Workshop Blues

‘My days weep,

I think of you through my tears,

My blood red tears.’

Okay. You’ve definitely got the mood, but try not to be so gothic. Maybe leave out the blood red tears.

‘My days weep,

I think of you through my sorrow;

My lost rose’

Yeah, that’s a nice poignant note, "lost rose". Unfortunately there’s been a lot of roses over the years; can you say it without the rose. Say it as though you are describing your grief to me in person.

‘My grief is like a thorn;

It makes me cry for you,

My lost flower.’

I'd say leave out flowers altogether. Express your sadness as though we’re having a conversation across a table.

'How can I go on,

my grief cuts me like a blade

for the loss of my own darling Chrissy'

Now we're getting there, but try to be less overtly poetic. 

‘I’m very down

Since Chrissy left.

And I don't need a fucking workhop to say that.'

St Féichín arrives on High Island

It is recounted in the Annals of the Ciarraige Aí that St Féichín, having been  invited back to Connacht to convert the people of Omey, one day said to the elders that he had experienced a vision in which God directed him to build a church on an island out beyond; where the fires of hell nightly sinks down into the sea.

It is said that he led a group of monks followed by the people of Omey down to the shore, from where he proceeded to walk into the tide. The monks followed him, wading waist-deep into water, beseeching him to turn back, but he refused. Never once looking back, never once turning his face from a point somewhere out on the horizon, he ploughed onward into waves, leaving his half-bodied, distraught followers looking after him with tears, hidden by the spray, streaming down their faces.

It was at the precise moment his head disappeared beneath the waves that they saw him lifted out the water, fully upright and heading still in the direction he had chosen.  He walked on rounded, smooth rocks that seemed to materialise with each step he took, and in this way walked onward, out from Omey, even though it was a rough and unpleasant sea.

They watched him grow small and smaller as he walked over the waves; many felt he was leaving them, but a cry went up and crowds ran to the currachs, dragged them out onto the water and followed him.

Four miles he walked, through surging seas and blinding spray. The currachs following him, tossed light as splinters on the waves, voices travelling fitfully over the din, spume carried horizontally into the faces of the monks and oarsmen. Rain was hail in their faces; cloud, sky and ocean their only visible destination; but they kept rowing.

It is believed that when Féichín arrived at the sheer face of High Island, a stone leapt into the air so he stepped directly onto dry land.

The weather eased, a hemisphere of calm settled on the grass-roofed rocks. And as the currachs entered into the shelter, they saw him on a cliff-top, a five-pointed star exulting in the emerging evening light, the sun from behind the clouds:fingers of God radiating around him.

The oars lifted from the waters drained streams like spittle back into the sea; gannets were easing along the thermals, and Féichín had the eyes of Omey on him.

Meeting an attractive acquaintance on her night out

I meet her outside a nightclub

CHRIST!

Unsure suddenly of making sensible

must speak composed

must maintain face articulate

my full windscreen

and me one instantly pony puny small

feeling stuck

totally

decide

to make me scarce

Flame

Nurtured in the bend of each other,

shaped, turned, unshaped,

we travel light as air.

Time furled in this one flame,

ourselves, our dreams one;

this momentary incandescence everything.

On The Beach

When, at the end of the beach, I turned

to face that gleaming scimitar of strand,

the filigreed waves  hurdling landward,

ripple patterns beneath my feet ,

the scythe of oyster-catchers by the water,

their chevron markings perfect in that light,

I was euphoric in the magnificence of it all?

And as I walked, I felt the completeness of my belonging,

impermanence too like those scarves of sand blowing

ahead of the wind, and not at all sad for that;

recognizing suddenly that transience is the definitive condition;

that the earth unmakes everything, and, in never-ending cycles,

brings it to shine at the edge of the sea.

In this mood

In this mood

things become more defined:

the silver sugar bowl, beyond reflective,

becomes the collection of objects around it;

the shadows between the fruit in the bowl

as dark and mysterious as those in a forest;

scale somehow immaterial; detail precise.

Colours become experiences: I look inside red

as I’d look into the flow of a river; browns

have the richness of burnished mahogany,

a grain within the colour, a dynamic.

Reaching for the sugar, I watch my hand, from mid-arm,

travelling over the table like a boat heading out to sea.

It seems my eyes are sucking out my energy;

creating this crisp perception from my concrete,

leaving me in darkness amongst the brilliance of things.

The Beginning of Science

Long before Saint Patrick,

leather-footed musicians

would keyhole dawn

to catch the sun in ice candles.

They played those flames on strings,

their spikes of sound,

for children’s whistling eyes and lunatics,

who, in their distance, danced.

Fire caged in ice, ice in their hand;

music lit from within;

ambition began;

separation became a beauty.

Brian O'Doherty Exhibition in Roscommon

 Roscommon Arts Centre is launching its re-developed visual art space with ‘Coming Home’, an exhibition of works by Brian O’Doherty.  The title is apt as O’Doherty was born in Ballaghaderreen in 1928, and received the freedom of Co. Roscommon in 2018. The exhibition opens on Friday, May 31^st, and continues until July 26^th.

Blue Man

There is a man,

dead of night,

clutching his shins,

making a hemisphere

to cage his pain.

 A blue man,

                                     middle of the street,

                                     roaring,

                                     arguing

                                     with traffic markings.

There is a man,

he is a plastic bag

filled with his own storm,

the white line

 pouring into his mouth.

Glass

                                              In the empty house,

I accidentally touched something against a glass;

it instantly, and quiet beautifully exclaimed bong.

Not a cry of pain or discomfort, more a declaration

of being. Bong in a clear, bright, unwavering voice,

neither male nor female but indisputably glass;

not any glass, but this glass three quarters full of water.

Storm

The storm is keeping me awake;
the dogs, discordant tuning forks;
the whine of lost souls in the electricity wires.


I’m tossing in the gusts,
waiting for the morning light to clank back
but knowing it’s beyond the gap
where the storm is crowding in.


Your unhappy face turning away
to hide the tears, and
the storm banging on that nail
all night, all night, the whole night long.

In Mayo

          

The sky:

            rags on bushes

            in a wintry gale.

Barbed-wire fence:

            a lunatic's music

            sprinting down the valley.

The mountains:

            a row of tossed heads

            with their silvery 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.

Fences

A rewrite of an earlier post. So often it boils down to hanging out the laundry not fully washed.

Fences

Imagine the countries of Europe erecting Auschwitzian wire fences

with no man’s land between: grassy lanes of ragworth, thistle and buttercup.

Imagine, like water released into channels, migrants entering these paths,

growing from trickle to torrent, eventually filling them; a teeming mass

constantly jostled onward to no destination. The seasons passing,

summer to winter, the grassy paths turned to mud, then frozen under snow;

a metre to either side, border guards watching with disinterested expressions.

Imagine these human streams flowing across the map of Europe

serenaded with the music of its civilization, Hungary, Austria, the Czech Republic:

Mozart, Bartok, Mahler…….,

and the migrant contemplating freedom beyond that barbed wire fence;

a perspective so horrifying less than the span of one lifetime ago.

Perspective

I’ve been seeing January migrations of geese in the powder blue sky above Dublin;

those ever-shifting arrows sign-posting exotic, faraway countries are in my thoughts

when a full-stop moves from the text into the blank margin of the page I’m reading.

I watch it moving up the page, wondering how much purpose a dot-sized creature can have?

At the top it turns right, making for the gorge between the two pages;

its slow progress suggesting rough terrain: clints and grykes, a burren’s uneven pavements.

A newscaster’s voice cuts into the moment  ̶  95 people dead on a street in Kabul  ̶

I lose sight of the full stop;

how high up, I wonder, must one be for our atrocities to be so small that they appear insignificant.

Three views of the universe

I am sitting on a park bench,

 a pool of sunlight before me,

 a cosmos of flies

are stars in Brownian motion.

A city park after midnight.

I am arrested by moths in lamp-light,

their sudden brilliance, meteorites

streaking from invisibility to invisibility.

A stream in afternoon sunlight,

 the innumerable scintillations, pulsing.

Again I see the universe;

and, like beauty, it has no scale.