Not normal

Outsider

I was born in a tree.

Before words rustled,

thoughts rustled.

Caught, netted in November; 

the leaves fallen,

I had my ten fingers fast around a branch. 

They felled the tree

rather than see me in it.

After that, they stuck their words into my mouth.

Where The Poetry Comes From

Fathomless blue;

Blue sky.

Two swallows proclaiming it

Are extravagant

Dancers in an empty ballroom.

A church bell chimes

Two, three, five o’clock;

No matter.

Tracing curves to unending time;

A route to south Africa ?

Fathomed true;

Blue sky.

Artur Widak Exhibition in Rathmines College's Culture Night Programme

Artur Widak  is a Polish photojournalist, currently based in Dublin. His striking images have been highly acclaimed and published internationally; publications include The Guardian, The Huffington Post, The Independent (UK) and many more. This Friday, Sept 16th, Culture Night in Ireland, his moving and thought-provoking exhibition 'The Path to Freedom: pictures illustrating the journey refugees are taking from war-torn countries to Europe' can be seen in Rathmines Town Hall between 5 and 9pm.

Artur Widak and budding photographer

  

The Tide's High Blood Mark

  

                 (Before The Firing Squad)

Ready

           

            The sun's tide

            is licking me.

           

Aim

            In one eye-full I have examined every brick,

            seen the crack in that window,     

       `   the wasp on the flag

            and still felt the sun

            and heard the voice right down

            to a bubble on his vocal cords.                                        

Fire

            The sun travelled its 93 million miles.

            Threw my shadow against the bricks.

            My shadow stretched

            My shadow stretched

            My shadow stretched

            And the sun said

            That my shadow was as tall and slender

            As any wave that ever rose

            That ever rose out of the full tide

            Climbed and stretched its arms

            Over the bricks of this barracks wall.

A Culture Night Miscellany in Rathmines

I'm really looking forward to joining  Kevin Hora, Maggie Breheny and Anne Marie McGowan for A Culture Night Miscellany of poetry, music, story and song in Rathmines Town Hall on Friday, Sept. 16th. And it will be a particular pleasure to welcome fellow poet Jane Clarke to Rathmines College.

2016 has been a good year for Jane, but, then again, all the recent years  have been good for her. This year she was winner of the Hennessy Literary Award for Poetry and was shortlisted for the Royal Society of Literature 2016 Ondaatje Literary Award. Her first collection, The River, was published by Bloodaxe Books in 2015.  In  2014 she won the Listowel Writers' Week Poetry Collection Award, the 2014 Trocaire/Poetry Ireland Competition and was  shortlisted for the 2014 Hennessy Literary Awards, as she was in 2013. I don't have to, but maybe I'll stop there. Suffice it to say, she is a cut above........., but then, like myself, she does come from Roscommon.

Jane Clarke

Do we torture what we don't like the look of ?

Marine.

Prostrate on the beach,

a slop of sea pulse,

a glob black as chewed tobacco

fallen from the lip.

My mother said -

the sea is sick,

it's breath on the beach is bad

and its puke is scattered

all over the sand.

She said

all its pin points are boiling,

its stomach heaves;

that it will yellow our skin

if it gets half a chance.

Then this morning,

when something with small eyes

came out of the sea,

I pelted stones at it

till the tractor came.

Old Man

The tyre hanging in the garden

is proof that children used to  play there;

but in the breeze it’s a shaking head.

Today snowflakes flying by

leave the sycamore white on its northern side.

The garden is still: no snowman, no footprints.

The tyre is an old man;

with an old voice, he explains:  

“I cannot remember names; truth is

I hung too close to the trunk to be of use;

the sycamore branches bolted upwards;

to this day they’ve never spread out.”  

A poem with a Mantegna painting

The Lamentation over the Dead Chris

Mantegna, in his lifetime, was criticised for imitating sculpture: the loss of warmth that could be achieved in painting from real life. In the case of the dead Christ, however,  it is the marble of  the dead body that makes it perfect. The perspective draws more of your attention; then the suffering, fixed  stone-like in the image, fixes it in a similar way in your mind, and  it remains there: indestructible marble.

I am fascinated by the cold solidness of corpses; always drawn to run my fingertips down the cheek of a dead friend or loved one. The memory stays in my fingertips, and, somehow, it helps to know that the person is now changed to stone.

  

The Viewing.

Dead: the colour of old cream,

his eyes shuttered shut;

so neat, besuited and slim,

weight he lost dying.

They made a basket of his fingers

with a rosary spilling down;

everyone said he looked lovely

but then I touched his face

and it wasn’t him at all.

Goodnight to my wished for lover

Goodnight, 

goodnight.

̶.  I’d like to smash goodnight down onto your head

                
and with those stars write

love messages across your sky   ̶.




Goodnight.

The Fire

A passion/a destruction. I am in a fire. I am the fire. 

It is a place. I am within it. 

It is a destruction. That will give.

The fire defines me. I give it coal. 

It gives me.

A Brief Note on an Imminent Famine.

Everyone here will starve:

each bone will be a stripe,

each hand a bowl,

each leg a stick.

Then there'll be the gluttony

of cameras:

our threadbare skin 

will be devoured,

our eyes exported

shining like pickles.

A Snagging Memory

Before The End.

The bedside lamp shone

in the pool of her eye;

it made her teeth translucent,

runnelled her face.

Daylight and I were reluctant visitors;

the  room smelling of trapped breath,

sickness and decay made me anxious

that I might inhale her disease;

and all I loved gone,

all dwindled down to duty.

Fragile Nature

Interference.

A fish is dreaming,

elbow deep.

With my fingertip

I draw a herring-bone

across his heaven;

he bolts.

Now the lake dreams,

empty like a canyon.

What Does He See Where I See Only Stone?

What does he see where I see only stone?

The man is still, his gaze fixed on the ground

but that gaze compels you to look again;

in such  moments a mind might overreach the stars.

I see my reflection, he says;

I see my hair no longer covers my head,

its silver ring above my ears, he says,

is like gorse cleared from a hill-top.

And, he says, I see the child struggling

in the young branches of childhood,

the school doors fanning him on and on

through corridors of captivity, a whirligig

through years, disremembering his own footsteps.

I see the would-be lover, and he loved his hair;

he put a shine in his eye like I polish a shoe;

and his full bracelet of teeth; my God, he could smile.

I see how time subtracts: aging dreams

till they become hobbled old goats that have outstared you,

till they have become unbelievable.

My young loves reflected back have their young faces still

but I would be afraid to see them now.

My plans and projects are shunted, rusting old carriages;

I don't visit them anymore.

The old man's arms are folded so fingers lie like stripes

on his right arm, forage in the dark woolen sleeve

of his left. His head is slightly forward,

his eyes unblinking as though entranced

by weeds growing on the floor of a pond.

I see too that I never held the reins of a life,

that indifference is a colander, indecision has the grasp

of a hand without fingers. Days are punched down

like receipts onto a nail; named, counted, collected,

they grow into months; life flitting across the pages 

of a calendar, falling  into the holes between Christmases.

And I remember those Christmases

long ago when I was young, the totting up  ̶

over a drink   ̶  of departed faces and the wishes,

the wish-bone skinny wishes for the coming year

that smouldered beside a glass of stout and then went out.

I see those faces whose roots entangled with my own,

how arrogance blinded me so I could not see

it was the carpet of their roots that buoyed me up

until recently, feeling them slip away,

feeling the cold gaps they’ve left around me, I discovered

it wasn’t I that put the colours in my head,

and with that discovery much has toppled

that hindered my view. I see, as though from a height,

my head is indistinguishable from all the others

rushing like froth from this life that we call

living.

Now his face is raised, his eyes red-rimmed

with the racing bobbin that’s in his head:

I saw the ground and the scuffed toe to my shoe;

a lifetime might have no other measure than 

its number of worn out shoes.

Thou shalt not

THE GARDEN OF LOVE

             

    from Songs of Experience by William Blake

I went to the Garden of Love,

   And saw what I never had seen;

A Chapel was built in the midst,

   Where I used to play on the green.

And the gates of this Chapel were shut,

   And ‘Thou shalt not’ writ over the door;

So I turned to the Garden of Love

   That so many sweet flowers bore.

And I saw it was filled with graves,

   And tombstones where flowers should be;

And priests in black gowns were walking their rounds,

   And binding with briars my joys and desires.

The same theme appearing in the myth of the Piper’s Stones: piper and dancers lithified for having defiled the Sabbath; it refers to the change in culture on the arrival of catholicism in Ireland. A number of neolithic stone circles inside and outside Ireland are referred to as the Piper’s  Stones.

from ‘Above Ground Below Ground’

In those days the piper played the music of streams:

fast flowing runs, sprays that erupted in feet,

blood hitting high C, dancers whirling dizzy with life.       

Then a new order.

That day on Brewel Hill, piper and dancers broke the Sabbath,

angered a god, who having decreed that music-making was subversive;

had gaiety transfigured to stone.

Athgreaney Piper's Stones