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.