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.