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.

His last tune

 I've tried to get this right before, my father on his hospital bed after suffering a stroke. A moment that has stayed with me, poignant and beautiful. My wife arrived to see  him and that's where the poem comes in.

When he was beyond talking,

close to dying, you visited.

For want of words he could not form

he hummed a  tune,

unrecognizable, tuneless; 

and never was a tune more beautiful.

Cirrus

 

Cirrus,

dolphins of the high heavens,

sing the light

harvested

from the deepest sky-ridges.

ikeanisation of office spac

 folded in a roll

above shoulders

the cape

with fabric loops

to hang light-weight

plastic stool

down human back

over fold-up table

and drawer

of ultra-light material

rotational

for mealtimes

above the waistline-

mounted laptop

After Hiroshige

 

A peacock on a branch,

waterfall.

                      Along the Tokaido road

                      a wave,

                      landscape rearing above a lake;

                                                            

                                                              a display, magnificent,

                                                              like a peacock on a branch.

Autobiography

 

Here’s the wind that brought me;

here’s the day that sang;

here’s the grass that was my mother

and there the trees that taught me.

Here are the hills that were my dreams;

there’s the river that aged me

and this is its silt upon my face.

Here’s the bay that sought me out,

the mountaintop I must climb is beneath it;

that is where I’m headed.

from a bus window

 

He’s standing on the corner,

a busy city junction;

he has walked from his house,

but………………...

and doesn’t know why he’s there

nor his way home,

recognizes no one

so….………….…….

he’ll stand there

where four streets disappear into a fog;

there's one he must take;

which………………?

Bohreen

 

Bohreen*

Burgeoning spring growth,

the hedgerows of hawthorn, hazel and elder

ankle-deep in profusions

of primrose, celandine and vetch

bowing towards each other over the bohreen,

claiming the light if not the tar.

Swallows, sleek as fighter jets,

bulleting down the narrow corridor,

skimming our heads,

wheeling behind us to come again.

Bends along the way revealing curiosities:

a bed-end stopping a gap,

moss-covered walls along cow-dunged lanes,

an ivy-draped ruin, pre-famine cottage

featureless but for the fireplace,

and those potato ridges on which blight-

blackened leaves once signalled starvation

still there, grassy corrugations in destitute fields.

Cattle with chomping jaws lift their heads

to watch us pass with quizzical stares;

all around beauty crowding into our eyes

birdsong and the sounds of fields filling our ears

and yet, behind it all, even now,

there’s the held breaths of the departed.

*boreen or bohreen from the irish word ‘bóithrín’ meaning a narrow country road

I would like to recreate the earth so

 

we may throw snowballs beneath showers of cherry blossoms;

put speakers by the pond to waltz across the water-lily pads;

strip off and swim in a field brilliant with poppies;

stand thigh-deep in the crook of a river collecting scintillations,

bring them home gleaming magnificent in a jam-jar;

walk that trail of moonlight all the way to the opposite shore;

climb the clouds towering Himalayan above the horizon;

run on feet of wheels when our heads are light with happiness;

live in the landscape that appears in the rear-view mirror.

Wanting

 

We sit here

running

open-mouth aggression;

rolls of flesh ugly,

back alley

tongue-out desiring;

dung-drain

fingering,

cornered, boxed;

deformed

into ourselves,

gut-red;

blood-curved,

womb homed, cartilaginous

wanting.

I think love infinite

 

I think love infinite:

stretching back to no beginning

onward to no end.

Having the most complete happiness

life can offer

makes the present limitless;

that completeness of oneself

through loving

makes an infinity of each moment.

The Pleasure

 

                    You                                                          video

                                                     green

                                                                                            faded

                                                                                                                              water

                                                               slide                                               peregrine

                                                                                  lisp

the waterfall has been full

                         white

and loud

                          reminding me of long hair

                                                      and

                                                   city-park                           face-down

                                                                                   carefree chat

 forgetfulness                                                                      pleasure of being us

Songlines

 

We sing the landscape, ourselves in it as we are, have been and will.

We sing in every language since no race owns it

and we sing of all times since landscape and time are wedded.

We sing its wellness and our singing makes it well;

we sing of the stars for they are the bright eyes of our ancestors

and we will return to them.

We sing the songs of stones and water, of deserts and fields;

of ascending and descending, of hardship and achievement, dreams

and wishes.

We sing the songs that are the floating contours of the planet, the northern

lights of the heavens; we send our songs across the world like universal fly-fishers;

we send them lightly and ask you to find them for there are no hooks

and when you do, sing for they all make the one map.

Cannon Fodder

 

Mired in the contradictory propaganda of enemies,

the stultified masses become the pawns of presidents

and governments, who, like medieval overlords, claim

jurisdiction over their lives and send them to war for

no imparted benefit but the political capital of those who, 

directing the course of annihilation from the rear, without care,

 send them to their deaths and the subsequent reparation 

of  wrapping their remains in the flags of their dreaming.

Becoming

 

Carving, relentlessly carving; the days sculpting,

long past physical peak, my most essential self

from the imposed, simulated, protocol-conscious

construct of employment years. Shaping the truer me,

daily experiences building my Alexandrian Library,

shelf after shelf filling as I would have them filled

so Goya, Hopper, Bacon, Bach, Pink Floyd and Myles

flow by my stones into my torrent; Du Fu, Kavanagh,

Whitman harmonious with Donegal’s shoreline and skies

and I may finally settle to my own frequency of life,

resonating with my own pleasures and designs.