Crosses in a snow-covered military cemetery.

These crosses seem to rise from oblivion

and carry oblivion on their shoulders.

In their ranks, each is unaware of the next,

as though the world must teeter on him alone.

And silence is the law, since all around is silent;

each one white as the ground he stands on.

Workshop Tips for Poetry Beginners

1.       Check that details included as factual are accurate.

2.       Check that words you have used do not have unplanned, unhelpful connotations.

3.       Colloquialisms should be used for definite purpose or effect; casually inserted, they often jar.

4.       Use ‘like’ and ‘as’ sparingly e.g. the train crawled out of the station like a caterpillar.

5.       Avoid explaining yourself; imagery or other poetic mechanisms may provide a necessary clarification.

6.       Avoid moralizing.

7.    Beware of lines you really like in your poems; if they are 'stand out' to you, they'll quite possibly unbalance the boat.

8.       Avoid changes of style in a poem, unless there is a specific purpose (e.g. the sudden appearance of rhyme).

9.       Read your poetry out loud to check cadence.

10.   One poor (lazy) line sinks a poem.

11.   Engage with art of all types regularly; poetry is art, artistic taste brushes off on your work.

12.   Compile a list of events/experiences/sights from your past and present life that could spark poetry.

13.   Look at day to day events in terms of their writing potential and take notes.

14.   Create a mood for your creativity with evocative music, images, smells etc.

15.   Poems seldom arrive in finished state; be patient, leave them to sit, and edit them after a reasonable period of cooling off time.

16.   Retain older versions of poems. Rewriting can change the tenor of a piece of work. It may transpire that you have more than one poem among a series of drafts.

17.   Old poems, that have been unsuccessful, can prove excellent sources of lines that, stitched together, recombine into  new and successful poems.
18. Get yourself a critic, who sees the world your way, but knows enough to give informed opinions.

The Lake

The lake sees.

It draws the world’s beauty into itself

and is replete.

I may admire,

but must not dip my hand into the water,

for worry destroys beauty.

Well, my friend

Well, my friend, our time is gone;

you are dead, and I have left that group.

Our friendship was the sole tie,

and it was a friendship, though only you

and I ever knew. The world is a cold place;

our time is passed, and, in truth,

there is nothing to mark our closeness.

I keep it in my head; it is precious to me;

beyond that there is no proof, no evidence;

the memory goes with us, and, I suppose

that is the way it should be.

A happy thought for St Patrick's Day

The weight of these beautiful things:

pool of sunlight among the trees;

scurrying shadows of April clouds;

scintillations on water flashing into my eyes;

brilliance of rime on a January morning footpath;

a blackbird’s notes spilling down;

magnificent blur of a kingfisher’s flight;

smell of lavender, of newly mown hay;

the sound of wind in the telegraph wires,

of children playing in the schoolyard.

The weight of these beautiful things is naught.

Films in your Face

I am watching the film in your face:

your enjoyment crinkling

at the corners of your eyes,

teeth catching your lower lip,

blood draining from the pressure,

draining back as soon.

Furrows on your forehead,

I am smiling at your absorption,

want to stub them out with my thumb

but you catch me looking

so I turn back to the screen

till your face is mine again.

The words on my lips

remain unsaid. A time may come

when, not having words,

I will wish I had spoken; a time

when love being tested, I could say 

I used to watch films in your face.

Under the Bridge

I sat under the bridge, our old den;

flung out a net to catch memories,

and sat watching the water’s  steely

mail grind past. It was cold, 


and I would not have chosen to sit there 

at this time of year;  life is miserly

to those who want a moment; I needed to stop,

 to look back, to feel my belonging.

Oh yes, I pulled in some cold fish;

 cold for their distance, estrangement; 

and cold too  for recognizing, as the years flow,

 the emptied out treasure chests of childhood.

Your Last Day

On the day you died,

All the important global events

Happened in your bedroom.

Gathered around your bed,

We followed your breathing

like we were following the events of a war.

And when the last breath

Left your mouth,

It was our Hiroshima.

Moving House

I am casting away the jetsam of forty years;

the once indispensable, now surplus cargo of a life

that failed to reach its destinations.

I am throwing away the evidence of fanciful notions,

ambitions that were too far out thin branches;

hopes that were shining bright, I left to wither.

I am casting them off without glancing back;

not for lack of regret or care, but knowing that

disappointment is no starting block for a new life.

The Clam

I picked a clam from the beach, a beautiful thing.

Its valves exquisitely symmetrical, its surface lustrous,

ridges swept in a graceful wave outward from the beak.

I keep it on the mantelpiece; it reminds me of perfect love:

the symmetry, the wave, the gleam, the perfection of it.

It reminds me of how we created a love that enfolded us

in a warm shared self-knowledge, a completeness of pairing; 

that symmetry of happiness apparent even to a passer-by.

Stream

              

                       Sinuous,

          the stream weaving braids:

 its muscles,

               solving the puzzles

                       set by strewn boulders,

              runnelling down geologic time.

Always motion; plaits,

      light and water indivisible,

               streaming moss, cloud, over-hanging bush;

                                  quietude or turbulence

                          on the whim of a sharp edge,

                                    creating music

           from the shiftings of time.

A Rose For Valentine's

Imagine an embrace: enfolding, encircling.

Imagine it warm, not intense, but lush pleasure.

Imagine it deep within other embraces; similarly

warm, encircling; similarly pleasurable. Imagine

it folds embrace outward to embrace, warm, not

intense, lush pleasure; circles folded within circles.

Imagine all is embrace, encircling, warm pleasure.

The Boy Who Watched For Apparitions

  Goodnight to the twin moons

  stretched along the railway tracks

  outside Roscommon.

  My night-time window halved

  with those trains rushing across the glass,

  strips of film filled with their own lives:

  adventurers and bon-vivants,

  whose strings of lights recreated as they passed

  the grassy slope, the elder bushes,

  the buffer with the hole in the side;

  strangers oblivious to such little worlds

  and to the boy who watched for apparitions

  from his bedroom window.

  And in a moment they were gone,

  leaving the darkness darker and the boy listening,

  trying to gauge where the sounds 

  finally disappeared into the wind.

 

  What lay beyond that window-world ?

 

  The station to the right,

  the white gates to the left,

  and then..........

 

  Now I remember those film strips

  sailing through that pitch emptiness; 

  sometimes they were only ruffed impressions

  when the window was full of pouring rain.

  I remember how my imagination filled like a can

  when all that was left was the headlight's beam

 over the trees of Bully's Acre.

  And there is often disappointment in these poems;

  the disappointment of that place beyond

  where the rhythms of trains were reclaimed by the wind.

Still Island*

The trees make a cracked sky;

beyond that, they make no sense at all.

There is so little soil beneath them;

they grow into deformity, arguing

for each inch of the ground they stand on.

Heaped stones made the island. Hands:

imagine the skin, softened by the lake water,

shredded by sharp-edged slabs.

What soil gathered, gathered by growth

of moss, beetle, moth wing.

The water gurgles between the stones,

still puzzling at the intrusion.

The hands are shining somewhere between

Cassiopeia and Cepheus.

The trees whistle to the birds.

It is thought that Still Island at Baile Dhubh Loch near Corr na Móna on the Galway Mayo border is a crannóg (a man-made island,  built for safe dwelling, and once quite common in Ireland and Scotland).

Patsy's Life

Patsy

Patsy thinks of sex, but without faces;

he often thinks this way

because there never was a welcoming face,

so he's never had sex,

and this July he'll be 46.

Patsy lives alone, and is settled in his ways;

people think him strange,

never ask him to join them in the pub

or wherever;

‘he’s getting more peculiar’, they say.

Patsy has an office job;

colleagues bid him good morning at coffee-break

but sit at another table.

He eats his lunch in the Arms bar,

and always sits facing a wall.