Marine.

Prostrate on the beach,
a slop of sea pulse,
a glob black as chewed tobacco
fallen from the lip.


My mother said -
the sea is sick,
it's breath on the beach is bad
and its puke is scattered
all over the sand.


She said
all its pin points are boiling,
its stomach heaves;
that it will yellow our skin
if it gets half a chance.


Then this morning,
when something with small eyes
came out of the sea,
I pelted stones at it
till the tractor came.

(from Sunfire)

Tonight I Nearly Died.

Tonight I nearly died
in the Sunday chain
returning to Dublin.
A scythe
arched onto the road;
as I rushed
I nearly overtook life.

What did I learn?

My eyes are good
dilated in horror.

From a Child's Bedroom Window

A small child with a view of countryside from his or her bedroom window has a million miles of darkness for imagination to roam through after darkness falls. Heaven and earth merge in the blackness;so the realms of spirit and man become one.


The Boy Who Watched For Apparitions.


Goodnight to the twin moons
stretched along the railway tracks
outside Roscommon.
My night-time window halved
with those trains rushing across the glass,
strips of film filled with their own lives:
adventurers and bon-vivants,
whose strings of lights recreated as they passed
the grassy slope, the elder bushes,
the buffer with the hole in the side;
strangers oblivious to such little worlds
and to the boy who watched for apparitions
from his bedroom window.
And in a moment they were gone,
leaving the darkness darker and the boy listening,
trying to gauge where the sounds
finally disappeared into the wind.


What lay beyond that window-world ?

The station to the right,
the white gates to the left,
and then..........


Now I remember those film strips
sailing through that pitch emptiness;
sometimes they were only ruffed impressions
when the window was full of pouring rain.
I remember how my imagination filled like a can
when all that was left was the headlight's beam
over the trees of Bully's Acre.
And there is often disappointment in these poems;
the disappointment of that place beyond
where the rhythms of trains were reclaimed by the wind.



......from Sunfire (Dedalus Press)

I Give You

This tree's dripping fruit
to place in your mouth
to ripen your tongue.

The water guttering down
these green leaves
to be a trellis of fingers
about you.

This soft drizzle of sunlight
to fall gentle as the petals
of meadowsweet on your cheeks.

This bindweed and all tendrils
to hook and bind
our desires together.

Roscommon Childhood

Roscommon, and the memories of a happy childhood there, in a poem that starts off realistically but ends with a skyscape transposed to earth. The child's imagination makes the place a Paradise at the close.


Frosty Morning From My Parents Bedroom

The music box plays
my mother’s glass-topped
mahogany
dressing table;

the frost-petalled
window
with a peep hole
for my blue eye;

a hedge of brittle
looping briars,
Curley’s field a flood
of sugary brilliance;

the beeches,
their heads in the stratosphere;
a barbed-wire fence
staggering between them;

abbey ruins,
a spire and steeple:
Roscommon town
cocooned beside

an ocean of duck egg blue
that rolls into a bay
beneath snowy mountains
a million miles away.