Friday, March 7, 2025

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. 


.

No comments: