Chagall’s Lovers

Chagall’s lovers curl around each other.

This is the way they talk to each other,

smile to each other,

insinuate their feelings to each other.

It is the way two bodies become one,

yin and yang;

it is their completeness in each other:

Chagall’s lovers’ curl.

Smallest Coin of Life

Albinoni’s adagio is playing. Behind closed eyes,

I fly this basket of bones and am free as sunlight;

not pacing back and forth the confines of a skull

fed by vessels circulating blood.

I am free.

This is the least freedom I have claim to;

the least freedom all have claim to; the smallest coin of life.

Once on Ardmore Beach

I’ve been walking the moon’s bright path over the sea

from Ardmore beach for too many years.

My notion of the magical: waves coming ashore

like the game we played as children,

a hand slapping down as the one beneath slips away.

The sound of the waves rounding a headland into the distance;

another time, another world.

The beacons on the far shore flashing, as remote, as poignant

as the piping of waders lost in the pockets of darkness.

Our last night.

And a glittering moonlit highway through it all,

in dreams we’d walk it, looking the moon full in the face, laughing,

magnified, colossal, in all that wilderness.

Runaway

Home, a bar code on your cells;

it won’t be left behind;

the more you try, the wider the crater grows.

I hear it in the shrillness of your retorts,

its lightning is in your eyes;

you forever feeding the vulture on your shoulder;

your frustration a lasso in the hands of home.

The swirl of home is in the pockets of your mind;

you live in its flux.

You choose to run with it or against it,

flow or trip.

Gagged voices don’t make sweeter listening.

Feichín's Bliss on Omey

In the play of sunlight and ripples,

that dance of the lake’s finery,

Feichín sees the splendour of Heaven

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the fish, silver treasure of the ocean,

the plenty that graces his table,

Feichín enjoys their steam-play with his nose

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the carpet of brightly coloured flowers,

bee-droning machair near the shore,

Feichín antcipates the sweetness of honey

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

In the uninhibited song of the lark,

sky-high notes from among the dunes,

Feichín feels the joy of God’s presence

and sends his thanks to the Lord.

Old Lovers

Mountain and cloud are coupling again;

mountain haunches pressed into cloud stomach;

cloud taking mountain’s contours, moving slowly,

driving slowly all the day.

Old lovers familiar with each others’ bodies;

the touch and feel,

the graceful flow of their love-making

blurring into ecstasy.

‘Make America Great Again’: gateway for a fascist

Normally, one wouldn't presume to comment on the politics of another country, in the case of Trump however, we're all impacted. Whether that be through his total disinterest in preserving the global environment, his unconcealed racism, his misinformation in relation to the pandemic, his disrespect for women, his disfiguring approach to diplomacy worldwide, the ugliness of attitudes that will unfortunately be gleaned by some of  our children. 

His lack of sympathy/empathy for swathes of his fellow citizens, something he shamefully doesn't even try to conceal is disgraceful (here, I can't help but remember how he playfully lobbed paper towels in hurricane-ravaged Puerto Rico). Some people, including himself, believe that he should not be shown any disrespect as it disrespects the institution of President; that tendency however started when he himself showed scanty regard for the position he holds.

‘Make America Great Again’: gateway for a fascist

There is a supreme but beleaguered nation

Its greatness has been neglected

There is a solution

There is one who knows that solution

There is only his way

The nation needs the one.

In Our Love-Making

Beyond the clanging

world,

inhabiting our own

drumbeat,

we are braided

lovers

breathing each other’s

breaths,

pumping each other’s

blood,

stirring each other’s

desires,

safe in the basket of

our arms.

Words Forceps

All their words: Basho, Neruda, Akhmatova, Yeats;

they enter and eddy and brim

and are gone, not completely.

I look down into their boiling;

am stirred and moved and inspired

and faintly lost

for wanting

‒ too much maybe ‒

myself spasmic on the end of those forceps.

Life Like Clouds

Life, like the clouds in a blue sky, changes slowly;

I turn onto my stomach to feel the sun on my back.

Afternoon progresses; the clouds of fortune and

misfortune transmute many times over;

I turn onto my back, onto my side and round again;

the sun comes out and the sun goes in

and all the time, with no more than an occasional, indolent

glance at the sky, shadows are passing, shapeless to me.

Slow as it is, life flashes by,

and all is changed completely before I quite grasp it.

Everlasting Life

One day, walking in the hills, I sense you’re inside me.

I don’t know how much of this can be real:

emotion built from the beauty of a place stirring me

and suddenly being aware of your presence.

I stop a moment; the shock of discovering you with me

pulling me up; I’m unsure, questioning:

in truth we are our parents in our time; if beauty is stirring

the atoms you bequeathed me, would that be a surprise?

Walking on, I am aware of a warmth like love filling me,

and I’m aware of the beauty that is all around, and being part of it.

I laugh out loud, quicken my step and have, in that moment,

comprehended something of everlasting life.

How Little Has Changed

I’m reading poetry from China,

first century BC,

and thinking ‘how little has changed’.

And now I see a video of a white policeman

murdering a black man,

and I’m thinking ‘how little has changed’.

Now I see a man,

white and powerful, using this to gain advantage

and I think ‘how little has changed’.

And I wonder how so little has changed:

that, even now, an autocrat may gain the favour of citizens

while fellow citizens die.

On a Rock of Flails

The cormorants are oil slick standing

on a rock of flails, a witch's exile.

Beseech, forever perhaps, the frozen ocean, twinned sky

with outstretched wings;

mimic, why not, the eagle like a famine victim;

as widows gather where a church used to be,

keeping watch for their salvation.

Lowerymore River at Barnesmore Gap

Sinuous river, beer-brown water,

easing past bows

where heaped

granite stones, rounded beneath

numberless years flow,

curl tighter

your mosaic bronze bed

shining now

under inter-crossed

ripples grinning

back straw-coloured sunlight.

The Swans of Derravaragh

The story of the Children of Lir is familiar to many Irish people from Irish folklore; the story originates, I believe, in Scandinavia. It is the sad tale of four siblings who are transformed into swans for 900 years; their step-mother couldn't quite muster the courage to murder them but could not live with the jealousy of  her husband's love for them. The story is heart-wrenchingly sad, but still does not quite distill all the sadness that's in the story.
The siblings will spend 300 years on Lough Derravaragh, 300 on the Sea of Moyle, 300 on Inish Glora. This is my Lough Derravaragh poem. (Please google 'Children of Lir' if you aren't familiar with the story)

On Lough Derravaragh the swans had their fill

of waterweed, pondweed, wild celery and grass;

their songs carried so sweetly over the water

that people travelled to listen and be transported.

Daily their father came to speak with them;

they related their stories. Aoife  was banished

to the high skies, and happiness

was as blue is patched into a cloudy sky.

They saw their father age, grow slower in thought

and speech; bitterness grew with self-recrimination

till finally he could not face them; the rock on which he sat

left bare,their songs became plaintiff and spare.

Three hundred years they spent on that lake,

three hundred years on its iron-coloured water;

the sounds of human life carrying down from the fields, and

the passing years counted in growth and decay, growth and decay.