Knots on wires uncurling:
crochets escaping staves,
commas punctuation.
September swallows,
avionics engaged,
suddenly frenzied
as though their true selves,
too long furled,
must hone their aeronautics:
wheel, swoop, sweep;
for tomorrow
they will trace lines of longitude.
Along the edge of your grieving
is the wind’s voice,
that snags and flitters on the sloe;
blooming rags that flicker
through the hollows of your nights,
rummaging through your memories.
And, when the scouring is done,
dawn’s eye, dry as weathered bone,
will come, find you, nail you to its eternity.
Tipsy,
singing your lop-sided song
with uncertain voice,
as though notes were ice,
while all the time dancing
on unsteady feet.
A song
smothers in technique;
but you found its soul
and set it free;
you’ve never known, but
I loved you most just then.
I moved house recently, this will be my last. Not suggesting that I’m moving on any time soon, but the house itself has strong echoes of the transitory. Its name, Bedeque, refers to a red-bricked street off Belfast’s Crumlin Road which disappeared in the seventies; the stone was taken from Enniskillen’s old railway station.
There was a time, when travelling on holidays, we’d be looking out for the first glimpse of the ocean; daily now, it’s our first view of the outside world as we look out over Rossnowlagh, across Donegal Bay towards St John’s Point, Killybegs and Sliabh League. The view through the dormer window has something of those old seafaring novels, I almost expect to see a galleon moored in the bay, but, actually it’s empty, the trawlers coming and going from Killybegs are hidden by St John’s long finger.
What I do see is the play of sunlight on the water, ever-changing as the cloudscapes are ever-changing in this part of the world. Glittering circles, burnished bronze; brilliant white streaks; silver-grey stripes; colours, that defy nomenclature, existing for seconds only, then passing with a puff of wind.
Some days the mountains are one with the sea, some days with the sky, sometimes all are one, lost in low stratus cloud, as empty a nowhere as anyone has ever seen. But the greatest glories come with the setting sun, spectacular at the end of August; red like the ambient glow on the cinema screens of my childhood, suggesting, as the old films did, mysterious, exotic worlds just beyond those wild impenetrable mountains.
And then, in darkness, the lighthouse and beacon lights across the bay; the house lights, street lights; the transience of our lives so much more appreciable in the miniaturisation of distance, beside the vastness of the ocean, its permanence and its indifference; there is a beautiful melancholia attached to it all. Which brings me back to the transitory: Bedeque Street in Belfast, Enniskillen Railway station; maybe I’m getting carried away?
It’s all relative of course, glad I’m not a mayfly.
In the pitch blackness of stone, keeping their minds cool,
we store their thoughts while the millennia skid by.
Boulders, like badges pinned to the landscape;
spirals chased into them, thumbprints for return journeys.
In their heft, we preserve their spirits, unmovable;
in granite, their dreams, stars plucked from out of the sky.
I watched her cross the stripes:
light grey loose sand, dark grey wet sand,
to the sea, blue stripe, shifting like a river,
dragging itself past.
Her dress, white flowing, a net for sunlight,
a Sorollo image, timeless, magnificent like a lily;
so sharply sculpted each movement freeze-framed;
and passers-by, all cropped to solitariness.
Each one photographed in the loneliness:
once was a day, when, beneath a straw hat,
on that strand, in that light, and the sea passing,
the sun acknowledged me.
"fall in love with lonely" from Bruce Springsteen's 'Hello Sunshine' stuck in my head. There's a wistfulness to the song, which is wonderful and a strange accuracy to the phrase too. Have a listen https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=icJjlg5e6l8 Let song and wistfulness diffuse into the sky; let the winds take them into the wedgewood blue stratosphere to the listening cockles faraway.
Fall in love with lonely
“Fall in love with lonely”,
wallowing
in unreliable memories.
Hopes thrown onto the rocks;
not really,
forlorn notions is what they were.
I wanted more
than fits into a life,
more than I’d a right to aspire to;
but it’s not all bad
falling back to earth;
when you land you can stand again.
Words fly,
they are air.
Bullets fly
through the air.
They fly
through the words.
The spread of covid from one individual in China to the entire world has illustrated that the planet is now just one large neighbourhood. Similarly, the spread of political trends and movements; we can no longer consider a problem in one country to have no bearing on another, no matter how far distant. In effect communications and travel have become ropes binding us all close together. In the coming years climate change, pollution, water management, conservation of environment will all have to be tackled by the global community working as one.
My point in saying this is that there is no brushing aside the current Afghan problem, the crisis there is not solely of their making, and the fallout will not be contained within its borders. It is a global issue and those in danger deserve more that our turned heads.
The Afghan Council of Ireland has published a letter template on its Facebook page for Irish citizens to send to their governmental representatives to urge them to strengthen the support for Afghan citizens fleeing the new regime. See https://www.facebook.com/101984398057143/posts/369156171339963/
I urge Irish readers to read and send it to your TDs and MEPs, and perhaps readers from other countries might do so with wording appropriate to the situations where they live.
I walk along the subterranean passage to St Brigid’s well;
it is jammed with pictures of the Sacred Heart, Virgin Mary;
statuettes of Jesus, Mary and the saints; crucifixes, rosaries,
mortuary cards, vases, medals, ribbons, coins, photographs.
Sadness. There are that many calls to God along the passage,
the walls seem almost sagging under the weight of the pleas.
The passage ends where the water falls in algal greenery;
where the earth is giving but also taking away.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Remember my beloved mother, Theresa;
she put so much store by Heaven;
I leave you her photograph.
Paul’s legs are both smashed,
he is too young for such hardship;
I leave you his gloves.
Twice my expected child has miscarried,
not again, dear Lord;
I leave you my rosary.
It is my hope that Anne will come home,
I pray for this daily;
I leave you the ribbon I kept.
Beyond the barren trees,
at the place silenced in snow,
the ruins of our love still stands.
A gable just, and the tracery of our dream,
still beautiful if vacant;
our ghosts, the grand thing we longed for,
still there.
When their bodies had started into stone,
we lay them among the boulders
that had grazed the hillside, in a nest
for early sunlight, not far from the roaring tide,
in sight of the eagles’ perches,
in sight of their timber homes,
in sight of their fields,
stones away from their parents.
When their bodies had started into stone,
we left clothing, corn, arrows, bone knives
by their sides and pointed them along the path
of the returning sun, with our prayers
and our wishes built so high they would be seen
from the birth-places of mountains, rivers or stars;
they would know that we were waiting, all the generations
waiting, running like currents through the stones.
First I saw bricks give way.
then the bricks and mortar collapsing
down, a chaos
in which I unexpectedly saw beauty,
a stampede of petals;
oh, I’m exaggerating to jump on a few lines;
there was a curvature, a pattern
one sometimes sees in a whorl of petals
because the fall of one brick is contingent on the fall
of the previous, except symmetry, a radial symmetry, almost,
spiralling down
was totally spectacular, absolutely beautiful.
