Going Places

 

That way, Ballybofey;

that way, Donegal.

Across the Bluestack mountains, Glenties;

to the east, Castlederg.

But in the direction I’m pointing: Ursa Major, Ursa Minor, Draco;

the faraway places, the intimate places;

places I’ve dreamt of,

places I’ve taken refuge.

Roads that arrive,

more that never do

criss-cross

that plain.

I’ve hitch-hiked

since a boy;

those roads are straight and endless,

and take you

not to where you want,

but to where you need.

 

Love makes a meteorite

of lovers,

their world its trail.

What brilliance;

what a zenith!

Part of us dies

 

The fields told their stories

over the walls, through the thorns;

whispered their secrets to silver roads

who, humming like telegraph wires,

carried them to the neighbouring parishes.

Stories that hung dancing on rowan trees

or carried lanterns into the earth;

some were left to simmer in springs

or sent burbling down into silt-filled ponds;

many still mark the earth like ringworm.

Ours, the kith and kin of Garrypat, Bully’s Acre,

Páirc an Easa; that mosaic of landscape,

familar, once, as our parents’ faces,

whose stories, our stories, are no longer heard

but are lost under the roar of passing traffic.

Alone, together,

 

Alone, together,

it seems we all remember our deaths.

Could never be everything to each other

no matter how great the love,

knowing too well the solitude coming.

Forgive me.

Landscape

 

Lifting the cup to your mouth,

I see the old water courses, dry;

parched ridges, infertile now;

desiccated trunks and limbs, forests once;

the semi-submerged human habitations

hazy behind the skittering dust dervishes

that haunt the place.

I would kiss your hands.

Her Gentleness

 

         

Her gentleness was healing.

Friends came when they were low;

she lifted them

back into their heavens

to twitter and wheel,

smile down at her.

Down to where,

watching over their worries,

she gazed up,

encouraged, smiled back at them;

spent her childhood

                 longing for their wings.

My Advice This November Day

Don’t be too fond of owning,  my little love.

As you fly;
let your head be full of the magic of flying
and happiness will be yours.
Be light as a leaf  among the millions;
such exhilaration!

This flight is your life, darling;
unique, incredible, finite.

Question

“What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in you hand
Ah, what then?”
― Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Complete Poems

Let’s drink to that.

"Need we say it was not love,

Just because it perished?”

― Edna St. Vincent Millay

We left through the same door we entered;

the seasons had moved along.

Neither of us turned to look,

the door was already closed.

Other people will stop there: a month, a year;

in our different worlds, let’s drink to that.

 

Unhappiness recreated your face

in myriad facets, as in a cubist painting.

The disarray made it ugly, but alive,

and that was another beauty.

Rain Fell

 

Rain fell.

It was not a dream,

but your voice

from the far side of the years,

sounding like sunlight on water.

If only I was prepared,

if I’d known such a thing could happen,

I would have walked out

to meet you.

Emigration

 

She went on a liner; we waved and waved and cried.

The ship’s horn blasted out its great bulky voice

and moved away from the quay. We watched her face

till it was indistinct, her frame till it was indistinct,

the throng of passengers hanging over the rail till they

were indistinct, the ship diminishing in size slowly slowly,

till no more than a dot on the horizon, and then it was gone.

I looked at the great emptiness that is the ocean;

it was the same emptiness she was leaving behind her.

Not such a death for her with the warming promise of her future,

but the saddest for us who watched her diminish like a birth rescinded.

November Poetry

 

In the park, the leaves of another year have turned

to rust, fallen, rotted and been cleared.

The flower bed at the centre of the lawn is bare,

as is the children’s playground; the coffee-room

is boarded up and a film of water has darkened the colour

of everything: tree trunks, foot-paths, benches.

November’s beauty is not great splashes of primary colour

nor nature’s pretty embellishments, but the textures

that lie beneath them, even the lowered sun throwing

shadows from the unevenness of the ground.

My mind too is shaded by November.

Less distracted by obvious beauties, I search with narrower eye

among the austere denuded trees for patterns

of growth along their barks, of bud-beading,

of the varying strategies in the splay of limbs to capture sunlight.

I have a more artful eye, that bends more quickly to deeper thoughts,

turning sod and light inwards; 

I rework the detritus of the passing year, 

work those textures into words.

Blank White

The oblong page: blank, white;

I turn it ninety degrees searching for inspiration,

catch sight of you at a side window;

note you do not wave.

But, seeing the exotic landscape behind you,  

a renaissance backdrop,

I decide, bird of paradise, to fly there, 

flare among the branches.

Vacuous occupation, the page declares;

look here, here is your reflection.

Waving

 

It was not the wave from the door, but,

when she’d turned out of the gate, looking back,

mother was still there with a second wave,

that, like an exchange of vows, was love

declared, over and over, with the simplest gesture.

Great milestones of her life started there;

her ever-growing steps towards independence,

all blessed with that wave, a warm pullover of love

to wear wherever the steps were going; and knowing too

that those achievements were always tinged with sadness.