Murvagh Grey Day

 

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.