A Poem for the Horticulturist with a Soft Spot for Opera

The flower that swallowed people,
already swollen to an indecent beauty,
swallowed an opera-singer
and thrilled the world incredulous
with legatos, staccatos, crescendos.
Its petals billowing rich red,
 
dribbled dark burgundy stains
to a star of blinding purple brilliance.
Its stamens, topped in solar ash,
hummed tremolo for television
while the stem was a flow
of swan's neck to the ground.

Day and night the concert enthralled
a world, at the garden wall,
drenched in orgasm.
But a flower's life is short,
its edges betrayed its age;
petals, cracked and folded,

fell like rotten teeth.
That day the opera-singer protruded,
in mid-bar, from the shameless stem
he stopped abruptly,
fixed his collar and walked away
not a little embarrassed.   

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.

Group Photograph After The War

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A woman is looking out of a dark house
onto a sun-drenched street.

There is only her old face,
enamel white and expressionless;
and the street just as always used to be 

                                                                        in July.

Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum

I was rather surprised some time back to find an introduction and a poem from my second  collection "Turn Your Head" in a blog titled "Leonard Epstein Photography".http://leonardepsteinphotography.wordpress.com/

Leonard Epstein is from New York.His blog presents photographs from his trips to different parts of the world including India, Cambodia, Vietnam, Laos, Bermuda,USA and Austrailia. The photographs are often accompanied by poems or other published pieces, and so my poem appeared in a blog on the Tuol Sleng Museum posted in Oct 2011.

I'm sure he'll be happy for me to return the favour with a photograph from that posting. With thanks:

TUOL SLENG (A POEM)

Irish poet Michael O’Dea

“1999 I wrote a series of poems called Tuol Sleng Still. They were inspired by the gut-wrenching photographs of the inmates of Tuol Sleng, S-21, a Khmer Rouge death-camp in Phnom Penh. Between 1975 and 1979, 14,000 were tortured and died there. 7 survived. Inmates were photographed with numbered tags, and they were photographed again after their deaths.

Anyone who has experienced such horrors would probably consider my poems from the comfort of 1999 Ireland wryly. I was horrified by my ignorance: during those years I was enjoying a carefree college life. But to see the fear in faces that are little different to those that fill my everyday; I immediately felt immense sadness and felt I should, at least, inform myself. And by researching, writing and publishing the poems I could at least make the experience more real to me and contribute in a minute way to the calls against the wars and barbarism that seem to me to exemplify the pitiful limitations of us humans.

I chose Tuol Sleng because the photographs that inspired me were from there. There is a danger that I will suggest that people from far-off lands with different features to ours are barbaric, however I consider the vacuum-pack cleanliness of American mass-murder by air-strike at least as obscene, if not more so. I consider the war in the Middle East carried out and supported by governments in our name to be abhorrent. That era in the seventies is and isn’t history: unfortunately, for too many around the world it is Tuol Sleng still.”

I looked at him,
Cambodian like myself,
similar in height and age.
He was handing out the tags;
I was bare to the waist.
I held the tag in my hand,
holding it up to be seen;
feeling awkward, conspicuous.
“Pin it onto your chest”
he said and waited.
I pinned it into my skin;
the humiliation delighted him.
Before the camera I stood erect
like I was proud to wear it,
like it was made of gold.

New Poem-Nature is Music

Following on from the last post,  this is one of the new poems.I'm using it as an introduction to the piper's music, the music of nature.

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;

the blackbird standing on the morning

trout etching circles at noon

raucous crows bickering with evening

a fox tearing a hole in the night-time.

Following a Different Piper

It’s been a busy and productive three weeks. After researching mythology associated with Irish neolithic sites, particularly Brewel Hill and Killeen Cormac in County Kildare, Loughcrew in County Meath, I have written 12 new poems to accompany a forthcoming exhibition of paintings by Elaine Leigh, a colleague of mine. Elaine’s images draw on stories related to these sites: the piper and dancers turned to stone on Brewel Hill; the Cailleach, goddess of winter, who scattered the stones that gave rise the cairns at Loughcrew; the Púca, (related to Puck), shape shifter and mischief-maker in Celtic lore.

The paintings are abstract: suggestions of human visages in stone, orbs of energy like flowers on stalks that are threads through time, ballerina-like trees, skeletal heads of horses, hounds, goats: the various incarnations of the Púca. They are richly coloured in gold, crimson and azure blue, beautifully rendered, highly original, full of energy, absorbing and evocative.

For me, it has been a change in direction. Not altogether my comfort zone: getting the balance between the modern and ancient proved difficult. Should there be constant reference to oak woods and hazel copses, should I use November or Samhain; keeping the “faery” element without becoming 19th century presents problems.

It has been instructive; the difficulty of writing poems that are not merely retelling what is already in the images, that provide information on the images while retaining artistic merit in themselves; poems that complement the spirit and mood of the paintings. Has it worked? I have no doubt about Elaine Leigh’s work, and I’m looking forward to your judgements on mine.

On a different tack but, coincidently, related, this Thursday there will be two sessions of story-telling in Rathmines Library at 2pm and 5pm. A fantastic opportunity to hear wonderful tellers weave their magic.

Life Journey

This nightmare sequence is a life journey. My life hasn't been nightmarish, thankfully, but yet, this sequence is appropriate. I suppose, set against certain expectations, many lives can have bleak countenances.



Travelling.

These gates are always swinging:
they screech,
squeal at each other.
These gates are jaws;
without partners,
they are harmless.

Now a field of pistons;
here work is the law.
Day and night they strain;
groaning up, collapsing down.
These pistons are muscles
betrayed by humans.

And this is the room of wings;
hold tighter.
These wingsflap, frighten the air;
have pity on the wings,
they have no direction,
only agitation.

Finally space
where molecules disband.
Unmoored
we fall;
terrorized by incomprehension
we scream into eternity.

“The world is your oyster”.

Shortly
the years will turn homeward,
their promises
still tight in their fists.


Endless corridors
leading nowhere,
crammed with people
all tumbling on.

Damp and Drizzle.

Damp wet, wet, wet.

Grim drizzle

Leaning against the wall

All day.



If I could hum the mood

Into your ear

You'd know what I mean;

You'd remember.

Apparitions

Good Friday and Christmas Night; my religious belief was so strong that I expected something to happen. I expected the word to become, if not flesh, spectre. In driving homecatholic beliefs, we were made more aware of the personalities than the teachings. The gospel stories were vivid in our minds and almost on equal billing were the Lourdes and Fatima apparitions. There was always the threat of divine intervention: punishments at worst, but at the very least, dire warnings complete with revolving spectral solar displays.

The significance of these two days in particular, the sorry state of the world - the treat of a third world war was palpablein the Cold War years of the sixties, I remember a Christian Brother telling us in 1967 that we probably wouldn’t survive the year – made an apparition a fairly likely occurrence. Our upbringing was strongly religious, that put me on the front line for a visitation.


The Dread of an Apparition

The most effective means
of avoiding a death fright
by apparition
might have been my blanket
but for the thinness of its cover
and the need to obey
Heaven's commands
which do not stop at blankets.
The problem was Mary's
predilection for teens
and my undoubted piety.
Therefore I can say
without any hesitation,
my earliest plans to reject
Catholicism - thereby
putting myselfsafely
beyond the fence -
were due to apparitions;
their lightning
and ghastly messages.

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.

Dayroom

A scene from 40 yars ago.



Dayroom

Here the old men sat,
hunched against the wall,
replaying the footage of their lives
in the half-light of the dayroom.

A beam of sunlight slants through the window,
the projection playing dead centre of the room
as though not only heat
but life itself was somewhere far away.

Something Beautiful - 3epkano

3epkano are a Dublin-based collective who compose sountracks “to silent, avant-garde, and temporary cinema”; they perform their scores live, and in venues that range from the main Electric Picnic stage to the National Gallery of Ireland. At home and abroad they are creating waves and deservedly.

Now and then over the years I have recommended music that can put you in the mood to write poetry; this does. The music is haunting, moving, simply beautiful. Creating soundscapes, dreamscapes you can move around in; spacey enough to find your own private place, moody enough to drown a little.

They started out in 2004 and have made three albums; the most recent released in Oct 2011; Hans the Reluctant Wolf Juggler – “What really marks this record out is the startling nature and force of musicianship.” Tony Clayton-Lea, Irish Times.

I have yet to catch them live, but I won't leave it much longer. Listen to the track below and you'll understand. Meanwhile the website is http://www.3epkanomusic.com/ go check it out.

Elemental

Owl eye
Night bead;

Flash from a branch
Plunge like fire;

Spring death
Live spark.