Fiddle, flute, the Salamanca reel:
drops of rain slide into line
along the underside of a mossy rock
before falling in the unpredictable waves
that breaths play in the crevices
between the rocks
asking them to go: now, go now, go now.
Swallows on a wire striking up the reel,
fluff up as gusts, minute as golf balls,
lift their feathers so each flickering a different
daylight swoops off
as fingers darken the holes,
strings flash momentarily
and see, the music moving through the air.
A re-edited poem, I first posted it in 2018. The cloud was down, and the world was muffled by it. There was no wind, so the Atlantic, for all its colossal extent and ferocity was lapping onto the strand as gentle as a pond. There was so much that was grey around us, we seemed miniature, like we were walking in the sky.
But small as we were, we were there when the world around us seemed to have been erased; we felt more alive, not in the sense of being more active but our minds magnified. In a way it made me feel like a God.
Murvagh Grey Day
There’s so little difference between sea and cloud,
the whole scene might as well be upside down.
The bisectors of St John’s Point, a finger stretching
across the horizon, and Mullagmore, Adam to God,
reaching back. To the left, white clouds are hanging,
sheets from a bed, down the sides of Ben Bulben; to the
right the Bluestacks slumped beneath mosquito nets of rain.
Smokey light, filling the bay, lulling the world like ether;
the waves that raced across the ocean, surviving the fury
at Rosnowlagh, collapsing, now spent, onto the sand of
Murvagh beach, pooled with cloud we’re walking through,
you and I, silhouettes moving along the bottom edge
of this canvas, causing suddenly a tin of paint to spatter
upward: a bevy of oystercatchers taking to flight.
In the small hours, in the darkness, early March,
I hear the curlews out on the bog.
Night and bog are the same to them;
they stick their heads through that one black fabric,
declare themselves black stars pulsing, and then
gone; the universe left searching through its pockets.
The question was straight; the answer infuriating, a labyrinth of generalities. So it had to be asked again, the minister prevaricated again, so it had to be asked again.......
No light forthcoming; the minister wasn’t answering, wasn’t acknowledging that she wasn’t answering and was, seemingly, hoping nobody would notice.
Goddammit, stop talking! Same minister does it all the time. I can’t stand her. And no, this isn’t a sexist rant, she just happens to be the one this time, and my head is demanding I offer some resistance.
To my way of thinking, this is a clear insult; does the minister somehow think that she has mesmerised us with canny wordplay, that all of us out here in listener-land are nodding our heads like those dogs that nodded, years ago, in the back windows of cars; is she so arrogant that she believes that her evasive handling of the question makes a good enough answer for a dim-witted population.
Democracy doesn’t count for much in a fog of obfuscation and lies, yet we tolerate it every time we allow a politician to use filibustering tactics in an interview; to talk over or try to drown out an opposing argument; introduce red herrings e.g. maybe X was corrupt, but don’t forget forget how well Y was managed. If the supreme power of a state is invested in its people, it follows that they shouldn’t be stumbling around in darkness.
Whistle-blowers are victimised unmercifully in these systems for daring to throw light on nefarious practices. No matter that they selflessly expose themselves to this for the common good, no matter that they show levels of bravery that are admired in other circumstances; the prevailing darkness suited these politicians, and that’s the wholly all of it.
Nor do cults of personality support democracy, when all the available light is used to spotlight a chosen one. Here the message is, keep your eyes on me, follow me, I am your source of light. And, of course, a spotlight always deepens the shadow around it.
I don’t buy the notion of western democracy as it’s presented. Sure, it’s an improvement on most dictatorships, but it doesn’t confer the freedom it claims to; not as long as public information is purposely garbled and deceptive, nor as long as advertising campaigns funded by lobby groups with deep pockets and partisan views are allowable – advertising is not an open forum – or indeed while there are systems that are overwhelmingly two party driven, when we all know that it takes more than two colours to produce white light.
To say I am troubled by recent trends in politics would be to understate it. It seems to me that the further we have travelled from the pioneers that founded our states the more our politicians have become blowers of smoke. I am afraid that a generation of politicians cleverer than the current will turn smoke to tar, and light doesn’t penetrate tar.
A narrow stream of blood has collected
in a pool on the cracked pavement;
it has run from a hole in the belly of a young man;
he lies there drained of his life.
Tomorrow people will walk over this trace, hurrying;
for what is a bloodstain:
a drunkard’s fall, a late-night brawl,
a remnant of hideous nightlife that blundered into day?
The darkening blood-flow seems almost a mockery
of the life that sailed away along it;
and the dried stain its receipt:
who could be blamed for believing there must be more?
You might like to check out a series of events being hosted by Tally Koren over the next few weeks entitled ‘Changing The Face Of Poetry’. Each event will focus on a different theme:
Sun 21stMarch 8pm GMT |
Sun 4thApril 8pm BST |
Sun 18thApril 8 pm BST |
Survival Feeling trapped Loneliness |
Hope Spring Vision of the future |
Freedom Reflection New beginnings |
You can find more information about the events and submission deadlines if you'd like to be involved at: https://www.tallykoren.com/events
During the course of the events she will look at how poetry can be turned into songs and demonstrate how one line of a poem can become a catchy chorus as she did with ‘Beauty of the Duty’ a song playlisted by BBC Radio 2 and other radio stations over the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWIOE7w_hlw
Daniel, sitting in his yellow canoe
on an afternoon sky of wedgewood blue
and pillowy white clouds, is
without paddle and, it appears,
the remotest notion of where he is.
Faraway, but behind him, an island
of claustrophobic greenness may be
a destination, but it is doubtful he’ll
look that way, and if he did, it’s
doubtful that he’d choose to go there.
At the moment, it seems more likely
he will step from the canoe onto the
marble-still surface,
then he'll be something like a flint arrow
in vertical descent.
Sunlight lit the fuse; the trees,
fires in the fields, blazed
silver in the black plates
of their leaves,
out of control;
the wind made their arms sway,
spill their light;
I gathered as much
as I could into my eyes,
so that I, too, might catch their fire.
Stone boxes; ruined, roofless cottages empty as looted coffins
at the foot of Slievemore.
How time scoured the ruins: Atlantic squalls dousing the walls
to their sterile stones,
silencing ghost whisperings from ancient hearths; no presences
lingering beneath doorway lintels
but skittles and jack stones played between the huddled houses;
the voices of children reverberating
between the walls; women laughing, gossiping, cajoling down by
the stream
carried, like rain on the wind, down the years, in from ocean, over
the grassy wave.
Lost spirits laughing, complaining, shouting, teasing, arguing, joking;
the deserted houses with their mouths agape,
tongues missing, and the dream light of day passing over them like
some ancient prankster.
And faraway, someone saying ‘sounds good.’
will make entertainment from this bloodshed;
live sumptuously on the profits;
manufacture heroes on the bodies of our dead;
make villains of us in our own land
for the concoction of stories for foreign ears.
And faraway they’ll live in unimaginable mansions
above the lapping of waves on golden beaches
with the choice of Lamborghini or Ferrari in their garages.
They’ll die in beds feathered with our hardships many stories on;
live longer than the span of whole families
who would have survived on a fraction of their box-office.
