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.
