Where grey is the most beautiful colour: Inis Meáin

Piper's Music

The piper is a mythological entity, so, free from shackles, his significance is unlimited.

Now the piper plays the notes of earth:

the slow air of the soil settling beneath our feet,

the centuries that have run like water,

the season-spattered years of crying, laughter,

wars and famine;

the bones beneath us, the resurrected bones;

the notes of time long gone, times never been.

He plays the cycles of life and death, mountain to sea-bed,

flower to seed.

His notes are the snowfall of white-thorn in June,

flurries of its petals in January.

The air is an air long gone, still coming;

he plays it slow; too slow for running ears;

too low for ears never listening.

photograph

I find you among the strewn things in the attic

and pull you clear.

You all but demanded to be lifted

but then go mute.

I drop you back, watch a moment to see you settle;

you’re giving a porcelain vase your lop-sided smile.

It’s not the memories that holds me that bit longer;

but your smile in that heap of junk.

Smoke

In the bar in which they used to meet,

I see him, in what was their place;

eyes fixed on the floor-boards before him,

cigarette smoke dreaming upward.

And then I see her sinuously, in silver tresses,

climbing the light; her slender body uncurling

from his downturned head, and I understand,

she, a resurrected soul, is leaving him.

At One End Of A Bench.

At one end of a bench

an old man wearing Winter clothes

regards the fountains and Summer

through melt-water irises.

This man needs my ear to be a conch

so that he can call to the past down these auditory canals.

And when he calls, his wife and sons will resurrect,

return, reverse like filings into a family.

It is mid-morning in Stephen's Green;

the usual sounds: clacking fowl and fountain symphonies,

outside the thrash of traffic and voices.

In a moment:

two strangers on a bench are traveling backwards to Mayo;

elsewhere a beggar has recreated himself in a bank window

and somewhere, busy in a kitchen, a woman is conversing

though the voice that answers has not been heard for years.

Faint

Strange to say, those memories are barely more than water now;

fluid, indistinct, and always rushing away from me;

that they were ever more is immaterial, I am not who I was.

I do, of course, acknowledge that you have been part of that change,

and for the good, I have not forgotten your part, and I am thankful.

But I have difficulty remembering you. Your face refuses to settle,

more or less as water spills, it refuses to fix in my mind;

your voice comes and goes, otherworldly and faint, like a signal on the shortwave.

More strikingly though, your spirit has become remote from me;

not by choice,  but with the passing of time, the mountain of featureless days

that I’ve kicked up behind me, the dust of accumulated years between us;

distance has anaesthetised me;  I no longer remember the feeling of you being here.

Sing Love

On his deathbed, when speech was gone,

we deciphered groans

and muddled on.

I remember she, visiting, took his hand

and for want of words,

he hummed to her

so tunelessly, it was not a tune,

but,  never in all his life

did he sing love so beautifully.

From her mother’s face.

  for Kay, in memory of Geraldine

At two months, she absorbs her mother’s face,

all gentleness and giving;

smiles back without a care.

Young girl, she sees encouragement, pride,

reprimand or disappointment;

learning, reading that alphabet of lines.

As teenager, she must stretch the grain,

find different measures in new faces;

re-arrange the markers of her life.

Easy smiles and shared frowns;

in adulthood, she returns to the home

of her mother’s face.

And when those eyes are finally closed,

and the face is still, its full story written;

she carries her mother’s face onward.

The best part

Falling in love is the best part;

when all is conjecture and optimism,

and your boats are high in the water.

You smile in expectancy,

in a world all giving;

and if there is taking, that’s fair too,

as you draw your duvet of pleasurable

daydreams more snugly about you.

Alone and Loneliness

Here, I have become accustomed to silence,

and silence falling,

as darkness falls.

I have learned to fill it with my own voice,

answer my questions,

debate my answers.

And sometimes I talk to you,

answer as you would,

and, in silence, nod agreement.

Page

I know a good poem. And the difficulty in breaking out of the chains of my own inability to achieve that poem (and this one ain't it either). I see how few poets do, and  I truly marvel at them.

Page

This rectangle is my exercise yard.

Snow bare now,

all my poems start,

haul themselves across the space,

stumbling in chains,

dreaming freedom.

The Country Child

       The Country Child.

The country child

runs in and out of rain showers

like rooms;

sees the snake-patterns in trains,

the sun's sword-play in the hedges

and the confetti in falling elder blossoms;

knows the humming in the telegraph poles

as the hedgerow's voice

when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting;

watches bees emerge from the caverns

at the centres of buttercups,

feels no end to a daisy chain,

feels no end to an afternoon;

walks on ice though it creaks;

sees fish among ripples and names them;

is conversant with berries

and hides behind thorns;

slips down leaves, behind stones;

fills his hands with the stream

and his hair with the smell of hay;

recognizes the chalkiness

of the weathered bones of sheep,

the humour in a rusted fence,

the feel of the white beards that hang there.

The country child

sees a mountain range where blue clouds

are heaped above the horizon,

sees a garden of diamonds

through a hole scraped

in the frost patterns of his bedroom window

and sees yet another world

when tints of cerise and ochre

streak the evening sky.

He knows no end, at night

he sneaks glimpses of Heaven
through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky. 

Leaving

The boat pulls away from the pier

while the houses are still sleeping.

I’m looking back at the empty windows

as though my leaving should mean something;

it doesn’t to them, but does to me.

I have fallen in love with this town, a fleeting affair;

being here has changed me,

and I know that mark is indelible.

The sky and the ocean are one; they are the vastness

into which I will throw this memory.

I will never be here again, so I allow myself watch, 

almost solemnly, as it flattens into my past.

Black

Lime green, grass green,

beer brown, peat brown;

pink, blue and yellow flowers;

a profusion of June colours

circular like a mountain lake;

and shimmering over all

a milky way of  bog cotton.

I gazed at it for a long time

and couldn’t smile for week.

The Kiss

Brancusi's The Kiss

You and I

made our happiness whole

inside the circle of our arms