Moment

 

You, in stillness at the kitchen table,

in a melancholy slant of evening light,

gazing past the tableware 

at life.

In that moment, 

how monumental the tea things;

how infinitely small you;

how brittle life.

Allingham Festival Book Launch

I'm looking forward to sharing a launching event with Caoimhin MacAoidh at this year's Allingham Festival. I'll be launching  'The Sound of Water Searching' and Caoimhin  will be launching ‘Between the Jigs and the Reels’; a book, originally published in 1994, that has been out of print for a number of years. The event is part of the Allingham Festival in Ballyshannon and takes place on Nov. 6th in the Abbey Arts Centre at 2pm. Booker Prize nominee, Claire Keegan will be in conversation with Sinead Crowley following this event

Threshing Floor

 

Sometimes the sky runs through you:

a light-saturated blue, streamers of white cloud.

I’ve admired your free spirit, envied your lightness,

and tugged at my mooring ropes but found them firm.

No doubt, this vision of you reflects intangibility:

I may as well be grabbing at falling snow.

But still, I tell myself, that all I can be and all I can know

is extracted on the threshing floor of my mind.

Reflection on the Death of a Loved One.

My deepest sympathies to the families of those who died in the tragic explosion in Creeslough. I can barely imagine the feelings of devastation that must hang over all in such a small tightly-knit community. It has brought back my own exeriences of death, though none in such tragic circumstances.

Reflection on the Death of a Loved One. 

Your death has drilled into me 

deeper than I knew existed. 

There, in the centre of myself, 

this sudden disarrangement, 

as though some vital bolt loosened 

and parts of me disassembled. 

But if your time has passed, 

not so your life, 

I live on with you, braid of my soul 

which even death cannot undo.

Audio: Michael reads 2 poems from his new collection, 'The Sound of Water Searching'.

To The Slaughterhouse, Klimt Moment

Closed up

 

Here is time,

a jacket hanging on a nail.

And here is sunlight,

dumped on the disused counter.

Here is its shadow

slashed down a wall.

And here silence

in the amnesia of unstirred air.

Here is an eternity

even ghosts have abandoned.

In Thrall

 

A tree, choreographing its own movements,

has curled back on itself, the better to see:

its veins have made a map of the sky

and are draining it region by region.

In thrall to the honey-lush-sweetness of light;

and its dance standing complete on the pedestal of its trunk.

On the Water

 

So small a boat

atop so wide a water,

seeing myself reflected two-dimensional

over so vast a depth,

and afraid.

So vast the depth,

so flimsy the timbers,

so frail the hand drawing a ripple,

so transient the ripple,

so insignificant.

Unfamiliar that face

below the hand

dumbly observing

the passing moment; 

I let my finger's ripple break it.

.

What is a Kingfisher?

 

Kingfisher:

an emission of blue light

resulting from

the discharge of electricity

following the path

of shortest distance

between two trees

along a river

and flaring momentarily

at the tip of the cathodic branch

before termination of the event;

a shy bird.

“Making Peace with Nature is the Defining Task of the 21st century”, UN Secretary-General

It seems no government is going to take the necessary steps for environmental or climate change. And until they do, private individuals will feel taking steps is pointless. Change will only occur when there is an atmosphere of emergency as during the Covid lock-downs, right now it’s life as usual for the most part.

It’s not as though the steps are unknown. The production of plastics must be curtailed immediately;

it seems appalling to me that, for one example, that plastic packaging as is used for putting butter and jam on individual slices of bread in the catering industry is a gross overuse that could easily be better managed. Why don’t we go back to re-usable bottles of milk? Why isn’t there a rationing system on air travel for holidaying purposes, on the consumption of meat, on the amount of packaging used in retail, on the unnecessary use of water? Why is their space travel for the pleasure of a wealthy few?

And how mad is prosecuting war, as Modi told Putin now “is not an era of war”. He knowing better than most as catastrophic conditions become ever more prevalent and temperature records continue to be broken.

United Nations Secretary General Antonio Guterres recently warned that the world is “sleepwalking to climate catastrophe.” Who, in twenty years time, will thank their parents and grandparents for caring so little about them and their planet that they over-looked such clear warnings and such clear evidence?

In nearly all the lists of what individuals can most usefully do, lobbying representatives comes near the top; they need to feel the fire. Talking about it is also considered vital to build the sense of imperative; the emergency is here, but we’re not all feeling the urgency yet.

About our children.

 

Inside the fog of adult worries,

her terrors hulk;

fears beyond comprehension

remain unspoken,

she lacks the words;

her child’s face has the countenance

of a sixty-year-old

with eyes gazing out

from shattered innocence.

She stands as though alone

among the other children

and appears not to know

how to play.

Under the Stairs

 

That blackness, beyond the storage boxes,

tins of polish, hoover and copper kettle

was, in the beginning, a solid-looking barrier;

I had no intention of going near it.

Time passed, I ventured further. On my knees

into the space, discovering shadowy discards,

dismantled appliances, things unknown to me, perhaps

from an earlier time and still that pitch unknown ahead of me.

A cave, a bottomless shaft to Australia, to Hell?

Eventually I breached the darkness and found it stopped

right there, wood; a prosaic end to my fantasies,

a step out of childhood.

Irreversible Nature

 

We walk among ghosts, they are our ether.

Switched to electronics,

we no longer feel their breaths.

Though Earth’s warnings crackle around us,

we stumble onward in science;

tumble backward in empathy to nature.

coming into ourseves

 

slowly

our lives become

our own;

as streams,

eddies and runs

settle

into their channels,

we find

our ways

 

My eyes without the glasses

make trping doffichlt;

memotu becmes sp much more

ompirtant wirh age