LADY'S ISLAND.

Our Lady's Island in Co. Wexford has a special atmosphere to it. Like many places of pilgrimage, christian or pre-christian, its topography is distinctive and interesting. An island in a lagoon,(appears more like an inland lake); add to that some striking ruins,(Augustinian priory and Norman tower), outdoor furniture needed for crowds of pilgrims, quirky mementoes left by pilgrims, and you've got a place that cuts a dash in the landscape and draws the curious in.



LADY'S ISLAND.

The water waves roll ashore in Hail Mary rhythms,
winds come, contours around the island
and speakers on poles are abandoned mouths
where rosaries of sinners collected in May.
Pews like pricked ears; regiment readiness;
oh Mary, you sure pick your locations!

In a hole in a ditch a community of holy ones
fancy dressed and frozen by a wall;
and all encased in glass, ready to shake
but snowless in July.


Best wishes, see you Monday,

Michael

Alone in the City

I’m a great fan of Edward Hopper’s art: those images of solitary people in city venues are haunting. There is so much emptiness, sparseness in his pictures; his people caged in the emptiness. I have often sat looking at reproductions of these, they move me; yet when I went to write a poem on a similar theme, it came out crowded: more influenced by urban jazz and its motor-junk sound than by those wonderful images.
Funny that, writing poetry is often more about letting it happen in your head than directing it. The subject matter seems to negotiate the furniture in your head and emerge as it will.

City Lives.

They shout into space,
answer each other like whales
across great haunted distances;
they never meet,
only sound waves ever meet.

Alone in their canyons,
hives,
shoals
they roar.
Rooms upon rooms
upon houses upon houses
upon streets upon streets:
roars spilling out,
spilling over,
spilling down.

A million sound waves,
a million discordancies
tumbling, surging,
pouring out
onto the streets,
into the traffic,
wheels, cogs, pistons:

the cannibal jazz
of cities.

A Taste of Emptiness

I arrived in Dublin in 1973, having joined the Bank of Ireland, and was training in the Head Office in Baggot Street. Away from home, it was the first time in my life I was not answerable to someone for how I spent my time; no one questioning where I was, or who I was spending time with. Strange after all those years,it felt wrong; there seemed to be too much space; there was a hollow feeling to it.

I think that hollow is the one that sometimes bringing loneliness, gets filled with drinking. Of course, it could also be filled with golf or dancing or..or..., but pubs are so accessible and they promise company or the illusion of company.I was at a loose end and I did find it lonely.This memory has very little to do with the poem Passage, but the "space, to wander in" brought it back - a disorientated state of mind.




PASSAGE.

We were lovers;
now I'm off,
you're packed away;
you folded up small.

So with curving spine
and arms belting knees
tight under chin, I roll on;
a wheel from the accident.

Ahead there is space,
to wander in,
to kick up dust;
space where fires won't burn.