Am I the stairs or climbing it?

              

Having moved through the years like clouds;

reached a crescendo, passed through it,

and still travelling to an ending.

Upward or downward?

It seems like the perspective of height;

the weighing up of the steps that have brought me here,

each built one atop the other,

but sometimes contrary like Escher’s stairs,

labyrinthine, incomprehensible like a mind;

maybe I am.

        

Albatross

 

Sailing the shifting geographies of the sky,

I captain the wind. Travelling with the ocean within my wings,

scanning the churning seas, I defy its rearing cliffs,

bloated-bellied monsters, fly beneath their drool-dripping teeth;

all contained in my eyes, their heaving guts, I soar, glide and swoop,

pull the jewels from their pockets.

On flattened wings I sweep from the edges of continents;

pulling the tides in my wake; see the sun over the horizon and follow.

All is still

 

All is still.

I have stopped to listen,

but there is only myself.

If you shout,

wherever it is you are,

I will hear you

because here, 

I am all;

I am the full of here.

If you shout,

your voice

will flood my ears;

if not your voice, you, 

you yourself

will fill me.

  

A Photograph Almost; 50 Years Ago.

 

My father at the kitchen table,

over the Sunday papers;

the sun coming and going

as lives do.

His pipe-smoke, DNA-like,

spiralling silvery upward,

joining the angels dancing 

in the Heaven above his head,

Happy 2025, let's hope it is less destructive than 2024.

What I Remember

 

A stream, somewhere in Connemara,

working its way through strewn boulders,

over a mosaic of rust-coloured stones.

The thousand sounds of water, finding

its races constantly blocked, celebrating

 boisterously its thousand victories.

The percussion of its falling into pools

isolated in hollows beneath the rocks;

a deeper tock under the spray’s sibilance.

The sprightliness of  mountain flow

through the gentle, soft greenery

of the fields beneath the slopes.

The exuberance of those waters rushing

through the channels of a young boy’s heart;

rushing still.

Cloud, caress her face

with droplets light as pollen,

salve her eyes,

lighten the blue you find there;

bedew her cheeks

like time blown back from childhood;

whisper into her ear

that the world has, indeed, grown more gentle.

Once on Ardmore Beach

I’ve been walking the moon’s bright path over the sea

from Ardmore beach for too many years.

My notion of the magical: waves coming ashore

like the game we played as children,

a hand slapping down as the one beneath slips away.

The sound of the waves rounding a headland into the distance;

another time, another world.

The beacons on the far shore flashing, as remote, as poignant

as the piping of waders lost in the pockets of darkness.

Our last night.

And a glittering moonlit highway through it all,

in dreams we’d walk it, looking the moon full in the face, laughing,

magnified, colossal, in all that wilderness.

Visiting the Corsetmaker

 It was ireland in the sixties. Corset conversation veered very close to immodesty. Michael O'Hehir was the voice of Sunday afternoons in Summer, and a spin in the car seemed like a good idea, but children get bored quickly.

 VISITING THE CORSETMAKER

Miss Gately, you know, the corsetmaker; her cottage 

thatched and whitewashed beneath sycamores ragged with 

crows and their bickering. A Sunday afternoon, my mother 

walking to the red door and it opened and closed and 

nothing else stirring for ages but ourselves in the back of the 

white consul with the red roof at the end of the avenue, just 

outside the gate; stone walls and lichen patches wallpapering 

our afternoon. Father dropping off in the driver’s seat 

while Micheal O'Hehir commentated on matches, one after 

another, without ever taking a breath in all that pipe smoke; matches collecting in the ash-tray all burnt to tiny black bird 

bones and the condensation all used up with words and 

faces dribbling pathetically into shapeless bad temper. Over 

and over: will she ever come out, can’t we go now, why do 

we always have to come, move your legs; till eventually she 

would reappear, a slap in the doorway, motor jauntily, 

red-headed, back to the car like it’s been five minutes or 

something, and Dad’s awake, reversing from the gate, back 

into the remains of a Sunday afternoon.

And I never knew what went on in there; never saw who 

opened the door, never saw a package, never heard anything 

about it. My father didn’t know either. I remember she 

took my sister with her when my sister was in secondary 

school. I wouldn’t have wanted to join them anyway, it was obviously a woman’s house.

War: Never-Ending Harvest

   

Early each morning, the river is obscured by fog;

sounds come ashore like cries from Limbo.

At dawn the young women come,

spools of brightly coloured  fabric, with fishing rods;

and, magical spiders, they cast weightless filaments

out over the water;

for a moment there are more threads hanging

than there are people on the streets of London.

The river stops;

nothing stirs; the earth turns a little.

Then suddenly a rod bobs and bends

and stares through its tiny eye into the water;

straining, tensing, till in a slick of weed,

slivered as a newt, a young man's body breaks the surface:

bulb-eyed, marble-chested and tapered

to a train of drops dripping back into the river.

Thousands upon thousands, like unlit lanterns,

or candles newly lifted from wax.

And when the fog clears

the women are standing with their t anterns.

The bank is a thousand miles long

and the river is wider than an ocean. 

Meteorite

Meteorite

When the starlings were the full of the sky,

we stood, rooted, gob-smacked,

exhilarated beyond words,

knowing that no air-show

nor any natural phenomenon ever compared.

Next morning I opened the back door

to find a knot of feathers on the ground,

a starling as far from flight as could be imagined,

as dull as the stone

that once blazed an arc across the heavens.

3 poems: audio

Depression. One Fruit

I must have written this on a quiet night. Occasionally I get depressed. Then the forward flow  of life is arrested and a disappointment settles over all. It might be triggered by something in particular, but the soft grey that settles has no particular focus. It locks out light and leaves you sitting energy-less and incapable of rising to the words of love that the sufferers around you deserve for their forbearance.

Fortunately, it's not a very regular visitor in my case, and after a day or few days, I'm back, slightly dented maybe and sometimes with a poem that has come from my deepest self. 

 

No Title

 

This evening I will leave my mask and crutch,

go to the well, immerse myself

till there is no chill;

till water, moss, sky and I are all one marble.

 

So when you find me, my love, this  smile,

my limbs and fingers will be milk-white;

rosaries will be hanging; petitions,

stuffed between my jaws, fluttering in the wind.

 

And the reason will hang: a faint quivering

of atoms in the air around you,

an SOS in a register just beyond audibility;

and the mask’s smile: a mouth full of soil.

The Clouds have overrun the sky

 

 

The whole countryside’s a fluster:

meadows quivering, a tree is screaming,

the boulders have clapped hands over their ears.

 

The word is that the stars have been burgled,

a stream’s stolen the silver,

and a cave, (whisper it), has swallowed the moon.

"Death the leveller"

Poem Beside Your Hospital Bed.                                               

 

Your face,

that I loved,

has changed so completely

that I already know

our time is gone.

 

And as dying

like a sandstorm

rearranges your features,

I am useless;

a cripple of words.

 

So if the winds in your head

will carry the smallest breath

of what I am saying, father:

let it be that

my proud years are tatters here;

I love you.

A Meeting with Winter

The Cailleach is the goddess of  winter, Bríghde is her summer counterpart. A hag that can appear as a  beautiful young woman; she carries a staff that struck against the ground will cause it to freeze over instantly. She is associated with mountains, hills and cairns; the formation of landscape and the annual cycles and renewal in nature.

The looseness in interpretation of her powers, the large number of legends that surround her, her symbolism in relation to ecology and the state of the earth today, the leeway one has to represent her in  myriad ways makes, (and has made), her rich material for writers, poets and artists.

 

Driving a herd of goats down a gorge:

primeval creatures with colossal spiralling horns,

coarse matted hair, yellow eyes. 

Tendrils of hair trailing down her back,

silver streams through the buff tussocks,

the swirled bronze bracken of winter. 

Her face, graphite sheet of a waterfall;

eyes, dark crags in its flow;

at its foot a rowan’s red mouth. 

A staff held high,

above us hail stones ripened for a fall;          

she drove us from the mountain with lashes on our backs.

                                                                     from Above Ground Below Ground

Music is a stream

Music is a stream

whose fingers, knuckling over boulders,

send droplets trickling into crevices, tinkling;

gurgles bass notes in hollows beneath the rocks,

spills soprano trills

that burst into the white noise of spray.

Music is the wind

that whistles high notes in the leaves

low in a bowl of mountain-side;

that whistles sad through a stone wall;

laughs in a stand of nettles.

Music is all that stirs on the earth;

blackbird standing on the dawn,

trout etching circles at noon,

the raucous crows bickering with evening,

a fox tearing a hole in the night-time.

Country Childhood

There is no doubt that my Roscommon childhood has been idealised in this poem, but yet, I honestly believe that I had a very privileged upbringing. It was a good time in a safe place among great people. Behind our house countryside stretched off into the unknown; we had complete freedom to disappear for hours on end into that vastness.For any child with a lively imagination, that was  freedom of the universe.

From the front we saw Roscommon town across three fields. From front to back contained all the world I needed, and I was happy in it.

       The Country Child.

The country child

runs in and out of rain showers

like rooms;

sees the snake-patterns in trains,

the sun's sword-play in the hedges

and the confetti in falling elder blossoms;

knows the humming in the telegraph poles

as the hedgerow's voice

when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting;

watches bees emerge from the caverns

at the centres of buttercups,

feels no end to a daisy chain,

feels no end to an afternoon;

walks on ice though it creaks;

sees fish among ripples and names them;

is conversant with berries

and hides behind thorns;

slips down leaves, behind stones;

fills his hands with the stream

and his hair with the smell of hay;

recognizes the chalkiness

of the weathered bones of sheep,

the humour in a rusted fence,

the feel of the white beards that hang there.

The country child

sees a mountain range where blue clouds

are heaped above the horizon,

sees a garden of diamonds

through a hole scraped

in the frost patterns of his bedroom window

 

and sees yet another world

when tints of cerise and ochre

streak the evening sky.

He knows no end, at night

he sneaks glimpses of Heaven

through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky.

Time to Celebrate

Passing time, whether ticking clocks, autumns or daffodils, has always been a rich ground for poets. The year passes on in a succession of natural displays: snowdrops under beech trees, cherry blossoms blown away in a matter of weeks, furze blazing again in the late spring sunshine.  The relentlessness of it all convinces me more and more that celebration is urgent and our time is now.  

In an Autumn Park

 

A maple is juggling a million splinters of sun,

its head lost within that globe of solar brilliance.

Sitting on an old wrought-iron bench

with my feet paddling in an pool of fallen leaves,

I stop a moment and listen to the sipping sounds of leaves

arriving dumbfounded onto the litter.

The ticking of years is not a regular beat:

a sudden gust of wind moves another year along.