Breathing

Now my father's life
is breathing.
Heavy work.

He has already slipped away
to be alone
while we outside
mark every breath
like lap timers.

Now come the spaces:
a breath
is an isolated thing.

Finally one breath
arrives alone.
I feel a soul has left,
but just then

I see, so clearly,
it was hope
that slipped out of the room.

Back in the Day, when Small Towns were Pure

What is Club 81 ?


Ba bloody news’s whaw tis.
We doan wan dah kine ting rown here
I’m tellen ya dah.................

What goes on there ?

I’ll telya wha’s goin on.
Dey cum owha dat place ah all hours,
day’r night, min.........an wimin.
I seen em owha dat place
ahafa leven of a Sunda mornin.

But what do they do in there?

Shure howd I know wha dey'd be ah..........
buh dey can fine sumwhar else fer doin it;
we doan wan dat kine rown here.
Anya can tellum I sed dah eswell.

Guluk.

Civic Responsibility

I wonder if there's a greater need than we acknowledge for civic responsibility to be inculcated in our children. I remember my grand aunt in her late eighties or early nineties saying after taking a fall, she was left sitting on the kerb in the middle of O'Connell St. This poem brushes up against the same issue.


On The Street.


He has her against the railings.

Holding his mouth up to her face
like a gun-barrel

he bawls;
words that burst clean into my sitting-room.

His fist, swinging in a small arc,
makes a soft sound of her cheek.

Inside,
with my marmalade coals curled up like a cat,

I ask myself what I should do,
taking till they've gone to reach no decision.

Rag Trees and Holy Wells

St Kieran's Holy Well, Kilcar, Co Donegal




Holy wells and rag trees, the exotic places of the Irish countryside, have long ago joined the list of endangered species. Disappearing yearly under bulldozers or through abandonment, one day they will be irretrievably gone and yet another colour will have been lost from the rainbow of Irish culture.

St Patrick's Holy Well, Ballyshannon, Co Donegal

The Moon and Me

I can completely understand why the moon is associated with madness. Watching it sail through the countryside of clouds, it becomes mesmeric and then it crashes out onto open desert to drift with its non-plussed face through nothingness with no apparent destination all through the night. And then there’s its strange enamel light, a weird brightness, the negative of day.
The whole effect is to bring you into yourself, to travel with it, through your own bleak wastelands. It always makes me introspective and catches me somewhere between it’s otherworldly beauty and a feeling of loneliness and loss. (The fact that cloudy conditions in Ireland makes the moon’s light scarcer and therefore more precious adds to the feelings)

Trapped between want and need;
desire brushing my face
like some woman’s hair.

Looking for comfort;
finding only a drizzle of muscles
and outside

the moon
filling the world with longing
and hopeless space.

Scarecrows.

We are two scarecrows: rags and string;
what the rain softens the wind picks clean.

We are two scarecrows: sticks and straw;
crows fly out from underneath our jackets.

We are two scarecrows: nails and wire;
each day drowning as the corn grows higher.

We are two scarecrows: sacks and hay;
nodding toward eternity, we tip toward clay.

Poetic Imagery in Art

The photographs pinned up in Francis Bacon’s studio re-emerged in some form in his paintings, The grotesque mouth in the still from the Battleship Potemkin (above) appeared more than once.

It helps in poetry to have images all around, to know the artists and images that will inspire. For me it’s Bacon, Hopper,Goya, Bosch among others. Among Irish artists, Le Brocquy, and Martin Gail’s work in particular inspires me. In this way, I believe that the process of writing poetry, in my case at least, is very similar to that of painting.

In Klimt’s “The Kiss”, the splendour of the enwrapping mantle expresses all that needs to be expressed about their love, it is so marvellously poetic. Andrew Wyeth, an artist I enjoy very much : his knowledge of countryside in his rendering of colour and textures is special. I find his eye for the poetic in rural settings moves me. In Snow Hill, he has his past subjects dance in a space
cleared by the snow’s whiteness that leaves plenty of room for poetic musings.

Laughter Yoga in Dublin

"What soap is to the body, laughter is to the soul." proverb




Quick mention of a free Laughter Yoga session at Rathmines College, Town Hall, Rathmines on 18th September at 2.30pm.Bring yoga mat or towel. Check out link for Laughter Yoga Dublin in links column.

Caught, Tangled in Old Years.

Caught; tangled in old years
young man;
the brambles have made you
delicately eccentric.
Your ears are closed
but to the berries,
eyes fixed to where the winds
have bent them.
You are like a hawthorn above the sea;
you seem to have frozen
at the very moment you were jumping clear.

Can't Sing

Can’t sing but good with languages and accents: I don’t believe it, I think it comes down to teaching methods. And there is a singing style to suit everyone, even if it is Professor Higgin’s “Why can’t a woman be more like a man.” I think children deserve the search for that style; being able to join in a sing-song and sing your own piece is a great confidence builder and for that reason gives even more pleasure.

PANIC IN THE BELFRY.

When the class was built up like an orchestra
my child was found to be hammering at the scaffolding.
Assaulted by such discord, the teacher
hit this gong over and over and sent her
down to the caverns to be a subterranean scaffolder forever.

There she could hammer alone, alone with her notes.
And it was there she heard other choirs;
choirs of discarded pipes singing in their hollows
bass notes for nether world shafts.

Patrick Kavanagh

A snippet of Patrick Kavanagh talking from 1962, one of my favourite poets and one that has had great influence on my writing:



As always,a search of YouTube will throw up more wonderful links.

Wasted Treasures

The lighthouse at St John’s Point in Donegal Bay in one photograph mimics a wave on the sea, in another a seagull.
It’s such a pity that lighthouses tend to be behind closed gates; they have such allure. I remember visiting one, years ago, in Finistere, Brittany; I loved it. Beautiful brass and wooden fittings, the great glass lens, the winding stairs; a walk straight into previous time, a more romantic time.
And then again you’ve walked a distance, away from towns and houses, out along a headland and there’s this one tower with commanding views all around, and entry is forbidden.
So it’s great to hear Loop Head lighthouse is opening to the public, and let’s hope it will be the first of many.

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.

She Leaves.

She leaves
a country of mountain tops,
pencil points in nothing
and crosses on current arrows
to where the sun shines on a space.

Angels
look over the rails,
cheering ferries on the sea

of her worries;
for that is where she bobs,
among all the sparklets
on the sea-top.
And fears
scratch their fingernails
down the glass

she has left;
not left,
left, not left.

Revisiting Lough Ree

There is a recollection in Brian Friel’s “Philadelphia, Here I Come” that rings a loud bell in my head: Gar Private recounts a May afternoon out in a boat, fishing with his father. He remembers the fine detail: peeling paint, an empty cigarette packet floating in the water, a rowlock kept slipping. He recounts....”between us at that moment there was this great great happiness, this great joy………………an active bubbling joy”. I admire Friel for so much in his writing, but his accuracy in his encapsulation of the Irish character, and particularly that of the young man,Gareth O'Donnell, in this play is breath-taking.

I was particularly struck by this recollection, because one of my most treasured memories from childhood is very similar. My father had to visit a property on an island on Lough Ree. There is a special atmosphere around a becalmed lake in Summer warmth; it induces a sense of complete ease and, dare I say it, spiritual fulfillment. I never had Friel’s difficulties in my relations with my father, but on that lake, on that morning, my ease and pleasure in his company were complete, and I feel very grateful to have had the experience.


Revisiting Lough Ree


Morning comes colourless;
trees stoop to the lake like pilgrims
witnessing images that are riddles in the water.

A sudden shriek: “Over here, no here, over here.”
I see nothing; the lake keeps its children chilled
in ice buckets among the reeds.

Once I trailed a ripple from a boat
that beveled this water. I’ll remember the oars’
loud soft thud, slap, lick till I die.

It was June. Insects teemed on the surface.
The sun, that tanned our backs, lulled the countryside
into sleep before the fields were even cranked.

My father was there.

Now December.The lake drags its cutlery
through this cress-green landscape
with an indifference that leaves memories shivering.