A poem based on Sebastião Salgado's images from the Serra Pelada gold mines in Brazil in the 80s
I am a hoist, component of:
sack of mud and ore;
my bones, levers,
haul gold
out of the hole.
Valueless:
thousands pour
out of the earth;
mud-covered chains
continuously turning
upward, downward
head sack thorax
legs feet
head sack thorax
legs feet...
When the band shines
on your finger,
we are
the ants crawling
down your arm.
Older now.
Do I dare say old;
yes, okay, old.
And wiser?
Each night the events and words of the day rotated,
a sluice gate opens
and more knowledge is allowed to escape.
You ask my advice;
I give and am wrong ‒ again;
there are experts, historians on both sides of every conflict
and still it is the old wars that occur.
Because, in the end, everyone follows their now
no matter the age-old mistakes
and when, again, you ask my advice, I will keep mum
until I give it.
I’ve been seeing January migrations of geese in the powder blue sky above Dublin;
arrows sign-posting exotic, faraway countries.
Now a full-stop moves from the text into the blank margin of the page I’m reading;
I watch it moving upward, wondering where does it suppose it's travelling to;
at the top it turns right, making for the gorge between the two pages;
its slow progress suggesting rough terrain: clints and grykes, uneven pavements.
Just then, a newscaster’s voice cuts into the moment:
95 people dead on a street in Kabul;
I lose sight of the full stop;
how high up must one be for our atrocities to be so small that they appear incomprehensible.
Gathered light from clouds,
made stone for building;
spun birds' chirpings,
wove them through the rafters;
harvested the greenness of fields,
cast it into a ringing bell;
built a well,
gazed skyward into its depth.
.
Hopes dancing in the branches of a hawthorn growing on solid rock;
in its shade an eye watches the passing centuries with quiet remove
On its bottom the dull glint of coins, each a beacon for someone’s wish.
Where gods immemorial have changed water to verdure; there, indeed,
is the place to sow a prayer.
Ballindoon Priory
Cattle grazing silent as jellyfish;
mid-summer's trees standing listless
in the pools of their shadows;
the ruined priory perched
between meadow and lake, sleeping;
its dead congregations in its arms.
Scoured of ostentation,
stripped to white-lichened limestone,
ceiling of Irish sky
and freed from the half-light of medieval nave,
austere rites,
babble of non-native tongue.
No longer its own prisoner,
but open:
earth to heaven, heaven to earth.
Camera,
transport my bones
to the breakfast tables of the world.
My legs, arms, ribs
without muscle:
beside the cereal bowls:
Let your readers
salve themselves
with the rawness of their reactions,
. And, with the turning of the page,
have the bones
returned to my private ownership.
sunlight shroud on the street,
slump of old houses,
nothing stirring.
A face in a window
like a saucer in darkness
looking out on nothing
but the years unturned.
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 warm and all was still;
he, with fondest memories of all his lovers, sat
awhile, allowing himself to be enthralled by this beauty
and 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 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.
It’s past my bedtime, the sky’s a screen and Laurence Olivier is fleeing
through a forest, dark branches clutching, clawing at him;
a gothic tale, a black and white drama.
Running onward, not towards, but away from somewhere, someone,
something, the story I haven’t seen;
before him the story still to be told.
I am at my window, the land I know is gone;
I am alone beneath the expanse of the Heaven's adventure;
I watch it, take it to my bed, trust tomorrow my country will return.
Another cancer-ridden lung;
its blackening tissue,
from the air,
ugly as any tumour,
as aggressive a cancer
as would cause any patient
to stop.
The blank, white page;
I stare at it like it's a snow-filled field,
catch sight of you at a side window;
note you do not wave.
But, seeing the exotic landscape behind you,
a Leonardo backdrop,
I decide, bird of paradise, to fly there,
flare among the branches.
Vacuous occupation, the page declares;
look here, here is reflection.
Evening soft Autumn light;
the year’s foliage
becoming humus,
new soil;
smell of decomposition:
mossy,
next year's fertility;
you standing,
foot on shovel, king of ridges;
colour of ripeness
heading towards rot;
unknown then
your lungs discolouring,
hardening
as Winter hardens.
Today, standing
in dank November
preparing the soil
for next year's growth
with your face
but older now
than you ever were,
thinner;
watching the years pass
in tides of growth:
the relentless march
of seasons pulling
me after you;
seeing the soil
as home.
Morning.
Stretching her arm back to him,
his bed-warmed skin,
expecting the familiar respnse,
his hand to her cheek;
she touches marble; taut, cold;
her brain caves
at her hand’s discovery;
and turn, can she?
Morning:
a morning she knew might come
but the chill of that stone in her bed!
Turning: there is no choice;
mercifully, his eyes were shut.
His mind sparks explosions in four cylinders, maybe six;
pistons rise and fall, connecting rods turn the crankshaft,
clutch flywheel disengaged a moment, gears shifted and
torque in the wheels altered. His engine purrs; he mulls
turbo with or without variable compression, and always
finds that quadratic equations and poetry hinder performance.
A hand extended;
normally one would shake it;
it is a child’s hand
sticking out from under the rubble of war.
Life
A stone skimmed across the water imagines wings
at the same moment a mayfly flickers golden sunlight
into the onyx eye of a granite-speckled trout.
Holding it with tweezers under his desk-lamp
an artist is marvelling at the multi-faceted
window that is a mayfly’s wing;
that’s when the trout’s teeth crush
and the stone sinks.
Never been so aware of the lungs as bellows;
how basic it becomes when, in dying,
one is reduced to breathing and we are
watching each breath
like you are lifting shovel-fulls
and so alone in the effort
and we so useless.
It's the end of Summer. There is a noticeable coolness setting in and the evenings are darkening sooner. As nature flags the moving on the year with the disappearing snowdrops, the arrival of lambs, the explosion of whitethorn, so the restlessness of swallows marks the onset of the cooling year.
September Swallows
Careering, dipping, wheeling;
knots unbinding,
lifting from the wires
(crochets escaping staves)
as though their true selves
too long furled
must be released in flight.
The restlessness in their DNA
compelling them to escape
to the grandeur of global arias;
smooth their energies
to become tomorrow's arrows
Morocco-bound.
Near the kitchen window
(A memory of my father)
Needing sunlight
for his sorcery:
smoke from his pipe:
spirits rising, coiling;
graceful tresses
suspended momentarily
then diffused,
dissipated
just as he, himself,
too soon, was gone.
Chagall's paintings incorporating all the experiences of life: art, culture, religion; the physical and abstract; the living and non-living components of our environments; earth and sky; stars and universe; all part of the heady whirl of existence shared by two people in love.
All is Flow
In exhilaration
colours burst their banks
all is flow;
no more bondage of bones ,
nothing tethered:
animals of the fields, birds of the air;
no edges nor corners
but fish-like, curved all to all:
all is flow.
No division:
all that is rooted has wings,
fly into one as notes from a violin.
Gods, stone, water:
light as thought;
you and I,
our loves and togetherness
one with this murmurating life;
all is flow.
A poem from 2023.
Autumn Aria
The tree:
aria
on a pedestal,
coloratura.
Autumn
performance;
the wind carries
fire.
Ireland in my childhood was a country that marched to the tune of the catholic church. The year was measured out in church events and feast days; not so much now, the mind of the population has shifted. But in a country that still fervently believed in the christian story: spirits, apparitions, miracles, Satan and hell, not to mention still having a consideration for its pre-christian beliefs, it's not suprising that a child with a lively imagination might find nighttime just a little scary. It was an adventure in its possibilities ( and of course the dark shadows of wet and cloudy climate addedgreatly to this); it was both exciting and frightening in a child's mind.
Whale Song
When I was young
night cleared away the countryside;
leaving nothing till morning.
Sometimes a dog barked;
barked in the void;
a bark that carried forever.
When I hear whale song,
I hear that void
and I remember a childs terror.
A hare, whiskers taut, eyes bulging,
scouring the mainland
in the grey hour of evening
when demons go searching for souls.
Sitting sentinel on day’s shoreline,
digesting the seen and the half-seen,
reining in phantasms,
deciphering commotions in the air.
He senses, suddenly, a juddering of molecules,
some looming presence,
an approaching darkness darker than night,
and an ice-bolt hits him.
With the flesh creeping along his flanks,
he kicks back his hind legs
and bounds through the tussocks,
to the church in the hollow.
The bell’s baleful clank, strange at this hour,
draws shadowy figures out of the night
into a bedraggled huddle
in the sanctuary of the church.
Feichín, now man,
the hare’s wild gaze still in his eyes,
turns to them gravely
to announce the arrival of Satan on Omey.
It is not just his works,
but the devil himself will walk among us;
be wary of every soul on the road,
every animal in the fields.
Speak the name Jesus at every turn,
a flail to his ears;
let your minds be tabernacles of the Lord
so he finds no space for evil there.
Feichín’s brethren left no soil
on which the seed of evil could be sown,
no patch of ground to build a hut;
made Omey inhospitable to him who rules Hell;
and so it is to this day.
It was as hare, Feichín saw Satan leave the island,
felt the agitation fall from the air,
and the twitchiness in his nose subsided.
