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.

 

 

Closing Windows

 

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

into a drawer in my bedroom.

 

One day I ran over the fields,

over the railway tracks to the stream

and threw it in.

 

I slept well that night,

but later, troubled by dreams,

I became obsessed with closing windows.

Old Houses in an Old Country

Emigration from Ireland in the middle of the 20th century led to a countryside that was dotted with farmsteads that had an eerie stillness to them. Warm Summer afternoons sagged with the silence. The lethargy that hung over the fields had more to do with the absence of children than  draining heat. The older people remained in stifled attitudes in darkened kitchens. Sun beams seemed to purposely miss them.

 

Is this an accurate memory? I'm afraid I cannot say.

 

 

A Stranger In The Townland.

 

 

In Autumn the farmhouse

with the sun-folded field beneath its chin,

traps the daylight in its spectacles,

then flashes it away.

 

A swing hangs among the orchard's arthritic trees

without stirring;

without remembering

a frantic liveliness now reduced

to the occasional commotion of a falling fruit.

 

Once songs of apples filled the farmhouse;

but the children became photographs,

the dust settled on their frames

and soon Autumns were flying uncontrollably by.

Today, between its curiosities, a bluebottle drones.

 

Now that the conversation with the hillside

is ended, the farmhouse

with the sycamore stole

has become an eccentric;

a stranger in the townland. 

Bone-white trees

 

I like these bone-white trees by Elaine Leigh. They suggest bodies,  rivers, limbs, less trees the longer I look. 

What the artist sees:

 

these trees, like the ladies of Avignon,

shamelessly flaunting themselves,

streaming earth to heaven,

arms thrown upward, presenting so fiercely.

 

In their assemblage, formidable, fearsome,

the usual meaning is altered,

(a shared purpose outside today’s understanding),

their collective nakedness guarding some primeval dogma.

Poetry Reading in Rathmines

This Saturday,  May 9th at 2pm in Rathmines Library, Hibernian Poets and guests.

The featured poets are Brian Kirk, John Saunders, Maurice  Devitt, Amanda Bell, Philip Cummins,

John Murphy and myself. It’s part of Canalaphonic Music and Cultural Festival so make it a day.

In a fog

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 a fog can make you feel tiny in hopelessness and still this:

Fog

 

 

In the fog I was shouting

mute;

 

 

the pair of us on the mountainside

unpaired.

 

In the nowhere of everywhere,

suddenly I was everyone.

A death

Small questions hang  over us after the deaths of those close to us:

 

 

Mam’s death

 

Struggling for each breath,

(mouthfuls of air, for god’s sake!),

I said “Mam, stop working so hard”

 

Dying, and still forced to work.

“Take it easy,

 take it easy.”

 

Her hold on my hand slackened,

her eyes fell to the side,

she took it easy.

 

Did I speed her on her way?


 

CanalaphonicTrad session in Grace's Pub

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 full swing, and so will Sugán in Grace's.

(Thanks to cocklesandmussels Youtube channel for the footage, visit to find plenty more.)

Religion embedded in the machinery of war

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 some other Christian denomination, blessing cruise missiles before they were deployed in Europe.

The wording has stayed with me, the justification for carrying out a Christian ritual on instruments of mass destruction. It struck me as almost surreal. It seemed to me to be an abuse of the religion, to use one of its rituals in this context. No doubt, there are those that'll say the prayer below is appropriate, but can anyone really believe that Jesus would have blessed cruise missiles? 

 

 

 

Cruise Missiles          

Jesus, the padre prayed,

direct these missiles onto the heads

of our enemies.

 

Except that’s not what he said. He said,

we pray that these missiles will be efficient

in their function.

 

Then. Up Jesus,

ride them clean down their throats.

Except, of course, he didn’t say that either;

 

but blessed them with holy water.

After that, the missiles were dispatched,

American missionaries to Europe.

 

 

In Mayo

 

The sky:

 

            rags on bushes

            in a wintry gale.

 

The barbed-wire fence:

 

            a lunatic's music

            sprinting down the valley.

 

The mountains:

 

           tossed heads

           with their silvering sheen.

 

Telephone wire:

 

            daisy-chained voices

            humming out of tune.

 

The lake:

 

            a shirt that blew

            off a line.

 

Rowan tree:

 

            tongue on the mountain

            shaping high C.

 

 

 

Reading at Strokestown International Poetry Festival

 

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 featured poets include Iggy McGovern, Peggy Gallagher, Paddy Bushe, James Harpur,  Eva Bourke and Vincent Woods.There is also the launching of a new collection, The Boys of Bluehill, by Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin. I’ll be reading with Gerry Boland at 4.15pm on Saturday, May 2^nd.

It’s a fantastic festival with a very pleasant and laid-back ambience. Most of the events are held in Strokestown House, home of the Famine Museum, a visitors’ attraction of national (if not international) importance. Added to that , a few great pubs and you’ve got a really enjoyable weekend.

Festival Programme: http://www.strokestownpoetry.org/?page_id=1538

The following weekend, I expect to be reading with a group of poets as part of Canalaphonic Music and Culture Festival in Rathmines. Details of this should appear on the Canalaphonic website.

Canalaphonic Music and Culture Festival:  http://canalaphonic.com/category/latest-news/

Writer's Block

i.e. the block on which a writer's head is severed.

Writer’s block

 

Nothing lands on this plain;

nothing moves

but its seeping emptiness.

 

Goggled pilot

high above

this snow-gagged wilderness,

 

loop or spin,

I leave no shadow;

the paper grins.

At Sartre's Funeral

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 didn't see a photograph, so it was easier to envisage her as, almost, sitting by her hearth.

It is one of a number of poems that would not have been written if I had seen the image as it actually was. I wrote a number of poems on the subject of the felos in Galician carnaval (published in a chap-book, Felos aínda serra, by Amastra-N-Gallar, 2004; see link in side panel); I saw the images in black and white; had I seen  the many photographs which were in colour I would not have been able to write them.

They Gave Me A Chair.

 

They gave me a chair

so I could sit beside the grave,

like a woman painted in

after the funeral crowds had gathered.
 

 

And I, his lover, was looking down

as though this earth was some sort of heaven,

thinking

I'd prefer it south-facing

or he could do with a bit more space

or some other such nonsense.
 

 

Then alone again, I found,

fixed above all my memories,

the picture of a coffin

on the floor of an empty room

as seen from above.

Another Perversion

Man-made

 

 

One shot

and the lights go out

down the street,

through the town, country,

world;

all that fits so easily inside a head. 

 

Now,

tipped slightly upward

in a hardened glob of brain tissue,

a beautifully sculpted,

aerodynamically perfect,

bright, shiny bullet.

Trap

I can't remember the circumstances in which this poem was written, and that's probably a  good thing.

 

Trap

 

I was in a hawthorn,

trapped in its branches;

all arms, hands and fingers

prevailing on me not to struggle. 

I was an exhibit in a jar

ragged and shock-eyed,

praying for a passer-by

where ravens perch still for hours. 

I was a storm-blown tatter

caught in another’s stitching;

my cries drifting into the sky

nonchalant like dandelion seeds.