Saturday, February 27, 2021

Wild


He can’t experience anything above

the city racket, his head’s a bag of

loose spanners. Never being able to

find a place inside to be himself

driving him to violence, he pushes

the volume up further to drown out

the noise, sending himself spiralling

towards craziness, his only way with

people, and, in truth, crazy youths have

their admirers. Having no other mode

of being, he considers himself wild and

often is, and when he is not he’s often

cradling his head in his hands.


Friday, February 26, 2021

From Knockma

 

Green fields,

green the colour of water;

an ocean locked in place

beneath a grid of stone walls.


Lens, curvature of the planet,

green out of sight;

water

pinioned for grazing.

Tuesday, February 23, 2021

On Oxford Street

 

On Oxford Street a woman, falls straight as a Christmas tree

onto the pavement, suddenly dead in pink coat and hat, handbag

firmly clenched and eyes wide, staring at the sky.


Walking behind her, part of the morning throng, I had noticed

her purposeful walk, her style; a country-woman I concluded;

and then she was quite obviously dead.



The crowds flow past, she’s a boulder in their stream.

I consider in an instant what must be done, what is right,

and consider it long enough for it to be someone else’s consideration.


Sunday, February 21, 2021

Barnesmore

 

Barnesmore

An Bearna Mór


A river runs through,

a road runs through,

the wires run through,

the wind runs through,

the rain runs through,

the snow runs through.


The moon stops,

its chin in its hand;

its mesmerising stare,

its silver gaze filling the pass;

nothing stirs

but ever so stealthily, the river

stealing the light away.


Wednesday, February 17, 2021

Travel.

 

To the farthest reaches of your skull:

a universe.


But, away, never;

you are always travelling within you.

Sunday, February 14, 2021

From memory,

 

from within the wreath of that life,

from within the nest of your arms,

from within the blanket of your care,

from within the fire-glow of love,


I have grown from us then to us now,

I have taken you, in coexistence, onward,

we are as one as we have always been.


Thursday, February 11, 2021

Voice

 Listening to Árbakkinn by Olafur Arnalds featuring the voice of Einar Georg I am struck by beauty of the voice, the ability of an older voice to stir the heart. And not lessened, maybe enhanced, by not understanding the words, this is one of what could be a number of responses. 


Voice


His voice was a thirsty stream

picking its way down among the rocks,

troubled slightly by the coins

that once cheered its passing.


It must have been a poem,

it wasn't my language; he spoke

as though watching his parents fade,

as though they were now reduced to a hand waving.


Wednesday, February 10, 2021

Salmon, All Gunbarrel


Salmon, all gunbarrel,

swim like weed,

watch like water,

dream like the moon.


Friday, February 5, 2021

Loneliness

 

She stands in her kitchen, turns, sits,

and feels there should be something,

there must be something.

But there is no other voice in that house

only the incessant radio gabble; she has tired

of it long ago; the repetition,

her brain on its spit; fatuous conversations,

contrived controversies, feigned remorse.

Or daytime television with its seeping mildew of cheap

dramas, old westerns and World War II;

a hundred channels, she can flick through a hundred

channels before throwing the useless remote away from her.

How can life have reduced to this nothingness;

she addresses the question to brain inside her head,

and it as voiceless as the house.

Wednesday, February 3, 2021

A Tale For The Times That Are In It

 

Drab, his room, like a prison cell, north-facing,

swill coloured; depressed outhouses crowded

into his window, a man-made fungal growth;

tea-coloured light oozed from the bare bulb

into his soul, till it too was of the same paint.


One day, he broke some daffodils in the park,

picked them up and brought them home;

left them lying, a rag of sunshine on the table.

Sunlight at last; he went back for more:

crocuses, tulips, ivy, grasses, bluebells, lilies.


Now a flower- bed larcenist, his room an explosion

in a paint factory bedecked from ceiling to floor

with all the flowers of the season, and his soul

blooming in colours that were, once, no more to him

than litter strewn across unkempt suburban lawns.


But as seasons passed and flowers died, unsatisfied

he learned to grow beauty; bulbs, slips, seeds.

That magic took him from his room to the library

where the tendrils of his research spread to faraway

places, and he travelled with them.


Books littered his table; a scatter of ripe, fallen fruits.

Sunlight poured upward from their pages, exploded

in firework blossoms all the way up to the ceiling,

all day, as though he had turned the house around;

and, in a way, I think you could say, he had.