Wednesday, May 27, 2015

Railway Child

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    Picking wood splinters from my clothes,   ear to the track and the soft thunder of a train hurrying from Ballymurray...
Sunday, May 24, 2015

The River Took Me

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Once, in a sodden flaggered field beside the river, the current took me; not a canoe but a trout, a water’s flint smoothe...
Wednesday, May 20, 2015

Caught, tangled in old years.

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Caught, tangled in old years; young man,   the brambles have made you delicately eccentric;   your ears are closed but ...
Saturday, May 16, 2015

Closing Windows

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  I carved a face onto a stone, put in my pocket and kept it for a charm.   After a while I grew uneasy and put it ...
Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Old Houses in an Old Country

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Emigration from Ireland in the middle of the 20th century led to a countryside that was dotted with farmsteads that had an eerie stillne...
Friday, May 8, 2015

Bone-white trees

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  I like these bone-white trees by Elaine Leigh. They suggest bodies,  rivers, limbs, less trees the longer I look.   What the a...
Tuesday, May 5, 2015

Poetry Reading in Rathmines

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This Saturday,  May 9th at 2pm in Rathmines Library, Hibernian Poets and guests. The featured poets are Brian Kirk, John Saunders, Ma...
Monday, May 4, 2015

In a fog

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As standing under the stars can make you feel tiny, but somehow colossal in belonging to  the universe as much as any star; standing lost in...
Saturday, May 2, 2015

A death

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Small questions hang  over us after the deaths of those close to us:     Mam’s death   Struggling for each breath, (mouthfuls...
Wednesday, April 29, 2015

CanalaphonicTrad session in Grace's Pub

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Grace's on a Friday night is always a great session, one of the best in Dublin. Friday, May 8th, Canalaphonic Festival will be in fu...
Sunday, April 26, 2015

Religion embedded in the machinery of war

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I think  it was the late seventies. I turned on the  news one evening, and there was a report showing a priest, along with a minister of s...
Friday, April 24, 2015

In Mayo

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  The sky:               rags on bushes             in a wintry gale.   The barbed-wire fence:               a lunatic...
Wednesday, April 22, 2015

Reading at Strokestown International Poetry Festival

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  It’s almost May. It’s almost Strokestown Poetry Festival time. The festival is on from April 30 th to May 3 rd . This year featur...
Monday, April 20, 2015

Writer's Block

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i.e. the block on which a writer's head is severed. Writer’s block   Nothing lands on this plain; nothing moves but its s...
Sunday, April 19, 2015

At Sartre's Funeral

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This poem has little to do with Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, but the image of her sitting in a chair above  his grave got me started. I did...