The Brotherhood of Stone

 

When I tell you, the man who lives on those hills

is made of the same limestone ‒ grey, white karst ‒

he stands on; the same rock that butts through the thin

grass cover of his fields; that is the material, he and his

forefathers, back to neolithic times, used to construct

the labyrinthine network of walls thrown, like a fisherman’s

net, onto the western landscape; it’s not a poetic conceit.

I have seen him standing in spring-limpid sunlight,

extending upward, undifferentiated from the bedrock; legs and

arms outstretched, trellised by briar and blackthorn, and

the language of that place, in a script of stonechats, robins and

chaffinches, rewriting itself over and over across his body.

I have seen him weather as limestone weathers, an outcrop

indistinguishable from the others; with the flight of sky above,

the rolling earth beneath; he, on that interface, also remains

undisturbed and unchanged. I have seen that the flow of water has

shaped him to his place; the hindrance that might have been,

smoothed now to a belonging, to a brotherhood of stone.

Soldier:

 

Soldier: the army’s smallest mobile unit; equipped 

with assault rifle e.g. HK416 and 300 rounds, pistol

e.g. M17 and 40 rounds, 4 grenades, combat knife.

Organised into groupings of increasing size: 

squad, platoon, company, battalion, etc. to army; 

all designed for maximum manageablity within 

the hierarchical system employed by defence forces.

Kitted out with combat helmet, body, hand, eye, 

ear-protection; medical, survival, navigation and 

communication gear; length of operation and supply 

also considereations; additional or alternative gear 

as may be required for special missions e.g. sniper 

optics; demolition requiring explosives and detonators;

i.e. soldier as much a tank as a human can be.

Increasingly now, their targets are those engaged in their 

                                                                       daily chores.

Kahle Kollwitz: Woman with Dead Child

And all dyed in seaweed

 

I have heard this music and I’ve seen it

where the small houses are strung high and low

around the spring-line, on tussocky hillsides

above the coast; quavers, semi-quavers.

I’ve seen it in the rise and fall of the walls dancing

on those wild fields strewn with bald, granite heads;

where the road above Bunowen, bright as water, plays,

a fiddle string strung between showers. 

The clouds dash, Grand National-style, across the sky

and over the slivers of lakes between the mountains;

lakes that beam back bright notes, sweet cascading

sunlight, as the sun too is wheeled across the landscape.

I’ve heard the music streaming along the wires, piping

through stone walls, lilting in pine needles, whistling

under barn doors, humming around the corners of buildings;

and always to that great booming drone of the Atlantic.

 

Treble clef, fragments of conversations speckling the music 

like raindrops; voices, with the accents of uileann  pipes, 

in the mosaic of sound carried on the wind: the screeching gulls, 

piping oystercatchers, a curlew's faraway keen. 

.

Mother

 

In one hand a cloth,

in one hand a hammer,

in one hand a tin whistle,

in another an oar,

in one hand a tin of beans,

another a knife,

in another a baby’s bottle,

another a pen,

another holding a book,

another holding a pillow,

another a shovel,

and a hand holding a map

while her family rests in her arms.

My View Of The Zelensky Trump Blowout

 

Appalled at the treatment of President Zelensky by President Trump and Vice President Vance in the Oval Office yesterday, I cannot but think that their lack of expertise in diplomacy and politics was glaring; it was depressing and, above all, extremely worrying.

Why am I entitled to give my views: because, nowadays, the world is a small place; no country is remote; the international is local, the local international.

The fact is America has voted a hotelier to manage their country; where then education, foreign affairs, health, defence, arts and culture, welfare. His is a profit and loss mentality. His empathy with and understanding of ordinary individuals appears close to zero; how else can you account for his Gaza vision; to empty a region of the people whose home it is to create a Riviera for those wealthy like himself.

A man who has little grasp of the world as lived and experienced by the billions. The pettiness he showed in his interaction with Zelensky, who is engaged in a war in which death and destruction are all around, was mind-blowing. The issue of Zelensky’s clothing, which was appropriate for one leading his people in an existential struggle, was pitched out of ignorance; “he’s not speaking loudly” ‒ embarrassing, childish. He demonstrated the same lack of empathy for wartime heroism in his relations with John McCain; his reaction to those buried in the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery ‒ ”losers”.

A Canny English Conservative, Margaret Thatcher, once observed, “The United States is a friend, but it is also a nation that sometimes forgets that its friends have their own interests and their own pride.” And a quotation from British historian, Paul Johnson: “The United States is a nation of immense power and generosity, but it is also a nation that sometimes confuses its own interests with the interests of the world.”

These quotations highlight important issues: those plainly stated and the questions and who, now, are Americas friends and is America still generous. These last two have only become doubtful with the arrival of Trump and Vance.

In the Gloaming

 

Martin Hayes playing a road’s river-silvery sheen

in the dying light of a November evening, north Clare.

Karst’s grey, slough’s lush greenery the last colours

before the nightly closing; a wind blowing angry off

Galway Bay, spitting splinters of rain, paring the skins

of the Burren hills above the loping dogs of electric wires

and the congealed pitch of conversations running alongside

every road. A single yellow-coloured window in the murky

hulk of a hillside at once inviting and shivering; a lone human

habitation - whisper from a fossilised sea-bed.

His notes flowing, drops of rain streaming along the underside

of  those wires; wind’s metal scraping through that empty place 

and the ear of God five miles out to sea.

Listening to "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

Listening to "The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face"

 in memory of  Roberta Flack

Memory of elated youth; of an idyll

before the years eroded openness

with contrivances and constructions.

A holiday romance, an incidental coming

together on a summer beach, in fire-light

beneath the stars, across the bay from flashing

beacons, to the calls of sea birds haunting us

from over the strand and barnacle-encrusted

granite knolls. Hearing all the time the drum-rolls

of waves coming ashore from the Atlantic darkness

and the cymbal swish of their lace spreading onto

the land’s margin, into the spiral shell of my cochlea,

to echo there forever.

The Race

 

There’s a woman

on the opposite footpath

20 yards ahead

bag on my back

on my way to school

I'm gaining on her

her lead reduced

pulling closer

she’s eyes ahead

total concentration

passing mabel Kelly's

I’m still gaining

her lead halved

passing Kiernan’s

she in the inner

lane I must step up

almost level a

stride in it

I’m level

pulling to the

front no she’s back level

a slight lead it’s going to be

a photo

the phone kiosk just ahead

back level

it’s a hair’s breath

she’s in front

we’re level

the kiosk

ahead by a sliver

my outstretched leg

I’ve won.

I’ve won.

Am I the stairs or climbing it?

              

Having moved through the years like clouds;

reached a crescendo, passed through it,

and still travelling to an ending.

Upward or downward?

It seems like the perspective of height;

the weighing up of the steps that have brought me here,

each built one atop the other,

but sometimes contrary like Escher’s stairs,

labyrinthine, incomprehensible like a mind;

maybe I am.

        

Thinking of Gaza

 

A low February sun is accentuating the straight edges of the patio bricks, the uneven

surfaces of the stonework in the pillars beneath the lamps, the darkness of the shaded

sides of ivy leaves and limbs of winter trees. From a clay-blue sky, it is casting its gold-dust

light across the abandoned railway siding, out over the bay to the mountains, Sliabh League 

to Killybegs, casting them in a distant, gauzy mysteriousness.

The friary bell-tower shows above the trees, a pitched roof and bare metal cross.

From here, it might as well be deep in woodland, abandoned, overgrown even;

not so, it stands beside the road with lawns and parking spaces to the front, elaborate

grottos; in red brick, a modern take on cloisters leads from the church to the house;

on Sundays cars line the roadsides; the priest’s voice drones from loudspeakers.

The heathers in the flowerbed are in full bloom, gleaming shrubbery leaves suggest recent

rainfall but they are dry, the sun reflecting back, a million lights; and into my eyes,

a clear shining liquid ‒ exhilarating sunlight ‒ life brimming and uncontained; as though

this world was a bottomless well, a never-ending source of happiness, and still, to know

that around the curve of the earth, a five hour flight, the sun is shining on darkness.

Albatross

 

Sailing the shifting geographies of the sky,

I captain the wind. Travelling with the ocean within my wings,

scanning the churning seas, I defy its rearing cliffs,

bloated-bellied monsters, fly beneath their drool-dripping teeth;

all contained in my eyes, their heaving guts, I soar, glide and swoop,

pull the jewels from their pockets.

On flattened wings I sweep from the edges of continents;

pulling the tides in my wake; see the sun over the horizon and follow.

To write

 

be blind

white out

the space

be psychedelic

grow tropical,

melt it

be brutal

slash, cut

til small is big

be gentle

nurture

your demons

Untitled

Winter was a single wing

flying to an enamelled horizon.

My words condensed before me

and you, sycamore tree, threw them back, 

singing  a blackbird's aria.

 

Untitled

 

in a clearing,

fish

still

afternoon,

dilute sun,

pewter-glint

minute hand

suspended

3.15

Ronald Binge's Magic

 

Zephyr is one of thse words I'd love to use in a poem, but I don't have the nerve. I'm getting it in sideways though. 

Ronald Binge is probably not the first name you'd shout out if you were asked to name a composer but the Derby-born Binge did  compose one of the most familiar tunes ever in these parts, 'The Elizabethan Serenade'. 

Reduced to poverty with the death of his father as a result of injuries in WW1, he never received formal musical training, but a local church choirmaster, seeing his potetial, taught him to play piano and organ. In the late  1930s he found himself employed as composer and arranger for the Mantovani Orchestra. If, like me, you remember their music, you'll know the wonderful lush cascading strings that were Mantovani's signature; I still love to hear that music.

But the zephyr; the zephyr is to be heard in 'Sailing By', familiar to many from the BBC's Shipping forecast; Binge's beautiful evocation of sailing on a fresh breeze, more than a zephyr I'd say, but there, I got to use the word........4 times now

Anyway, close your eyes, play this bit of music and be transported to the south seas. A sailing boat  a little way out on the water but with the palm trees still in plain view. The sun on your skin, time of no importance whatsoever and dreaming.

Did anyone ever compose a tune that could transprt you so successfully to another world. Here's the link:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dFdas-kMF74

Which?

 

Which?

The film strip of my life:

the constant change, albeit slow:

was I all of those?

That youthful face, hardly;

neither lines nor traces,

none of my history there.

Or the newly married

with all his questions answered

before most arrived;

can he be my truest self

before he has questioned yourself?

And then, with the first signs of grey

and a modicum of success writing poetry;

was he the arrival; I suspect he thought so,

though the years were already picking up speed

and his dreams beginning to look ragged

in their flight.

Now this face, growing gaunt,

age seldom recognized in the mirror,

but seen with shock in the updating

of passport and license photographs.

Time sculpts beauty away, individuality too;

but stripped of self-importance, pride diminished,

there, at last, inside the scribble of age, is my bared self.

The Year Moving On

 

Nothing marks the year moving on so well as

the leaves in the park transported by November

gales. ‘In step, men’ or should I say ‘mice’; lifted,

brown and scuttling, their year’s work done, already

composting with nature’s relentless efficiency,

their sopping undersides rotting; already half way to

humus and chased underneath hedges for ferrying

to the underworld by worms to become, without

delay, the richness of another year coming.

Two Rainbows

 There's been a lot of frost recently, it is January after all. But seeing two rainbows on either end of the bay the other day brought an expected touch of frost.

Two Rainbows

Two rainbows, miles apart, glimmered

above the steel-coloured bay. I stood

watching them, straight sided stubs just,

equal in size but gauzy, one as faint as the other, 

both on the point of disappearing.

I waited for that moment, but, instead, they

grew by degrees, spectral pillars, curved

and high in the graphite heavens converged;

a Romanesque arch soaring, spanning

the length of Donegal Bay, magnificent;

in that moment a difference was erased.

All is still

 

All is still.

I have stopped to listen,

but there is only myself.

If you shout,

wherever it is you are,

I will hear you

because here, 

I am all;

I am the full of here.

If you shout,

your voice

will flood my ears;

if not your voice, you, 

you yourself

will fill me.

  

A Photograph Almost; 50 Years Ago.

 

My father at the kitchen table,

over the Sunday papers;

the sun coming and going

as lives do.

His pipe-smoke, DNA-like,

spiralling silvery upward,

joining the angels dancing 

in the Heaven above his head,

Happy 2025, let's hope it is less destructive than 2024.