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.

New Draft of "September Swallows"

 

September Swallows

September, swallows

suddenly in a frenzy

as though too long furled,

their true selves

must out;

fly from the wires

like crochets escaping staves;

hone their aeronautics ‒

wheel, sweep and swoop ‒

for tomorrow

they must swap wires

for lines of longitude

as though they were scored

down the centre of their brains;

be pulled south

as surely as iron filings

must fly to the poles.

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.

Passing Time

 

When I was a child,

time stretched beyond sight,

out over the curve of the earth;

Summer days deliciously slow,

mid-afternoon stalled in the sky;

the drone of bees the lag of seconds.

Life.

The daily events well worn,

the cobbles of living smoothed;

time slips over them with accelerating

ease and I, past seventy, looking at its blur

like a train-passenger with glazed eyes seeing

the years speed by like telegraph poles.

At the military cemetery

 

At the military cemetry, I am struck

by the myriad patterns of the crosses;

marvelling at the precision over and

over as I walk into new perspectives.

In death, the soldiers in this postumous

parade still creating the most beautiful,

mathematically correct symmetries.

The precision: clean, uniform, orderly;

identical crosses stretching into the

distance to the glory of the dead, to the

glory of the army. Individuality un-

observed; humanity absent; an army

of stones.