Ballindoon

 

Ballindoon Priory is on the shores of Lough Arrow in Co Sligo. On a warm Summer's day it is a place of delicate beauty and calm.

Ballindoon

Cattle grazing, quiet as jellyfish;

mid-summer's trees drowsy,

loitering in the pools of their shadows.

The ruined priory of Ballindoon

perched between meadow and lake, asleep

with its dead congregations in its arms.

Stripped now to white-lichened limestone,

colours of an Irish sky;  

scoured of medieval ostentation;

freed from the half-light of doleful nave

and chant-droning chancel,

the austerity of  ceremonial formalies. 

No longer prisoner,

no longer locked in to itself,

but open, earth to heaven, heaven to earth.

Coming upon the Old Abbey

The silver drizzle is making ghosts of the hills,

the ruin’s limestone walls hulking presences,

the round tower a vortex into the unknown.

A bell’s footsteps comes clanging across the dawn,

sandals slap along the flags, creak of iron hinges

and the susurrus of monks gathering in the choir.

The voices, suddenly a deep brown river flowing,

fill the nave, flow sure and steady out into the valley

spreading their primal credo, a rich fertile soil.

The rain is everywhere: in the fields’ greenery,

a skim on the lichened stones, sweeping through the air,

through the lancet windows high above the chancel.