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.