Silver Birches

Today I came on a stand of birches

dazzling in late evening sunlight.

A tableau of, maybe, a dozen nudes;

splendid, shameless.

Torsos of Elginesque splendour,

arms twining upward in Grecian gracefulness;

statuesque beauties

nonchalant in Olympian lasciviousness.

Feichín's Response to the Women of Omey

On hungry mornings, Feichín became a cormorant,

dived deep into the Atlantic to retrieve miraculous numbers of fish.

On the rocks of Omey, he often caused commotions, standing,

arms extended, skin stretched tight over bones, naked as a newborn chick,

drying his body in the wind.

When, once, the women of Omey delegated one of their number to go to him

to chastise him for his sinful displays, which, their souls being jeopardised,

must be the devil’s work; he, upon hearing their complaint, reached up to a shelf,

took down the bones of a meal and asked,

“Do these bones offend you?”

“No”, she replied.

“Was I not more clothed than these?”

and with that he took a switch to her and sent her running from his hut.

Days of our Lives

So we’d have a coffee, maybe two, then off

into town by the side streets, looking for

red-brick houses with lilac doors and yellow

window frames. Drop into the IFI, sit over

another coffee, browsing the catalogue with half interest,

the steady drift of film-goers and idlers with more.

On down Dame Street to College Green,

enjoying our navigation of ever-shifting crowds,

the dexterous manoeuvrability of ourselves.

In Hodges Figgis we’d scan the poetry

shelves and the art books, those names and titles

settling in our heads like we were travelling the

world: Heaney, Mahon, Carver, Balthus,

Kahlo, Lorca, Basho, Holub ‒ dabs of fresh paint

and print to keep us informed for a month or two ‒

before returning to Grafton Street to knit crooked stitches

through the crowds, stop a few minutes to hear a busker

play a saw or slide guitar then around to Tower Records

to be tempted by some new ECM arrival in the jazz section.

George’s, Aungier, Wexford, Camden, Richmond Streets;

the diminishing scale of a city’s architecture, and

the backwards walk down the telescope to the landscape

of our normal lives. Crossing the border at the canal, with

its familiar vista down Rathmines Road to the mountains

beyond; we, like fish, breathing easier in our own habitat,

saw our hurdles flattened, but, perhaps, never recognized

the days of our lives?

That beautiful odyssey: Saturdays, mid-morning to mid-afternoon;

or maybe it was just one Saturday,

or, maybe, it wasn’t at all.

Klimt Moment

We’ll sit where we sat before, above the stream,

watching the golden eels of sunlight dart and shimmy

above bronze coloured stones to the sound of water searching

out all the possible solutions to the conundrum of strewn rocks

while somewhere beneath us a hollow-sounding tock tock

drums our time away.

Let us weave time and stream into a cloak, a Klimt creation:

magnificent flowing, yet enveloping us in a precise moment

of pleasure. Let us hold it in our eyes so we may see it, wear it

when times are harder, these moments scarcer and the glint

of gold more precious.

A Poor Man Offers Unlimited Treasure

It’s a paltry thing that sparkler on your finger,

when, on a sunny morning, I will present you

with ten miles of dazzling lake almost to the door.

Or an emerald, when my house is sitting at the bottom

of blazing green fields, and the same all the way to the sea,

two counties to the west, three to the east.

Or amethyst, when the boreen is crowded with foxgloves

ringing their bells for the attention of bumble bees who’ll be losing

their heads in nectar from May to September.

Or rubies, when the hedges are brimming with myriad constellations

of fuchsia; even the ash, high on the hill, outshines them with its harvest

of late evening sun gathered in sprays of blood-bright berries.

And that gold bangle on your wrist, how dull it will look beside the daffodils

under the beech trees not a hundred yards from my house, or June’s irises

with blooms like laughter among the flaggers opposite Scanlon’s old shed.

Over by the privet hedge, you’ll have all the pearls you could wish for

come the end of January; snowdrops, promising the year’s beauty,

will be yours every January, if only you’d come live in my cottage.

Married Couple in the Pandemic

I noticed our fingers: grown old,

bones and knuckles;

my face sort of similar, hers is fuller.

We got so used to our own ways,

hard to live to someone else’s tune;

old habits are comfortable.

The house is empty, there’s no company;

I make noise to hear noise,

talk out loud a lot.

Her fingers on the perspex, that small distance

brought the whole distance home;

I would have liked to touch them.

The Saintliness of Feichín

A sea mist clinging to the rocks, dunes, stone huts;

vague dawn light; occasional screechings of sea-birds;

insidious dampness slithering between the stones,

under doors, between blankets and bodies; bodies huddling

closer; breaths’ clouds condensing on faces hard by.

Suddenly the shriek of a man; again and again,

each on the lightning slap of a tong on flesh,

so all, now awake in their huts, are bolt upright, listening,

and suffering the strokes of flails embedded with thorns;

marvelling at the saintliness of Feichín.

After a long agonising period the lashings cease;

the waves are again lapping on the shore, the gulls are screaming;

from Feichín’s hut come quiet moans and latin supplications:

“in manus Tuas, Domine, commendo spiritum meum”; it is Good Friday,

in mid-afternoon the skies will darken and the temple veil shall be rent.

At mid-morning, he emerges; shock-eyed scare-crow

with shroud covering his body, a scream of blood;

the brothers kneel; thanks is given to God; Feichín is safe.

Already wild flowers are colouring the fields, soon the swallows will come

and bees will make honey to their glorious chant.

How Feichín Got His Other Name, Moéca (Backslider).

Feichín stumped out of Clonmacnoise fuming,

the argument a burst blister in his head.

That cur, Ciarán, had, for the last time, demeaned him;

may his feet blacken with gangrene, may a nest of ulcers

prevent wine ever passing his lips again.

All day Feichín had tended the oxen while it poured and hailed

and him without the merest fortification of a drink.

He made ribbons of his arms climbing through a hedge of briars,

stumbled up to his neck into a stand of nettles, fell through the bridge

over Abha Bán where the rotten timbers ripped open his leg.

Lumbering on now, he growled at shadows, sent the stones of the road

into the bushes with delicious kicks he imagined on Ciarán’s arse;

but suddenly, breaking his reverie, the detested voice was ordering him back.

He grumbled, fought with it, cursed God, but having no choice,

walked backward so as not to look that accursed saint in the face.

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.

From a Child's Window

The child is at the window; he is there every evening

at this time, as the clouds of the world are catching fire. He knows

the fields behind his house: the hay-shed with the tunnels through the bales,

the wrecked car under the elders where some of the hens are laying,

the field with the maze of pathways through the furze.

Beyond that, the railway line where the lesser known world begins.

He has been there, where the fields are wide and there are no houses,

to the water hole where the small fish dart from weed cover to weed cover;

that’s where the prairie begins, where cowboys travel alone.

To the left, the railway line cuts straight to the white gates;

he has seen the gates; beyond them trains travel days, weeks

across parched deserts, open steppes, past wadis, oases. The passengers

seldom look: tuxedoed gentlemen with glinting teeth are tipping whiskeys

lit by a million lights in crystal glasses to feather-boa’d women

whose champagne drinks sparkle back from the tips of their slender arms.

He knows the station is to the right, and there’s the bridge he loves to stand on

when the four o’clock is coming through. The excitement as the engine appears,

slowing to the platform, then starts up, and the carriage roofs passing beneath him,

he loves that; then the last of it, the tail slithering away from the station.

Where to? He does not know. It goes into a place he has no thoughts on;

the evening train into the hours he sleeps through; that is where darkness is.

Giorria

Noiméad ar a shuaimhneas,

ina thiarnas ciúin, folamh.

Go tobann ag ropadh tríd an scrobarnach

mar a bhí mé í láthair.

Draíocht an nóiméid,

é ina shuí ina áit féin,

imníoch, ach an méid atá nádúrtha dó

í dtús Aibreáin, é ar faire ar chnocán féarmhar.

Agus draíocht a éalú,

an aclaíocht sin agus an diongbháilteas;

treo áirithe aige, an cinneadh agus an bhogadh

déanta ar an bpointe.

Transl.

Hare

One moment at ease,
in his quiet empty dominion.
Suddenly flashing through the undergrowth
because I am present.

The magic of the moment,
him sitting in his own place,
anxious, but the amount that is natural to him
at the beginning of April, him on the lookout on a grassy hillock.

And the magic of his escape,
the agility and the single-mindedness;
a particular direction, the decision and the movement
made in an instant.

I love You

This is an updated version of a poem I posted about two years ago.

I love you

The chives’ purple heads standing on their bottle-green stalks

were June’s bright soldiers above the dun-coloured sandstone;

beyond them, on the hillside opposite, the soft pile forestry

was our wealth, especially in the rich glow of evening sun.

I moved closer to you, held out my hand to find yours already there.

to be links in this chain of beauty; and then I said, ‘I love you.’

It was not just the moment, but the magnificence we were part of;

happiness was bubbling,  the words came like breaking into a song.

Minnows

Compass needles

in current,

still

as thought.

Flint arrows,

they darted linear,

abrupt angles sparked

and quenched

Euclidian

in execution.

Feichín's Penance

January, frigid dawn. Rain

forged in heaven's graphite-dark belly

flaying the island.  

Fifteen strides out from the shore,

Feichín’s head, gull on the water,

chanting to the glory of God.

Waves crash over, tearing hair,

weed on the rocks, and eyes,

cockle-shells bleached staring.

Charlie Brown's Eyes

This isn't the first version of this poem that I've posted, probably not the last. Rewrite follows rewrite until, like evolution, the series of mutations leads to  a completely new poem. And for that reason, I've always thought it important that all rewrites are kept.

Charlie Brown's Eyes

On the Lower Kimmage Road

I stopped to watch Charlie Brown's eyes

winking in puddles;

an iodine-stained filth was polluting the city.

In the pub a burnt-out match

and a rib of hair snagged my attention,

my convexed eyes;

I drank more than intended.

A carrier bag gulped on the broken white line

and I moved on. In the hallway,

removing my overcoat, I counted sixteen balusters,

re-buttoned my overcoat and walked out.