The end of August, into September

 

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 grander arias of global skies;

smooth their energies

to become tomorrow's arrows

Morocco-bound.

Near the kitchen window

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.

Thoughts on Paintings by Chagall

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.

An Autumn Performance

A poem from 2023.

 Autumn Aria

The tree:

aria

on a pedestal,

coloratura.

Autumn

performance;

the wind carries

fire.

Childhood Misunderstanding

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.

When The Devil Came To Omey

 

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.

I Saw This

Very much in the vein of a previous poem, To The Slaughter House, this was a scene I came on in Dublin. A lorry-load of pigs stampeding away from their deaths made for an appalling, unforgettable moment that brings to mind not just our violence to animals but our violence to humans also. 

 I Saw This

A truck, over-loaded with pigs,

reversed to the abattoir door;

ramp dropped,

tailgate opened

and they stampeding

backward into no space,

crushing,climbing over the backs,

into the sticks beating them

through the side-boards of the lorry;

forward the stench of death;

they opt for torture

more aware than humans:

the blood-laced atmosphere ahead;

they choose life,

even horrific life.

In the Lives of Feichín and his Followers on Omey

 

St Feichín Takes His Followers To Omey

Let us leave the wooded Glen of Fore,

for men must shun trees;

their lives be lived in the full gaze of Heaven;

to Omey where trees are shrivelled to the earth,

and thorns are the ocean driven on wild winds,

gorse to lash our backs. Let us go far from these trees

that conceal our transgressions.

And they went to Omey, leaving the gentle Glen of Fore;

built their monastery among the sand dunes

where the winds rode the dragons of the ocean,

and the rains were nails;

as the granites were hump-backed on the shore,

so were they

beneath the charcoal sacks of the sky.

But if they forsook the bountiful harvests of the Glen of Fore,

the Lord lavished them with fish for their tables,

shellfish, seaweed and they were blessed

and in the dim light of their church, they sang

to the glory of their Provider;

and still asked that they might bear greater hardships,

for the sins of others weighed heavy on them.

And if, in sleep, they dreamed themselves back in the Glen of Fore

feasting on deer, boar, pheasant and grouse,

come morning they purged their night’s gluttony, kneeling

hours naked in the freezing tide and waiting for the end of day

to marvel again at the light of Heaven

as the sun sank beyond the edge of the ocean

and the splendour of God was manifest on the island of Omey.

A Child At A Window

Still gathering and editing from the last six years of Poetry and Miscellaneous Yap. The years of Covid has given me a lot of drafts of poems to consider. This is a simple enough poem; those Sunday afternoon matinees on the tv opened my childhood mind up to a universe of imagination, they embedded and have fed my efforts at poetry right up to my present.

A Child At A Window

It’s nighttime, the sky’s my screen. Laurence Olivier is fleeing

through a forest, dark fronds clutching, clawing at him;

a gothic tale full of the drama of black and white.

The forest is vast and he must run blindly through it,

somewhere behind is the story I haven’t seen, and

somewhere ahead is a border with a land no one knows.

I am at my window, the land I know is quenched;

above, across the inexplicable expanse of the Heavens, is adventure;

I watch it, take it to my bed, knowing tomorrow colour will return.

On that Beach

 

Flood of  sunlight.

Alone on that beach,

dozing to the clock of the tide:

sibilance into sonorousness:

each wave rolling down the coast.

You walked along the water’s edge,

white cotton dress, fishing net for the sun;

beautiful.

.

When today I hear a tide’s clamour

each wave’s commotion roaring into the distance;

consider the millions of stones turning over,

the endlessness of that beauty strikes

the match of that momentary vision:

you dressed in light,

strolling the edge of eternity

just once

as the tide drummed an afternoon’s hours away.

Emigration

 

Emigration

She went on a liner; we waved and waved and cried.

The ship’s horn blasted out its great bulky voice

and moved away from the quay. We watched her face

till it was indistinct, her frame till it was indistinct,

the throng of passengers hanging over the rail till they

were indistinct, the ship diminished in size slowly, slowly,

till  it was a dot on the horizon and then it was gone.

I looked out over the great sadness that is the ocean,

it was lapping inside me; this was not such a death

for her with the warming promise of her future,

but for us watching it was like a birth rescinded.

Untitled for now

 

Here is the first part of a poem that I can extend in a number of ways. So, for an early 2026 project, this is the decline of a living room that I used to know.

Cushions flattened, upholstry thinned,

chair legs cracked and broke.

The piano grew old, gap-toothed, jangly;

soon its notes refused to sound.

Upholstery ripped, horsehair came through;

floorboards creaked; curtains hung

like jackets on hooks.

Grime-covered windows greened,

the weather stole in;

a board placed in the gap

but weather, like bees, found another way.

The floorboards warped, rotted;

one day an ivy shoot poked a pair of leaves.

through a crack in the window frames.

I remember green-tinted glass vases,

photographs of yankee cousins

and space that the fire could hardly heat.

And though there was light; I remember

the faces dim like fish in a river;

and the growing resonance of voices

in that emptying room.

Almost

                                                      

                                                      Love made arcs of us,

and as water dreams

of droplets,

we dreamed the perfect circle

and might have found it,

but the curvature we brought,

unfortunately,

could not achieve it.

Unroll your pack;

set up home.

From The Well

 

Far down; a glimmer of light

from inside the earth;

a wonder to our young eyes.

We lowered the bucket

through the ferns and darkness

to collect magic

and drew it up, into daylight:

pristine, icy; we drank

what we believed to be purity.

Her Hair

 

Her Hair

 

Her hair

fell, entwined tresses

down the length of her back,

down past her knees.

Morning sunlight found it

and nested there;

I was at a window

entranced.

It was just a moment,

an interval in the journey of clouds;

it was not yesterday,

nor even twenty years ago

Today I stopped to admire patterns

of run-off water on the strand;

the hair of Celtic goddesses

as will be remembered in stone.

Beneath Our Feet

 

Lives: we think of people.

Life: we think of the distinction

between organisms and inorganic substance.

I walk the beach; it’s littered with shells, billions,

remnants of dead organisms and I marvel.

Barely more than blobs of protoplasm; yet their shells

beautiful, fine as china, now beneath my feet;

an unfathomable scatter becoming sand.

We ask the purpose of life;

I look at these with same question;

the intricacy of the interactions of living things;

their sequestration of carbon, recycling of nurients,

building of habitats; even now fragmenting to sand.

I think of all the beaches worldwide;

and these stars we walk on;

their infinity, if we permit it.

More Revision

Today

Can you spin a cloud onto a stick;

collect sequins of sunlight from a river;

walk the moon’s pathway over the sea?

There are times when happiness might belong

in this list; I thought so today when you cried

and we were not there to put our arms around you.

Happiness seemed very remote just then;

you might as well have tried to fill a jar with blue sky

and I could swear I heard a hollow clank from the universe.

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.