Daffodils, Aliens

 

Daffodils are

yellow-brained aliens

standing one-legged

in the April snow.

Star-headed,

they gaze into the emptiness,

open-mouthed,

silent.

The Waves Make Mountains

 

The waves make mountains;

they are as impassable as the Himalayas.

A life time is short;

I’m not going to take them on;

and that, somehow, seems a defeat;

a wide gaping failure;

as though the waves came ashore and found me

and declared to all and sundry that I am a coward.

Ripple

 

Underside of a ripple moving through the water;

sleek and graceful.

Elegant too, sitting by the pool as though it was

the flowing water that shaped her.

And the pool, still in thoughtfulness, as I would be

if she stepped away.

Landscape

 

The backs of my hands ancient:

aerial photo of mountain range,

parched landscape, countless miles.

My life, neither cuneiform nor hieroglyphic,

not hardship, but travelled;

travelled across that lonely landscape.

Precarious

 

Oak-aged, Leonard’s voice.

Dancing in the early hours, turning

on the spools of his words;

arms pouring like wine downward,

filling her full with his lilt;

her eyes soft as the vowels he intoned;

her feet unsure, carefully stepping

on the cobbles of song;

singing it one beat behind

as though each word arrived one moment too late;

swaying,

the glass of wine in her hand

precarious

like a life on the verge of spilling.

The Salamanca Reel

 

Fiddle, flute, the Salamanca reel:

drops of rain slide into line

along the underside of a mossy rock

before falling in the unpredictable waves

that breaths play in the crevices

between the rocks

asking them to go: now, go now, go now.

Swallows on a wire striking up the reel,

fluff up as gusts, minute as golf balls,

lift their feathers so each flickering a different

daylight swoops off

as fingers darken the holes,

strings flash momentarily

and see, the music moving through the air.

 

I’m not here,

he says

and turns in his bed

shuttering his eyes more tightly shut.

Go away,

he repeats

with the knock knocking

him into an ever smaller remnant of himself.

Go away,

he pleads of himself

turning and turning,

but unable to turn away from himself.

Murvagh Grey Day

 

A re-edited poem, I first posted it in 2018. The cloud was down, and the world was muffled by it. There was no wind, so the Atlantic, for all its colossal extent and ferocity was lapping onto the strand as gentle as a pond. There was so much that was grey around us, we seemed miniature,  like we were walking in the sky. 

But small as we were, we were there when the world around us seemed to have been  erased; we felt more alive, not in the sense of being more active but our minds magnified. In a way it made me feel like a God.

Murvagh Grey Day

There’s so little difference between sea and cloud,

the whole scene might as well be upside down.

The bisectors of St John’s Point, a finger stretching

across the horizon, and Mullagmore, Adam to God,

reaching back. To the left, white clouds are hanging,

sheets from a bed, down the sides of Ben Bulben; to the 

right the Bluestacks slumped beneath mosquito nets of rain.

Smokey light, filling the bay, lulling the world like ether;

the waves that raced across the ocean, surviving the fury

at Rosnowlagh, collapsing, now spent, onto the sand of 

Murvagh beach, pooled with cloud we’re walking through,

you and I, silhouettes moving along the bottom edge 

of this canvas, causing suddenly a tin of paint to spatter 

upward: a bevy of oystercatchers taking to flight.

Curlews

In the small hours, in the darkness, early March,

I hear the curlews out on the bog.

Night and bog are the same to them;

they stick their heads through that one black fabric,

declare themselves black stars pulsing, and then

gone; the universe left searching through its pockets.

Light

The question was straight; the answer infuriating, a labyrinth of generalities. So it had to be asked again, the minister prevaricated again, so it had to be asked again.......

No light forthcoming; the minister wasn’t answering, wasn’t acknowledging that she wasn’t answering and was, seemingly, hoping nobody would notice.

Goddammit, stop talking! Same minister does it all the time. I can’t stand her. And no, this isn’t a sexist rant, she just happens to be the one this time, and my head is demanding I offer some resistance.

To my way of thinking, this is a clear insult; does the minister somehow think that she has mesmerised us with canny wordplay, that all of us out here in listener-land are nodding our heads like those dogs that nodded, years ago, in the back windows of cars; is she so arrogant that she believes that her evasive handling of the question makes a good enough answer for a dim-witted population.

Democracy doesn’t count for much in a fog of obfuscation and lies, yet we tolerate it every time we allow a politician to use filibustering tactics in an interview; to talk over or try to drown out an opposing argument; introduce red herrings e.g. maybe X was corrupt, but don’t forget forget how well Y was managed. If the supreme power of a state is invested in its people, it follows that they shouldn’t be stumbling around in darkness.

Whistle-blowers are victimised unmercifully in these systems for daring to throw light on nefarious practices. No matter that they selflessly expose themselves to this for the common good, no matter that they show levels of bravery that are admired in other circumstances; the prevailing darkness suited these politicians, and that’s the wholly all of it.

Nor do cults of personality support democracy, when all the available light is used to spotlight a chosen one. Here the message is, keep your eyes on me, follow me, I am your source of light. And, of course, a spotlight always deepens the shadow around it.

I don’t buy the notion of western democracy as it’s presented. Sure, it’s an improvement on most dictatorships, but it doesn’t confer the freedom it claims to; not as long as public information is purposely garbled and deceptive, nor as long as advertising campaigns funded by lobby groups with deep pockets and partisan views are allowable – advertising is not an open forum – or indeed while there are systems that are overwhelmingly two party driven, when we all know that it takes more than two colours to produce white light.

To say I am troubled by recent trends in politics would be to understate it. It seems to me that the further we have travelled from the pioneers that founded our states the more our politicians have become blowers of smoke. I am afraid that a generation of politicians cleverer than the current will turn smoke to tar, and light doesn’t penetrate tar.

 

Days notched like ogham,

clipped as morse;

we salvaged nothing;

don’t you regret.

A narrow stream of blood

 

A narrow stream of blood has collected

in a pool on the cracked pavement;

it has run from a hole in the belly of a young man;

he lies there drained of his life.

Tomorrow people will walk over this trace, hurrying;

for what is a bloodstain:

a drunkard’s fall, a late-night brawl,

a remnant of hideous nightlife that blundered into day?

The darkening blood-flow seems almost a mockery

of the life that sailed away along it;

and the dried stain its receipt:

who could be blamed for believing there must be more?

 

All that is mood,

that is movement, warmth,

idea, dream, ambition,

invention, achievement,

sadness and regret

are dyes run together.

I express them;

they are, in a particular measure,

my breath or yours,

never quite can be both

nor be full in understanding

in their unique mixing.

Free Online Poetry and Music Events

 

You might like to check out a series of events being hosted by Tally Koren over the next few weeks entitled ‘Changing The Face Of Poetry’. Each event will focus on a different theme: 

Sun 21stMarch 8pm GMT	Sun 4thApril 8pm BST	Sun 18thApril 8 pm BST
Survival Feeling trapped Loneliness	Hope Spring Vision of the future	Freedom Reflection New beginnings

You can find more information about the events and submission deadlines if you'd like to be involved at: https://www.tallykoren.com/events

During the course of the events she will look at how poetry can be turned into songs and demonstrate how one line of a poem can become a catchy chorus as she did with ‘Beauty of the Duty’ a song playlisted by BBC Radio 2 and other radio stations over the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWIOE7w_hlw

Yellow Canoe

 

Daniel, sitting in his yellow canoe

on an afternoon sky of wedgewood blue

and pillowy white clouds, is

without paddle and, it appears,

the remotest notion of where he is.

Faraway, but behind him, an island

of claustrophobic greenness may be

a destination, but it is doubtful he’ll

look that way, and if he did, it’s

doubtful that he’d choose to go there.

At the moment, it seems more likely

he will step from the canoe onto the

marble-still surface,

then he'll be something like a flint arrow 

in vertical descent.