floors

 

floors

we stand on

saw you

my love

on your ice floe

passing

waved but

you were gone

blades skimming

through desolate

heavens

ah lover

it was the flight

we fell for

passing

is what we are

Dad smoking by the kitchen window

 

Smoke from his pipe

were spirits rising

from the dead;

they coiled into the air,

graceful tresses,

defused and dissipated.

He needed sunlight

for this sorcery;

his ghosts, silvery white

hung momentarily,

umbilical, heavenward;

he was at peace then.

Alone

To turn, on eyes opening,

find again that blank space beside you;

come downstairs,

witness to the still-birth of another day;

a receptacle of words, restless

to be heard but no ear to hear them;

to move, room to room,

through the obdurate indifference of objects;

remembering warmth in memories

that leave you to its shivering absence.

A Town Called.....

 

Sometimes I wish I was living in a crossroads town,

less than really, a bar, a grocery store, a water tower,

far away from any place of consequence. Here heat is a cube,

in summer; people are encased in it, flies in amber.

You walk outside to look at the day, then retreat inside again;

time is irrelevant; all day is heat, every hour the same

till night comes. Nothing of note has happened since the sixties:

a fire that gathered the population together for six hours,

smoked for a day or two, then went out;

that old shop’s still there like a rotten tooth.

There’s no traffic to speak of, the wires come in on high poles,

the line of them, askew in places; you see them into the distance;

there’s nothing on the landscape to obscure the view;

turn your head, ditto in the opposite direction.

When a wind gets up, it lifts the dust, everywhere’s covered;

the view through a window gives a grey tone to the landscape,

but that’s fine, dust is part of the appeal.

People are old; they grew old while they were still young;

it is their way of dealing with the heat and emptiness; their faces

are parched soil with bright eyes embedded, and they’re gentle.

Time has stopped in my town; there’s no one racing with it,

there’s no point; that’s the way I like it.

Decision

 

You stood at the side of the road,

snow-covered and, as yet, unmarked.

I watched you from the window:

at first, filling your eyes with its perfection,

then weighing printing your footsteps

against being the first to leave a blemish.

And before you had even turned,

I knew your decision.

Questions on the Continuing War in Gaza

 

What difference: the oblivion of a newly born child

and it dead beneath a city’s rubble?

And the child born on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the grief of parents of fighters

and the grief of parents of children?

And the love of parents on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the child who is voluble

and the child whose words are dead in the wreckage of its lungs?

And the longing to live on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the bones that support a child

and those bones smashed to uselessness?

And the care needed on one side

of a fence and the other?

Incarcerated

Concrete walls,

steel door.

Daylight is twilight,

though

way up, light

through a window

makes a play of leaves

on the wall opposite:

 

by this means,

we know that we are 

underground,

buried.

Our living lives

are those leaves;

how we fear

the arrival of autumn

and autumn

is almost here.

Damien

 

He’s got a gimp;

it throws his suit

like the buttons are one button-hole out,

and the shirt falls

below his jacket

on that side.

He walks faster to blur it;

speeds through the city throngs;

that adeptness pleases him;

the gimp’s

in his talk

too.

He tells you straight;

tells you

he’s telling you straight,

to remember what he says

or get used to 

being kicked around.

And always checking behind

or glancing into doorways

like he’s in debt

all down the street,

then turns a corner like he’s

trying to lose someone.

He keeps his right hand

in his jacket pocket;

the fingers are walking too;

I think it's because some woman told him

that constant movement

is freaky.

He won’t mind my

telling you;

he’ll enjoy been written about,

and feels he’d be good on tv;

he knows they wouldn’t have him;

their loss.

Betty

Betty,

the world is a marble;

getting smaller daily;

its mildews and viruses

have spread,

and they are at your feet.

I wanted to say something

reassuring,

for, at the very least, a child

should have hope

and till corrupted,

the child is beautiful;

but, what is there to say:

this has been destroyed.

Betty, 

the world is a marble;

there is no stopping it;

its mildews and viruses

are  spreading always

and they are at your feet.

.

September Swallows

 Some poems refuse to be written, over and over. This is a rewrite of a poem that seems to have a hold on me

September Swallows

September swallows

Knots on wires unbinding,

as though their true selves,

too long furled,

must hone their aeronautics.

They lift from the wires

into giddy flight,

like crochets escaping staves

for the grander arias of global skies.

Career, dip and wheel;

a restlessness in their DNA

compels them; tomorrow,

they’ll be arrows, Morocco-bound.

Care and Love

 

Behind those children playing,

I see a grandmother smiling;

she remembers

the blur of children’s play

but it’s not that memory,

it’s their place in her heart.

These moments of happiness:

she has seen them before,

knows the thin bone china

they’re made of;

her smiles are carefree

as the children

but are of this moment;

she has lived through many years.

 

These books are steps;

climb,

climb,

climb for a better view.

The ladder

 

How impressive the ladder looks from the bottom,

disappearing, as it does, into the clouds.

How those rungs invite;

how everyone encourages you to climb,

so you do.

And all the way up: yes, up, up, up

and, at the top, no more rungs:

space, just space;

they invited you to climb to a space.

Perhaps, I think, this may be Heaven;

maybe, set my molecules free 

to wander through Heaven.

Perhaps, the thought is Heaven;

perhaps such a moment is eternity.

Legacy

 

Like earthworms,

like the carcasses of all animals,

we darken the soil,

enrich it.

In their turn,

our children will rise,

live in the sun

till they, too, revert to humus.

Our gift to them,

to those coming ‒ grandchildren,

great grandchildren:

a poisoned, decaying earth

and, as a tree nourishes its fruit,

this earth must feed its children

all that has collected around roots,

all that is unseen in water.

Internal strife

 

You see it in his eyes.

He drowns it in incessant yap,

conceals it behind constant activity;

answers nothing,

but is forever asking questions,

filling his life with places and people;

always on vacation from himself.

His travels are to distraction.

In my Grandmother's Kitchen

 

Your hands, gentle,

resting in their usual place

on your lap,

listening to our conversation.

Fingers interwoven,

a basket for your thoughts,

the shape of caring,

the warm nest you made.

How wise those hands,

saying nothing

but alert in contemplation

and ready, always, to open.

The Wanderer

 

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich

Climb to the summit;

come closer to your soul. 

Traffic

 

I'm four years out of Dublin now and live in an idyllic part of Donegal. The change wasn't quite as dramatic as it might have been as I've been travelling up and down for years, spending weekends and holidays here. To say that the quality of my life has improved is an understatement and I have not regretted leaving, but I have lost something which I think this poem addresses.

Traffic

I awoke to the usual rumble of city traffic

and then realised it was the sea two fields away

and for the first time felt sad

for all that is past and all that will never be.

That crash of people was the myriad possibilities

daily breaking on my shore;

the roar of their conflicting energies:

the screeching, bellowing of breaks, exhausts, pistons.

The cacophony of the streets sparking blood flow;

the city a pumping heart;

I turned on my side to hear the traffic in the sea

but there was none.

Bejewelled

 

Fingers dripping diamonds,

arching under their weight.

All summer long the yellow tips

blossomed abuzz with bees;

now, in the slow drawl of time

following an August shower,

gleaming white with rain drops,

some spectral in the sunlight;

a once green plant in the trug

outside my window

now bejewelled

as Fabergé might have dreamed,

as would have coaxed Mughal emperors

away from their Peacock Throne.

Coming In

 

White light

sluiced from trillions

of anemones’ mouths,

all open prayerful,

free-loading on the shoulders of breakers.

It flies and crashes,

pours into ravenous bays,

slaking cathedral thirsts

whose morning, pin-shaped eyes

high up on the cliffs have turned corundum

with waiting,

wanting.

Once Green

 

Even now,

with only vaporous memory of you,

I hear the clank of the shovel against a stone

as you dig the ridge,

see the manure on the graip

that you’re about to mix into the soil,

smell the groundsel whose roots

release so satisfyingly from the clay.

And cigarettes that would be the end of you,

I see the spiralling of their smoke

from your fingers

like each was a little dream

or the pipe lit and re-lit,

the friendly glow near your mouth;

an almost hobbit-like cosiness;

ah, those  green hours spent beneath the sky.

In the Clouds

 

The archipelagoes of a boyhood’s imagination:

the exoticism of islands so far east

they are unexplored expanses of the far west;

beyond them, flame-bright horizons, dreamers’ infinities.

Last evening, before sunset, beneath a sky, charcoal-blue,

Himalayan; above a misty-grey sea;

molten-magnificent and littered with low-lying islands

I found myself, again, looking out over those same South Seas.

That same enchantment, buried under years, unearthed;

a reminder that the age of exploration has not yet passed,

the excitements of childhood not yet spent;

an explorer may find limitless the wonders among the clouds.

Away

 

As a crumpled up page,

thrown there,

discarded;

in a vague way

the shape of the fist

that scrunched it;

a man

on a pavement

near a doorway

where cigarette

butts are strewn;

his face

bent close to his feet,

into his coat,

away.

What shape is our love

 

1.

What shape our love:

a circle I believe.

And what colour that shape:

buttercup yellow.

What constitutes the circle:

the village of our lives.

2.

We experience no gravity,

no ground;

when we step we fly,

when we fly we swim.

Dolphin-arced,

designed for infinity;

big and little hand,

we orbit the sun.

Still in Love with You

 

The sun playing the water;

I could hear those notes long after sunset.

Still in love with you was the song singing

 in the small hours awake;

that rise and fall,

the way the winds carry over the sands in your head;

how that play attaches to the nerve system;

how the choirs of sunlight sing you present .

His View on The Loss of Habitat

 

The loss of habitat:

“criminal”, he says.

“Not nearly enough consideration,

governments must do more.”

“A worldwide effort,

nothing less."

“Humans have been careless,

they've destroyed enough.”

He likes neatness,

his lawns to be uniform, green, carpet-like;

not a daisy to be seen,

a bee’s desert.

Sebald's Icicles

 

So when Sebaldus heaped icicles on the fire

and watched them blazing bright as firewood,

was it his faith in the benevolence of God;

had he sat in snow at -5 warming his hands by

curtains of icicles, stalactites with flaming innards?

Or had he a nuclear bent to his mind:

the emission of energy contained in crystals,

solar-induced bond dissociation in the ice lattice.

Did he foresee the nuclear radiance and the heat

that leaves people clinging, shadows to stone?

His Days

 

His days are the fields his cattle graze,

the years run from under his feet in meadows

of primrose cowslip meadowsweet fireweed: the months flying

till once again pools of sunshine, daffodils, defy February gales.

His evenings are the savage streets of New York, Los Angeles,

where he dodges bullets stumbling down fire escapes,

slips in slicks of blood running into dark alleys

then he’ll drink a cup of cocoa before flicking the world to darkness.

On a Sunday morning he drives the tractor into town for mass

and he’ll chat an hour or two over a pint in his local;

when he wipes the Guinness from his lips and walks out the door,

he returns to his days, the fields where his cattle graze.

She in her house

 

She in her house

converses a lot:

asks questions, answers;

debates, argues;

always wins

an argument.

Decor ‒ spare;

has a tidy mind,

all matters carved to her liking,

stored pat;

she keeps a tidy house.

Comes and goes from her door

with the working hours;

has some friends,

keeps them separate;

they disappear eventually.

She might be seen

passing a window,

then passing another;

always seems she’s looking

for something.

Early morning

sun in the front window,

late evening round the back;

she in her house:

a stone in a box.

No One Knows

 

No one knows

what wars were waged in your head.

That you were bruising on the inside was clear,

but locked up in silence ‒ a human safe ‒

only your eyes spoke and they of pain.

And hands shaking, cigar burning

precariously close to your fingers; a storm warning.

You, sat in our company; in your own private weather,

your own private sea.

Love

Let’s pare away what’s not needed;

carve it back

to the vein

running rich through the stone.

Not the media noise:

lazy visuals,

pulp pop.

Let’s remove, cut and cut

till we have it massive:

the elation we feel

lying side by side.

The Arrival of Civilisation

 

The mangled corpse: bludgeoned; skull gaping,

gore-spattered, blood-soaked. That intimacy with

slaughter, we call it savagery; their basic weaponry,

rock and branch; that engagement with violence.

And later, with the wielding of swords, the blood-bath

battles; that crush of thrashing bodies, flailing armies,

harvesting death; we call it barbarism, that intimacy

with carnage: the hacking, slitting, piercing of bodies.

To the release of rockets that kill, maim and demolish from

distance; no blood-stained tunics nor eyeballing death;

we call it civilisation: that delivery of devastation and death

with corporate efficiency, distribution worthy of the 21^st century.

Monet's Water Garden

 

Each lily is a flaring match,

a stud on Monet's 

liquescent

 mind.

.

May Stroll

May’s detonation of summer growth; 

walking down a lane between two hedgerows 

overgrown with cow parsley 

like confetti suspended in its fall,

I feel the intoxication 

of the bees nectar-induced drone; 

the surge of life, an internal fireworks, 

its ticker-tape brilliance, 

the exhilaration of it.

Labour

 

Death has arrived into your breathing:

you labouring to stay alive.

I’ve never been so aware of the lungs as bellows;

how basic the mechanism is

now that all the brain-work is past.

Straining for oxygen all these hours;

we standing by your bed parsing each breathe,

the minute modulations in the sounds,

you hauling oxygen from the room to your blood.

Dog

 

A long way off, across the open strand;

small, minute even, a couple walking a dog.

Picturesque and sweet somehow, their 

silhouettes across the deserted expanse of sand.

And as we stand there looking, the dog starts

to run in our direction. Tiny at first but building

into a shape we recognize, a pit bull coming

arrow-straight to us. 

She sees it early, recognizes the breed, 

knows it’s coming, crossing that quarter of a mile 

directly for her and she is petrified. And it does, 

and is now jumping at her, now a frozen stump. 

The dog persists, not aggressive but it is

a pit bull and she is terror-stricken. 

Across the strand, a quarter of a mile off,

 the couple watch their 'puppy', 

miniaturised to cuteness with distance, 

playing with strangers. And perhaps too, maybe,

 just maybe, one of them is nonchalantly running 

the dog's lead through a half-closed hand.

Strokestown International Poetry Festival 2024

From the 3rd to 5th of May poetry lovers will  be in Strokestown along with many of the finest poets around including Rita Ann Higgins, Jane Clarke, Peter Sirr, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Ger Reidy, Tony Curtis, Pat Boran among others; quite honestly a very impressive line-up.

If you haven't spent some time in Ireland's Hidden Heartlands, this is certainly the perfect excuse to visit. Strokestown Park  and the National Famine Museum alone are worth the visit; other attractions nearby include Roscommon Castle, Elphin Windmill, Lough Key Forest Park and more.

However on this weekend poetry is the star; I'm reading on Friday night with a group of Roscommon poets. See you there.

Festival website: https://strokestownpoetryfest.ie/

Céide Fields

 

These walls, stone calligraphies

of almost six thousand years;

predating Sumerian cuneiform,

built on the tablet of geologic time;

pages stacked above the ocean,

stripes of the Céide cliffs

beneath the cover of bogland.

That book reopened,

retelling lives in Neolithic script,

a stone net thrown onto the land.

And now I think of Tom’s new walls,

the limestone boundaries of his fields;

how he has written his lines into this history;

how glorious they stand.

Emi Mahmoud's Powerful Poem On Sudan's Unnoticed Crisis

 

This BBC link, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-68816523, contains a compelling message and poem from Emi Mahmoud. We need to be careful, the media directs our attention, but there are other crises, some claiming more lives though not lines. Lives are of equal value everywhere;  news media manages to subsume human lives to political interest.

Notable too in this interview, she underlines the importance of poetry in communicating human anguish.  

A Gap in the Hedge

 

A gap in the hedge

where briars are looping downward

under the weight of grape-like clusters

of fat juicy blackberries ‒

squelching cattle-trodden paths

lead onward to fresh, green, larder-like

half-acres of lush shining grass ‒

choked with cloud

and birdsong sweet with plenty,

among stirrings in the leaf-litter,

momentary alarms;

I step, sinking in wellingtons

in the dung-gummed earth,

into a triangular field

green as the previous,

as secluded within its sycamore,

blackthorn and elder confines.

I stop as I would passing into a new room

and know I can walk the whole country,

east to west, field to field, across this mosaic

with its opulence and endless allure.

Life Long

 

Life Long

Still:

my once loved

is standing there

as though left out in the rain

and waiting to be brought in,

ever-present,

a hologram

at the end of the garden.

Still:

my once loved

is standing there

as though left out in the rain

and waiting to be brought in,

ever-present,

a hologram

at the end of the garden.

Still,

and the years have rolled,

I have held her there.

An insight into our capability for inhumanity

 

 Inured to the inhumanity displayed in times of war, here is a horrific example of the depths we are capable of descending to. Historic it may be, but there is no real indication that anything has improved; the genes haven't changed, only the arenas in which our basest inclinations play out.

 

Iconic Photographs

Miley twerks,

Marilyn gathering in her dress,

a galaxy of stars gathered around Bradley,

a sailor kisses a woman in Times Square,

5 soldiers raise a flag at Iwo Jima,

Einstein sticks out his tongue,

a child face down dead on a Turkish beach.

Marble

 

Michelangelo might have carved

the wrinkles on his forehead,

veins on the backs of his hands,

the fingers slender in death,

knuckles, fingernails,

lids shut over spiritless eyes.

The rosary trickling down from

his fingers is an intrusion;

no renaissance here,

Dad is a statue now.

Days, Pages, Happiness

 

What you’ve never grasped

is your days are flying loose,

pages in the wind,

and you busy about filling them,

never catching them.

Happiness is  sunlight

on the pages;

it flies with the days.

.

History Lesson

 

All of that twentieth century history

went in, piled up;

from childhood, it stacked:

the cold war, Bay of Pigs, coup d’etats,

dictators, famines, invasions,

Vietnam, Congo, Falklands, Belfast, Kosovo;

treaties, broken treaties, military exercises,

nuclear arsenals, on and on

and we got wise

and understood that nations are hungry

and savage;

there were always answers and we knew them

from a young age.

And the great page turned, twentieth to twenty first:

still they came: Darfur, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan,

invasions, piracy, terrorist attacks, revolutions

until we know nothing,

and therefore

on it goes.

Bloodbath

Trump's recent 'bloodbath' comment continues his pattern of being incendiary. This (not so delicately embedded in his speech-making) stoking of violence, the self-cultivated  image of his own greatness, his demanding of loyalty to himself, the outrageous claims of his abilities to rid the world of ongoing problems, his narcissism are all so reminiscent of other dictators. Add that to his fondness of autocrats:

my question is how, with all the knowledge of history available to us, do we allow presidents, the people with the greatest potential to do damage, to act outside the checks and balances everyone else is subject to? 

Bloodbath

Loyalty to a man or a country, even an organization

may lead to a bloodbath;

loyalty to humanity would not.

Humanity appeals;

the others order;

which, would you say, has its roots in freedom?

Jam

 

Plump juicy blackberries:

that’s where the Summer went.

Rosy-cheeked apples, damsons:

-- energy neither created nor destroyed --

Summer’s sun packaged for Winter’s want.

September, we stretched across the hedges,

beat the birds to the berries,

and filled our cans. All went into the pot;

the kitchen filled with clouds of steam;

the windows, opaque,

cut us off from the world.

Fresh bread thickly sliced and buttered,

slathered in blackberry jam

still warm and flowing; we ate greedily

while the jars, in ranks,

stood prepared to face the darker months.

Your Young Beauty

 

Young beauty settled on your face,

extended its wings a moment,

then flew.

The skin over your bones slackened,

took the shape of your humours;

there was no concealing.

Finally, life, like traffic

over the snow-white landscape of beauty,

is your billboard to the world.

Behind the Glass

This poem has been with me for years in one shape or another. I've posted more than one effort in the  past, but was never convinced. All versions go on display, but, like a photographer's work, there'll always be one photograph that has the edge; I think this has the atmosphere I've been searching for. There's a good chance I won't look back at this for a while in case I meet disappointment. Come another book though, I'll have to weigh it up.

Behind the Glass

Every day, sitting at her window,

looking out onto the street of her life,

empty now.

Her face, just her face, hanging

behind the glass;

a room untroubled by sunlight;

the darkness of a Rembrandt portrait

and wearing old age like a mask.

She's waiting for the street’s stories

but the street has nothing to say;

she continues, daily

 staring into the space where her life was.

 

This needle,

my mind balancing on it;

its mercury glint

a painful ecstasy.

She fires words

 

She fires words

spiky as hail;

I shoot them down;

they’re unwelcome in my heaven.

But the same words go off

over and over;

some see you out,

shovel in the clay.

Truth is words are clouds;

I don’t shoot them;

I shoot at them.

Now, Then and Forever

 

When their bodies are cold and stony,

we lay them among the boulders on the hillside,

a resting place within sight of their homes,

fields and children; in the company of their parents, ancestors.

We leave clothing, corn, arrows, bone knives by their sides

and align them with the returning sun.

Our prayers flutter on strings, clicking for the attention

of the gods who gave birth to the mountains,

rivers and stars; chattering till we, ourselves, arrive.

They expect us, and all the generations coming;

we are currents, the stones oversee our passing,

September Swallows

 

Knots on the wires untying themselves,.

rise into the sky

like crochets escaping staves.

September swallows, restless,

must shed nesting order

as commas might abandon sentences.

Their Autumn selves must unfurl,

wheel, sweep and swoop; for tomorrow

they will trace lines of longitude.