More Revision

Today

Can you spin a cloud onto a stick;

collect sequins of sunlight from a river;

walk the moon’s pathway over the sea?

There are times when happiness might belong

in this list; I thought so today when you cried

and we were not there to put our arms around you.

Happiness seemed very remote just then;

you might as well have tried to fill a jar with blue sky

and I could swear I heard a hollow clank from the universe.

Donegal Changes

 Six years now in Donegal, six years retired from my teaching job in Dublin; there are defnite changes in my writing. Perhaps it's no surprise to find myself more aware of nature now, with a large garden to tend to and struggling to keep on top of the job. But also much more walking as I live beside the sea and on a country road that links into a vast network of  unpopulated roads stretching off eastward across the border, through hilly and often empty lands into county Fermanagh.

The hedgerows, linear forests, teem with flowers from the early snowdrops into primrose season, foxglove onto fireweed of early Autumn; it's a succession I could not have named until I found myself living in a rural setting. And the land often rushy, lush with other plants, just as beautiful; a different palete of colours, a different atmosphere, a different set of feelings.

 

Fireweed, Montbretia, Swallows and Me

It’s past mid-August, and the year, measured in flowers, is turning.

The foxgloves gone, they faded quickly, followed the iris, that

followed the garlic out of season.

Now that fireweed floods the roadsides with carnivals of colour,

and bonfires of montbretia are raging gloriously out of control

the swallows being skittish, flying broken circles about the house,

we enter the season of apples reddening, pears yellowing, plums purpling.

Yearly, I get this feeling of sadness as though programmed into the cycle;

it’s not the passing of beauty; beauty just changes its cloak; it’s time

stealing a gift that only time can give.

The Romantic Heart

 

The enamel white moon made a ladle on the water;

Li Po, a tick full of wine with a romantic heart,

rowed his boat up the long handle towards the bowl.

It was a gentle night, the air was warm and all was still;

he, with the fondest memories of all his lovers, sat

awhile, allowing himself to be enthralled by this beauty.

He became ecstatic; alone with the universe, colossal

therefore, and filled with the dream of love, he fell

into the water with arms wide to embrace the moon.

It was sudden, chill and lightless;

deceived by his love, he fell past euphoria

into the dank cavern that is the final knowing,

while up above the moon continued to beguile

all the wine-drinkers with love in their hearts,

all those who would drink their dreams into reality.

An Updated Draft of an Unforgettable Moment

 

Sing Love

A memory from my father's last days

On his deathbed, when speech was gone,

we deciphered incoherence

and muddled on.

I remember she, visiting, took his hand

and for want of words,

he sang to her

so tunelessly, it was not a tune,

yet, still, in all his life

he never sang so beautifully.

A Book from Stone

 

Well, not really. But sometimes it feels that way.

I keep the blog to amass poems. Publishing online keeps me at it; knowing that there are readers out there gives me impetus. 

There comes a point when I have to decide there's enough to carve out a collection; I've been deferring; editing is a chore and there is a serious amount of editing to be done to re-shape these poems for a book publication. But now is the time. I have about six years of material, poems that have been produced like diary entries. I will disregard about 80% of them and spend, perhaps a year, maybe more, getting the rest into a shape that I am happy to have representing me. Somehow a book seems to demand a level of care that the blog doesn't; I  hope that's isn't an insult to regular readers.

I mention it because, though I do post newer drafts of poems on the blog, there'll be more now as I rework the pieces. I don't tend to get feedack but feel free if you feel the urge; for now, though, I have to address this chunk of stone.

 

Bog

 

Bog

Sinking into the soft mire, spagnum sponge;

ooze rising inches above my feet: beer brown,

freezing cold. I take a handful and squeeze;

water, so much water drains through my fingers;

I slap away the fresh vegetation; hold my hands

to my nose, am filled with the smell of fertile earth.

Heathers, mosses, sedge and bog cotton;

a wilderness, once a lake, its margins still visible:

green fields and farm houses away in the distance:

Here, in the realm of insects, plants that devour them,

sundews and butterworts, their killer genes expressed

in the mucillage, tentacles, in the traps of their leaves.

And down, down beneath my feet, rich black turf:

countless years of heat, insulation: walls and roofing;

from bountiful earth fuel from the growth of millennia.

There too, the preserved remains of the past: old roads,

wooden tracks, submerged walls, jewelery, weapons, tools;

bodies wearing facial expressions that have defied time.

August Hedgerow Momentarily

Photograph by Josef Koudelka

 

Thin as splinters,

butterflies

borne on white wings

like flags,

flitting over the hedgerow

like scraps of paper

wind-blown.

Dallying over the brambles,

wings

bright as lighthouses;

careless

like children playing

as birds watch,

beaks like mousetraps.

Beneath the Trees

 

A gentle breeze,

the mottles of light and shade

continuously shifting,

pleasing the eye

as asymmetry does,

but continuously,

exciting the retina,

and cumulatively;

creating a giddiness ‒

optical intoxication.

What Young Should Be

This is written in the context of the ugliness of modern warfare, where population are slaughtered.

What Young Should Be

It should be a state of invincibility,

a guarantee of safety;

believing in the powers within;

I am up to it, all of it.

It should be a view of infinity,

a horizonless plain of time;

space for all the dreams,

and I have those dreams.

It should be painless,

rejoicing in the body’s capacities;

with exhilaraion in movement;

I break into carefree running.

It should be a flood of freedom,

an unstifled education in finding oneself,

revealing many futures;

and I have those choices.

Back Gardens

 

I’m on the train, heading out of town,

passing yards and back gardens

with that unkemptness that would

never be seen on the street side.

And suddenly I think of smiles and

pleasantness; the gracious conversations

we present to people while inside

our opinions are stacked mum.

How, wading  through the back gardens, 

we might admire the front;

how we live in other heads 

having developed in semi-independent ways.

A New Level of Madness

 

The 21^st century: a new level of madness:

men, I would not leave to baby-sit my child,

with the shadows of their fingers stirring

above nuclear buttons. The same cold-heartedness

as Genghis, Vlad, Stalin or Hitler; the will

to wipe out, not armies, but children at their meals,

at school, in hospital wards, babies

who have still to recognize themselves.

Their lies as nature withers; our children's

futures left arid by their glory-seeking;

this civilisation in straight reverse.

We brutalise with greater ease, level homes by the city,

kill innocents in soaring numbers;

the 21^st century, and, incapable of learning,

we have given these  vainglorious men the care of our billions.

Droplets of Water

 (a rewrite of a poem from 2022)

Droplets 

along the sharp edge of a stone

like a chain of headlights

in December traffic,

sidling onto moss greenery,

streaming down an algal thread

to a pool of pellucid water

over a mosaic of coloured stones.

Beads of water, taxis,

carrying you in iotas 

to pools, your thoughts

in subterranean caverns

where the beauties are pin-sized

and, though forgotten,

were once your fireworks.

Summer Downpour

 

on asphalt, concrete,

glass and slate;

drumming steel, aluminium

wood, copper, tin;

slapping tarpaulin and canvas,

polyester and polythene;

raindrops, billions,

thunderously:

a summer downpour

slowing now

slowing

fingers,

fingers tapping

buckets, barrels,

blocks, boxes, bricks,

hollows in canopies,

puddles, ponds and pools;

flicking leaves,

chattering light

as the sun finds crevices in the jet sky

tipping

tapping

now below the frequency of seconds,

dream-like, 

to isolated beats,

the new world of

water-lensed

colours teeming thunderously,

giddily,

answering sound

with a symphony of light.

Distance

 

Distance

A train tunnelling through the night-time lights briefly

before the sound, self-weaving,

eventually becomes another thread in the wind.

From over the fields, a dog barks; perhaps a fox

stirring the undergrowth, a flurry of wings in a coop;

the commotion broadcast along the chicken wire.

A bird is calling from the unknown of  vanished daytime;

a child listens; a key turns;

another vastness opens in the sweeping of invisble wings. 

Reading at Boyle Arts Festival

 

I'm looking forward to being back at Boyle Arts Festival this year. I'm giving a reading at 3pm in Frybrook House on Tuesday 22nd.

The festival itself is a 10 day event and has now been in existence since 1985, having developed from a smaller festival that began in 1983. It is one of the best known in the country. This year, as always, it includes music of all types, art exhibitions, drama, literary events, interviews, comedy, children's events. Headliners include music from  Karma Police, The Fureys, The Irish Tenors, Bad Manners, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and others; comedian, Jarlath Regan; author, Kevin Barry; historian, Diarmaid Ferriter. It goes on, but I'll stop here.

The festival runs from July 17th to 26th.

Passed On

 

The dresser:

axe-heads, bone needles, stone dice,

flint knives, beads, limpet and whelk shells.

My mother’s plates with nowhere to go;

the silver’s in the attic. And that mahogany table:

unuseable without doilies.

In time the soil will shift;

more sandstone dressers will be found,

and so too the broken pocket-watch she gave me .

AI and Are poets about to become obsolete?

 There's a lot of talk about the inappropriate use of AI by students in education, less so about its use in the arts. But it's here and I, for one, will be very interested to see how editors and publishers deal with AI-generated scripts. 

I asked ChatGPT english and irish words for the mix of soil and dung in places regulalry trodden by cattle. After getting the list, it asked would I like it to give me a poem based on my request and using some of the words. Having given me its original poem, it said " Release it under your name or in a shared authorship format, depending on your use".

Bracais is irish for mire, pluda is soft pulped muck.

“Bracais”

There, where the gate sags,
and the trough leans under rain,
the ground is a churned remembering —
bracais of hoof and hunger,
a mire where clay and dung
no longer part ways.

Boots sink with knowing.
This is the old place,
the place beneath every threshold,
where soil and waste embrace
like labour and loss,
like birth and decay.

The cows do not mind.
They have shaped it with their weight —
slow, patient architecture
of pluda and presence.
Even filth, trodden long enough,
becomes home.

Gaza Bombing

 

From a clear blue sky

thunder,

bombs

and death

to man, woman

and child.

When it settles,

the dust is spread

over breakfast tables,

Tel Aviv to Washington;

the milk in our cereal

stained;

a grey powder

on our bread.

Welcoming Felix

So, I'm a grandad. Felix arrived in February, when I started this poem; only now completing it or at least editing it further. It's all colour for the little fellow now, but seeing him in February, it really struck me how extraordinary the process of human growth and development is.

Welcoming Felix  

Well, Felix, you finally made it. How small you are, sleeping,

half-waking to a world of black and white, soon enough to be colour.

Exploring it in  your mother’s face; later the room, the house, the garden; 

all the time gathering to yourself the world within grasp.

That growth, from the cockle you are now to the man coming;

let it be flush with the eagerness to experience life’s richness,

may it ease you into the heart of happiness.

So, Felix,

with your sight still forming; may the world come, settle gently around you.

I wish you the love that will make it easy, safe passage through the days

and the humour to break the backs of any hardships you may meet.

   xxx

For Mother's Day

 Waving

 It was not the wave from the door, but,

when she’d turned out of the gate, looking back,

mother was still there with a second wave,

that, like an exchange of vows, was love

declared, over and over, with the simplest gesture.

Great milestones of her life started there;

her ever-growing steps towards independence,

all blessed with that wave, a warm pullover of love

to wear wherever the steps were going; and knowing too

that those waves were always tinged with sadness.

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.

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

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.