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.

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.