In The Ring

One word thrown into the ring,

and intimacy is honed to cruelty.

Our red mouths’ lining never spared;

if I ever loved you, it was my mistake.

                    And still, there was no mistake;

                    I love you.

Confession

Gulls curdled out of the tide;

spume flew then settled.

I confessed at the top of my voice

to an ocean convulsed in its own troubles.

All of it disappeared in the spray and the tumult, 

then I sang.

And my voice danced away

over the strand.

Remembering

A lot has been written on the subject of the Irish famine; most of what’s needed to be said has been said. However, when I found myself digging potatoes in water-logged soil beneath the Bluestacks, gathering up marble-sized potatoes; I couldn’t but be reminded of the value even these had for families whose survival depended on ground such as this. 

Hard to appreciate, but the span of two just lifetimes (by today’s standards) would land us right back into the middle of those years, and hard to credit also, that affluence and starvation still live cheek by jowl today. 

Remembering 

In November, this charcoal month of sagging

clouds slung low between granite mountains,

while the trap-jawed landscape stalks,

diggers hunched double to the ground

are harvesting bright potatoes that constantly

endeavour, like mice, to escape, scuttle back

into the sodden soil, where roots compete

for water, and decay is life rekindling.  

Round-backed labourers, boulders fallen off

the mountain, sieve the soil for each stunted práta,

(size of a fingernail, ten minutes of a child’s life),

that scampered off the sleamhán, scuttled back

into the earth, fugitives from scrabbling fingers.

Potatoes, apples of the soil, sole currency of life

to those whose DNA shaped these fingers,

now rough with working the same earth.

Dicing with the Devil

The local men outside the church interested me as a youngster. On a point of doctrine, did it qualify as attendance at mass if you joined them outside the church or was it a matter of being inside the porch door? I suspect it must be the latter. But why did they bother at all? Does God make these sorts of distinctions? One way or the other they had the best time at mass with the exception, probably, of the priest and altar boys who as far as I was concerned always performed to full houses.

The After-mass Men were these men with the addition of a particular strain of ‘inside the door’ man, a type who appeared to me to be taking the same risk as marijuana smokers who hang out with heroin addicts. Anyway, morally,they all constituted a dodgy breed, endangering each Sunday their eternal living conditions.

These clusters of men arranged themselves in ways that would have excited a sculptor. Dark clothes and, I suspected, dark conversations reigned. They were a dangerous influence, to be avoided by such as myself, to be looked down on, to be prayed for like you’d have prayed for the conversion of Russia;and every boy risked joining them at least once.

The After-Mass Men

Remember those figures by the church wall
Sculpted in after-mass conversations:
Blather-tattooed men
That hung there by their jackets;
Museums with pockets,
Pockets full of knives,
pipes and matches.

Stone men:
Pre-Christians defiling Sabbaths
With their Saturday conversations.
Gargoyles:
Coats would be wrapped against them
As though they were sudden showers of hail.


from Sunfire (Dedalus Press)

Elemental

Owl eye
Night bead;

Flash from a branch
Plunge like fire;

Spring death
Live spark.