A powdering harangue ‒
the city's voice over unkempt pavements.
The footfall at 5.30,
the lighting up apartments;
desperate masses
rushing to close their doors
on the daytime hours.
That voice
gusting along those surfaces,
propelling them;
behind those cigarette-moment windows
they fold.
Perspective
Lately, I’ve been seeing January migrations of geese in the powder blue sky above Dublin. Those ever-shifting arrows sign-posting exotic, faraway countries are in my thoughts when a full-stop moves from the text into the blank margin of the page I’m reading.
I watch it moving up, turning right at the top, making for the gorge between the leaves; its slow progress suggesting rough terrain: a karst’s uneven pavements perhaps. What purpose, I wonder, can so small a creature have in undertaking this journey; where does the mite think it’s heading?
I might have found out, but at that moment a newscaster’s voice cut into my thoughts ̶ 95 people dead on a street in Kabul.
I lose sight of the full stop; for you are there, somewhere in that city at the height of the violence and you would not confess to us the dangers you face.
How high up, I wonder, must one be for our atrocities to be so small that they become ludicrous?
Dancing in the early hours
to Leonard Cohen’s oak-aged voice
swaying drunkenly to his words,
arms slack as streams of poured wine,
eyes soft as the vowels he intoned;
her feet uncertain, stepping cautiously
over the cobbles of song;
hearing each word a moment too late,
singing one beat behind;
the wine glass tipping precariously and
still the wine defying gravity
like her life was about to spill
and still it did not
a genie above a lamp for so many minutes,
holding the room expectant but
as suddenly as appeared was no more;
it seemed a spotlight went out.
A Transparent Eyeball
“I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Acknowledging
the occurrence of all things
in myself
as being one with God;
the unfettered transmission
of His deity through me
as the sensations of living
electrify my soul;
the ebullience I experience
in re-awakening daily
to His creation;
the infinity that defines me.
Last Words
at my mother's bedside
Her life frayed to the last strand;
breathing: difficult, tenuous;
and I searching for the right words
in those last minutes
to put our love beyond doubt,
find a gentleness to salve the hardship.
Now, years later, trying to remember
what did I say when love
was reduced to faltering words.
Did I have the right words?
What words can be a parachute
as she steps from that ledge?
