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.

I awoke to the usual rumble of city traffic

and quickly realised it was the sea two fields away;

for the first time felt the loss of a life passed; 

that boom of  activity was the myriad possibilities

daily breaking on my shore;

the roar of conflicting energies: the screeching, 

bellowing breaks, exhausts, pistons.

The cacophony of the streets, the pumping city.

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

                                              but it was not there.

Bejewelled

 

Diamond-beaded, stems

bowed under the weight.

All summer long, the yellow tips

blossomed, abuzz with bees;

now, in the slow drawl of time

following an August shower,

with the  sun trapped in a million droplets, 

it dazzles as though lit from within.

Bejewelled 

as Fabergé might have dreamed,

beyond any beauty I've  ever imagined;

beyond any beauty money could buy.

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.