When I have nothing to say

 

When I have nothing to say, to write;

I imagine a white expanse,

a space to be filled;

it always forms a rectangle, a page in fact.

I wait for an idea to appear in that emptiness;

and, sure enough, something arrives, sooner or later,

like a stage coach on some remote winter road

in a Dickens novel.

First, a dark spot in a snow-covered wilderness;

I wait for it to take form.

Is it a herd of yak on a Himalayan slope, that stage coach

bound for London or is it a spot of mildew?

When it draws up it may not be a poem;

in fact it may have destroyed it:

the pristine white emptiness;

the untrodden field of freshly fallen snow.

Rossnowlagh, Christmas Eve

 

The ferocity of the ocean dissipating on the beach;

its heaving waves falling flat and disappearing so I

am walking along the edge of its anger, in spume

turning into mice scuttling to the safety of the dunes.

Thousands of miles of Atlantic violence; bared teeth

in ranks lunging landward, spittle flying skyward

like savagery unleashed, uncontained, uncontainable;

white rage, jet loud, breaking powerless on the strand.

Happy Christmas, hoping the new year might see an end to the uneashed, uncontained savagery of 2023.

Life at its most horrific

 

A truck over-loaded with pigs

reversed to the abattoir door.

The men dropped the ramp,

opened the tailgate

but the pigs stampeded away

from the space, climbing backward,

frenzied, into the melee of bodies,

screaming.

Beaten with sticks,

struggling to go forward, still jerking

their bodies back into the torture;

away from the stench of death,

back to life,

even at its most horrific.

Travels

 

Sun nested on the water,

Himalayan cumulus above the horizon,

a stratus sea,

a silver road to the moon;

sky and earth mimic each other.

I survey a polar wilderness,

a vastness above me;

sometimes the sea is limitless with sky

and is infinite;

I am Marco Polo, Cook or Shackleton

and there is so much that is unexplored

beyond this window

that these travels are epic;

unimaginable wonders roll in on the wind;

my eyes are nets.

A Thought on Religious Belief in This Time of War

 

i.

 I do not sow a seed

to have seedling or sapling

wrenched from the earth.

Those welcome in my fields

celebrate the success of my crops;

those who have wreaked havoc

must answer for it on day the My return.

ii.

When God resurrects the dead,

will He not ask,

‘why are there so many children among the risen?’

Will He not then say,

‘these children were My creation;

who are these who have presumed to defy Me?’

‘I gave man dominion over the fish

beasts and birds, but not their fellow man.’

Will he not say, therefore,

‘these people have made false gods of themselves,

they have forfeited their place in Heaven.'

All is Flow

A Chagall view of life

All is Flow

In here, there is no one God,

no solidity nor weight;

all is flow.

Towns, buildings, steeples

are animals of the fields,

birds of the air;

there are no edges nor corners

but fish-like, curved all to all:

all is flow.

We make no division:

all that is rooted has wings,

all fly as free as notes from a violin.

Animals of the fields, birds of the air

light as thought;

you and I,

our loves and togetherness

all part of that murmurating life;

all is flow.

Our Finest Belonging

 An edited version of a poem I wrote in 2021 inspired by a Sorolla painting of wife and daughters lying in the grass. 

As we lay there, our grass bodies within the sea

of meadow; sweep of wind carrying us along,

flowers of rye. We, the droning bumble bees

in buttercups, the chirruping finches, chomping

cattle; sudden dartings within briary hedgerows,

rustlings, commotions but hunters’ silences too

and only a vague consciousness of the faraway

                                              cataracts of traffic.

How sumptuous the flow of light and warmth,

the sinuousness of our bodies in that current;

the colours of the field embroidered into our bodies.

We, agglomerations of the soil, but the criss-crossing

zeniths of nerve and muscle too:

at one with the swathes of breeze-blown beauty,

settled, nested into our finest belonging.

We Lovers

 

Our colours are bells;

we, lovers, live forever;

defy perspective;

grow from each other

into each other;

no beginnings nor ends

but running timeless,

seamless like trains

                  through air.

Sun in a Cage

 

Pearl-white, the day;

January frozen colourless.

The sun, golden in its cage,

a pint of lager in a man’s hand,

a quarter mile out on a frozen lake.

Light coming through a keyhole

from another world, perhaps:

Summer, honey-coloured warmth;

small enough to carry in a hand,

persistent enough to shine into my eye.

In Autumn

 

Light falling

like leaves

in Autumn;

you inside it.

Eyes grey

in their pools;

pale and thin,

dimming;

disappearing

among the wonderful

colours 

of rotting.

Same Face

 

Failing light soft as Autumn leaves

falling.

The year’s foliage becoming humus,

new soil;

smell of decomposition: fresh, dank,

mossy;

preparation of next Summer’s fertility.

You standing,

foot on shovel, king of the ridges;

colour

of last apples, ripening towards rot;

who knew

that inside the lungs were discolouring,

hardening

as Winter will curtail with sheets of ice;

or that I

would stand, years on, in dank November;

with same face,

watching for the robin in the nearby hedge.

Boned Trees

 

When they shake out the fields,

wring the cities,

we fall out,

boned trees.

How our Summers passed

and fell,

desires.

Left us gaunt and brittle,

fingers

still scraping the sun.

What Legitimacy?

 

Blasted to rubble,

and buried in it,

a child,

a baby dead before

arriving on the floor

of his own mind.

Don’t talk of rights.

The Perfect Poem

 

The poem has a descant voice;

born of beautiful words,

it flows, whirls high above them.

Even when the meaning is opaque

it sings the song

the words are breathing into being.

 

Rain has stolen the plants

from my garden

leaving their colours

flowing unconfined

finding fresh courses

blending into new

carrying my eyes

oarless

over uncharted waterways

I Am

 

Silence as in a fish tank;

life laps to the walls

but in here almost tangible;

in this unstirred air.

In the stained glass gloaming

of this cathedral,

conscious of my own presence;

senses magnified.

Size, minute

inside this architecture,

colossal within my own frame

as standing beneath the stars;

I am

infinitesimal but integral.

at the table

 

Sitting at the table,

it set

but no one else there.

Your eyes, too,

elsewhere,

or lost perhaps.

How small you look;

and still

how far you may see.

When

 

When the sea comes,

we will be ready

to turn from this lighted shore,

face the beacon perch,

draw ourselves into it

hauling ourselvbes along the string of pearls

that passes 

to where the wind choirs rehearse.

Culture Night Poetry Reading in Ballyshannon

Readers of this blog tend to be from foreign parts, but should there happen to be anyone from the vicinity of south Donegal looking in, you may be interested to know that Local Hands in Ballyshannon is hosting  an evening of literary readings with interspesed music this friday evening, Culture Night, Fri 22nd. The event goes from 5pm to 8pm and features local poets and musicians; I expect to be reading in or around 6pm. Other readers include Olive Travers, Ted Hall, Roisín Lee, John and James McIntyre and members of Pen2Paper Writers Group from Donegal town. 

Local Hands, which conveniently has my books for sale, will have information on their facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/LocalHands/

   

Winter Trees

 

by Caspar David Friedrich 

Winter trees like old shipwrecks

sailed the winds;

hold those memories

close as the grain in their timbers.

Now defunct, the tips of their branches

scratch at the sky;

they stand, shaped to memory,

listless.

Superpowers

 

They had the genes,

they could embed them:

a dog’s hearing,

a cat’s dim-light vision,

dolphin’s echolocation;

they called them superpowers,

marketed them aggressively:

SUPERHUMANITY HAS ARRIVED.

They never admitted

that the brain cannot handle the sensitivity.

They never declared

test cases driven to madness,

sleep having become impossible,

nerves shattered, but advertised:

navigation skills of homing pigeons coming,

HUMAN FLIGHT ALMOST HERE.

But for Two Millimetres of Plastic.

 

A stone, a deadly bullet, flashed

from the wheel of a lorry

into the visor of my helmet,

driving it hard onto my nose.

Speeding to Tipperary on motorbike;

it would have smashed my face;

the bike, careering, would have dragged

my body; legs and arms breaking

in impossible angles,

jacket ribboning, a grotesque melange

of cloth and blood-sopped flesh.

By that thickness or the grace of the Gods,

I am the Michael I take for granted;

by such margins, we presume.

Faint

 

Strange to say, those memories are barely more than water now;

fluid, indistinct, and always rushing away from me;

that they were ever more is immaterial, I am not who I was.

I do, of course, acknowledge that you have been part of that change,

and for the good, I have not forgotten your part, and I am thankful.

But I have difficulty remembering you. Your face refuses to settle,

more or less as water spills, it refuses to fix in my mind;

your voice comes and goes, otherworldly and faint, like a signal on the shortwave.

More strikingly though, your spirit has become remote from me;

not by choice,  but with the passing of time, the mountain of featureless days

that I’ve kicked up behind me, the dust of accumulated years between us;

distance has anaesthetised me;  I no longer remember the feeling of you being here.

Over the Line

 

Picking plums from the branches of the clouds,

berries from the blue of the sky.

Dew-jewelled blades of grass doused my feet

while fir cones listened to my every step;

a tree of apples blushed and lit the field;

I shook hands with the leaves of a thousand trees.

Exhilaration

 

The wind combing the grass silver,

tossing the heather;

the humours of the sky,

scowls and laughter,

tracing the mountainside’s contours,

a hunt at full gallop

through the gap.

The duns and greens, bright yellows

flitting light and shade,

carrying the atlas of the sky

over the gushing streams,

the ravines, the bracken meadows;

the exhilaration, fluid mosaic,

Donegal to Ballybofey.

Conductor

 

I draw the music from my arm,

it expands like an opening wing;

I extend what I cannot speak

nor hand over,

an iridescence of sound

that all but aches to be free.

When there is no way to convey

the beauty that is within you,

loneliness is the sentence.

Should I write a poem about you

 

Should I write a poem about you;

skin-tight,

revealing like a bathing suit

or a big coat

to keep you hidden

or warm.

Would you even like it,

my written portrait;

I stray into Francis Bacon mode.

Perhaps leave those bones unstirred;

maybe I should write about hands,

how they colour in Winter weather.

Napalm

 

Napalm.

Nice to feel the sun on my back,

to idle the whole day through;

watch girls passing along the beach,

thier beautiful tanned bodies.

Nice too, the sounds of the seaside:

a speed-boat buzzing out on the water,

the tide washing onto the strand,

the screaming children.

Storm ( edited version)

 

Spent all evening alone on the strand

watching a storm’s elbows resting on the horizon,

but now its shoulders are rising.

Once, God’s eye was the centre of every storm;

I feared the Himalayan masses of His charcoal-coloured anger;

they throw the earth to its knees.

The sea, wearing requiem black, is a writhing mass,

the birds have all disappeared down a hole

and the cattle in the fields are humming nervously to themselves.

I can feel a stinging in the molecules of the air 

as the clouds roll in on the wheels of their blue undersides,

coming, rumbling over distant rocks, coming.

I must hurry, lock myself away, shiny bright conductor that I am.

I must dig myself a burrow;

hide myself from the war-making God of the sky.

Marble

 

Morning.

Stretches her arm back to touch him,

his bed-warmed skin;

expecting the familiar response,

his finger down her backbone.

Touching marble; taut, cold;

her brain struggling to climb

to her hand’s discovery;

and turn; can she?

Morning.

It was a morning she knew might come

but the indifference of the stone shocked her;

turn; there is never a choice;

mercifully, his eyes were shut.

A Year of Flight

Seeds in June, nonchalantly,

like tourists

flying on the south-westerlies,

dawdling

where snowflakes in January

were hustled along

or the mists that spent days

‒ like looped film ‒

throwing shawls

over mountains’ shoulders.

Swallows plane lush lanes,

green larders;

later sycamore helicopters

flicker down

those same corridors

or thud, the crab apples

escaping with their summer’s booty;

globes of  pinhead lights:

fruit flies in pools of sun.

The spume cutting loose

from the waves

in Winter storms,

Guinness head rolling up the beach.

Aimless flight of gulls

in the high winds

chipped off the cliff-face;

above the houses, curdled cloud, 

charcoal crows,

disturbed people.

The Salmon in the Spring, the Hazel and the Hermit

When to give up? An edited version of a oem from some years back.

 The Salmon in the Spring, the Hazel and the Hermit

Into an open gob the hazelnuts fell,

so that over the years the salmon grew

into a colossus.

A day came when one nut fell plumb-line;

devoured complete with husk

at the very instant of its dimpling the surface,

it caused the salmon to spew from its intestines

the knowledge of a thousand years

that cascaded downhill

over the shilling bright stones,

through the ignorant meadows to the lake,

where it became part of an ever-shifting

circuit of water, weed, spume and silt.

A hermit, who lived by the lake,

dousing his face, drank some of this potion

and was instantly replete.

In time a hazel took root in his belly

and he convulsed

so that the stones unearthed by his flailing feet

filled the lake

and sent its waters flooding out

onto to the plain where the people lived;

so they, too, in their turn, drank;

and by this means knowledge and poetry spread

from the time that was before

to the times now and those yet to come.