be about to go to town

for groceries, chops, tobacco; and opposite it, amidst encroaching

greenery, the well.

How to describe the magic of the well in that tumble-down yard:

its decrepit wall cracked and mossy, hemp rope with bucket hanging

down, dim distant eye forever staring. The lowering of the bucket,

clanking as it went, a faraway splash and clear cold water recovered,

as though we’d lifted it from legend, from depths that were unfathomed,

from the jaws of monsters no one would dare to imagine.

Rag Tree

By water, a river reaching the sea,

its journey’s completion.

Beneath a tree, contemplating the leaves

pilgrims have placed on its branches:

pleas for help by the river

that has achieved its ambition.

Roscommon Town Then

My Roscommon is gone since the seventies. Town

of small shops: Finns, Morris’s, Smiths and Kerrigan’s.

Main Street: Raleigh bicycles leaning against the houses,

open hall doors, shop awnings, fair days and processions,

aroma of fresh bread mixed with fresh print from Nelly

Higgins’, rolls of fabrics in Donnellan’s old shop,

Anglias, Prefects, Wolseleys, Zephyrs and Cortinas,

scarved heads, flat caps, walking sticks, evening papers.

Behind the shops another world full of magic and mystery,

exotic haunts and hideaways. Storehouses, disused stables,

barns, slaughterhouses, grain-stores, tumble-down sheds,

ancient gardens, abandoned workers’ cottages and these

filled with the wrecked remains of more distant civilisations.

Skeletons of mangles, weighing scales, churns, carts, battered

display cabinets, old counters, rusted motors, bicycles, prams,

assorted crockery, old glassware, scattered ledgers and coins.

Not now, the old street picked clean as a fish-bone on both sides;

the mysteries long forgotten under the sprawling car-parks, new 

entrances and that dull predictability of modern shopping developments.