When Less is More

I had forgotten this poem from Felos aínda serra; it was drawn to my attention recently. It came without too much effort, maybe that’s why I had forgotten it. The idea came from the icons on the bicorns worn by the felos in Galician carnival festivities.

Looking at it now, I am very pleased with its accuracy.

“There’s an owl in my head”

Said Joseph.

“I am wise,

Wisest of all creatures.”

“There’s a tiger in mine”

Said Paul.

“I am the fiercest;

All creatures respect me.”

“A stag in mine”

Said Thomas.

"I am majestic,

Admired by all." 

“My head is empty”

Said Jim.

“So there is space

For all creatures to come and go.”

Banks

A number of years ago, I had occasion to call into a bank of which I am not a customer. While there, an official suggested that I open an account. I asked why, that I had an account elsewhere; he came out with the beautiful “because we would like to get to know you better.”


I could hardly believe it: do they learn their advertising jingles off by heart; are they hooked up to electrodes; worse, did he think I was chuffed to be a target for the bank’s friendship; worse still, does this line actually work?

Fast forward a number of years; the banks lose money through poor management, poor regulation, corporate greed, and all those close friends are coughing up: losing jobs, savings, pensions; emigrating.

Is it too simplistic to see the banking system as facilitating us, not a hoover for clearing our pockets.So when the system goes belly up, why are the people facilitating it, a system.

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;

like a hawthorn above the sea,

you seem to have frozen

at the very moment

you were jumping clear.

Memory of My Father on Lough Ree

It was so safe and reassuring to walk as a child holding your father’s hand. How great and powerful fathers appeared to their seven year old sons. How perfect those times were. One day. One day you would be like that: strong and kind, if you could ever know enough.

Did you ever marvel at your father’s ability to drive from one part of the country to another and get you there, right to the door? That knowledge; it didn’t seem possible.

No surprise  then at the difficulties that commonly manifest themselves in teenage years when the role model is tarnished and communication have begun to fray. And when one looks for affirmation, it does not come easily, or not at all, from the hero branded into those souls years before.

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  bevelled this water. I remember the oars’
loud soft thud, slap 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.

Coping, Not Coping

You screamed, no one heard;
you wondered if you had screamed at all.

I asked where the lines on your face had come from;
another one appeared.

Now, because your eyes are perpetually electrocuted,
I talk on and on;

always taking the precaution of being somewhere else
when I stop.

The Silver River

Jacket, shirt and shoes,
his socks and trousers;
that bundle neat on the bank;
a small crowd watching from the bridge.

-the silver river running-

He was coming from a game of cards, late;
the winnings were in his pocket.
There had been a woman,
they had even visited the priest,

-the silver river running-

but that’s long ago now.
He worked the farm,
a good worker, his neighbours said,
always busy with the tractor.

-the silver river running-

He lived with his mother,
who cooked his meals and managed the money.
Now she was a great farming woman,
everyone agreed

and that’s how the silver river ran.

Gorgeous Music

Zakir Hussain's "Making Music" (1986) is one of my favourite albums. With Jan Garbarek,John McLaughlin and Hariprasad Chaurasia; it gets close to heavenly at times.Take a listen.

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.