On Seeing Cnoc Mordán from the Clare Coast

I have a notion of beauty that is a wild place;

a grey desolate lake beneath a craggy ridge,

a windswept landscape of stunted thorns,

strewn boulders and scattered outcrops,

furze blooming out of season, dun-coloured reeds,

bronzed bracken broken double by the Atlantic gales.

But it is not the place, not really, it is the girl that lived beside that lake,

in the streaming Connemara gales that swept  her hair,

gave the colour to her face; sallowed her skin

so her eyes shone sharp as needles; gave her the same grace

as the reeds by the water,  slender and graceful. That’s how I saw her;

and now I see the ridge across Galway Bay forty, closer to fifty years later.

Unmerciful time; the place is unchanged but I am old,

and she is old, and the dreams that were young and beautiful

are now like the bracken broken double by the Autumn gales.

But it is not the girl, not really, it is the notions in our heads still hanging 

though November has come, and the sunlight on Loch Con Aortha,

long past summer, full of the cold clarity that comes with Winter.   

Passion

                              Pared down

to tongues and mouths,

we became one.

One moment.

The following moment

steals the previous;

and so it goes.

Kavanagh and I by the Grand Canal

Sodden in driving rain,

watching our  lives

bobbing on the water

while the colour-drained city

shivers backwards;

the two of us lamenting the sins

we never committed at all.

But you outdo me

having made this place your own;

ducking with the waterfowl

into the city’s murk,

claiming no part of it,

and always happiest

when the rain’s flaying.

Fine Art from Spain

When I saw this painting by Regina Carbayo, a Spanish artist who has been living and working for a number of years in Cork, my immediate (gut) reaction was ‘wow’, and still is; undiminished.

The painting has a classic, timeless composition and palette. The faces are Spanish, and, as other Spanish artists have been known to do, the painting playfully cocks a snook at itself and the whole genre, through its subjects’ exaggerated hauteur and feigned disdain.

Here they are, bound to classic portraiture by props that would for long times past have suggested learning and aesthetic high-mindedness, trapped in that age-old  format, formally posed and extremely self-conscious, faces melting downward as only  the faces could be permitted to move within the strict composition.

Those expressions draw you in to rich fun of the image, hold your attention, and call you back to look again and again.

The Swan

Evening light;

you and I walking beside the river;

the gold coins of leaves littering our path,

the world around us turning quiet and serious

beneath heavy clouds lost in thought.

Then a swan lights like a match;

its wings aflame over the water, in the water,

magnificent as magnesium burning.

We stop to marvel, and find ourselves wistful;

the swan is us, our souls' yearning for beauty.

Last Circle

Congregated in a circle in a field in Cork,

backs hunched dark against the driving rain,

heads covered, faces hidden, unfathomable

presences humming low

-- the sea coiling inside a mountain,

the wind trapped inside a hollow oak,

gale stuck in the high stone tower

all day, all the rain long --.

Incantation, tumulus and ditch, tumulus and ditch

concentrically droning outward,

draining into the earth’s pinna, swallow-hole,

the whorl of light, green and time.

Fatal Impact

A word of thanks to Thomas McRae for sending his recent collection of poems 'Fatal Impact' (iUniverse). For information : https://www.iuniverse.com/Bookstore/BookSearchResults.aspx?Search=thomas%20McRae

I give you

This tree's dripping fruit

to place in your mouth

to ripen your tongue.

The water guttering down

these green leaves

to be a trellis of fingers

about you.

This soft drizzle of sunlight

to fall gentle as the petals

of meadowsweet on your cheeks.

This bindweed and all tendrils

to hook and bind

                   our desires together.

Statement

My demons know no boundaries;

I am a propeller

blinded by my own agitation.

When I come to

I’ll be devastated,

and stamp out fires that never burned.

Passing

An old man with pipe and stick

is sitting on a kitchen chair

beside a rick of turf

in the field before his house;

there is a mountain in the background.

One Summer’s day, passing,

I watched a curlicue of smoke rise

from the man’s pipe,

gyrate in front of his eyes,

then disappear

to become part of the nothing,

the blue sky not far from Achill Sound.
A moment,
one of the fleeting series,
the passing that is a lifetime.

After The Bucketing Rain

After the rain's

  bucketing,

    plaiting fingers                    

     flowed,                            

      long limbs                     

        lisped                            

         and fat drops                           

         

          tock tocked                          

           enchanted rhythm

            on brimful

             barrels.

              Beneath blue clouds'                                                    

             electric light,

            dumb drops                         

           exclaimed                         

           

          tipsy seconds

         to every

        listening ear:                

      after shower             

    magic

   tock ticking            

           suspended time.              

Iceland's Banned Ad

Banned by the UK's broadcast code for advertising practice (BCAP) for carrying a political message. But, just a few weeks on from the WWF's  chilling  Living Planet Report  in which it was  stated that there has been a 60% decline in the size of populations of mammals, birds, fish, reptiles, and amphibians in the last 40 years (a staggering 89% in South and Central America since 1970), wouldn't it be brilliant if some more supermarket chains delivered the same message? 

If we have any thought for the wellbeing of our children, grandchildren and their children to come   this along with climate change must be addressed now. The Report can be downloaded at https://www.worldwildlife.org/pages/living-planet-report-2018?link=txt2

Take a look at the ad, and post it on.

Social Work

  

Do you remember our hospital visit;

he asked for his present?

Present !

And dying the only life

left in him.

There we were, the two of us,

at the end of his deathbed

and our hands,

great big empty sunbursts.

Certainly, we were young;

but I thanked God when he died.

and then he was dead;

(remembering my father's death)

and then he was dead;

breathing stopped;

eyes closed;

still warm.

I stared at his face,

for the first time

without life inside it.

I stared and knew:

that body

was never him at all.

The Man-Owl

A man imagines himself an owl and perches in a tree.

All summer unseen, in winter completely exposed;

sitting; eyes closed, open, closed; otherwise still.

A group of children have collected beneath him;

they are throwing taunts, then sticks then stones;

he makes himself smaller, like a hedgehog in a tree.

The townspeople have now gathered beneath him.

A dim view was taken of the stone-throwing,

they have called fire brigade, ambulance and police.

Two ladders extended, one each side of the man-owl,

and two firemen straightening, one by one, his fingers,

talons he has hooked around the branch over his head.

It was considered wise not to have a view of the garden;

the window of his room faces the opposite wing;

a television, left on 24/7, masks the sounds of the wind.