Ballindoon

 

Ballindoon Priory is on the shores of Lough Arrow in Co Sligo. On a warm Summer's day it is a place of delicate beauty and calm.

Ballindoon

Cattle grazing, quiet as jellyfish;

mid-summer's trees drowsy,

loitering in the pools of their shadows.

The ruined priory of Ballindoon

perched between meadow and lake, asleep

with its dead congregations in its arms.

Stripped now to white-lichened limestone,

colours of an Irish sky;  

scoured of medieval ostentation;

freed from the half-light of doleful nave

and chant-droning chancel,

the austerity of  ceremonial formalies. 

No longer prisoner,

no longer locked in to itself,

but open, earth to heaven, heaven to earth.

Universes

 

In my hands, this head, close to sleep

is a universe closing;

to burgeon in the morning,

to be again an infinity of possibilities.

I marvel.

And how many universes have been sent to war?

How many sleepy heads have emperors cradled?

You'd Cook Love

 

You’d cook love;

I’d prefer it raw.

You’d put it on a plate;

I’d lick it off the floor.

You’d be moving onto afters;

I’d be craving more.

Descent

 

Zong,

falling into the lake

light

half light

gloom

darkness

Dling, dling,

a chain

of silvery white

bubbles

following it

down

Dwn

medals

spinning the light

descending

softly

sftly

into weeds

The Irish Language, Fundamental.

 

Weathered, the language

of North Atlantic gales and fleecing rain;

of bare granite, stunted thorns, tongue-red

roan-berries and rugged wild rose.

Of meadows, richly butter-cupped;

rickety fences, bed-end gates, stone walls

and their builders’ hands.

Of sodden bogs, the skies that douse them;

the hands that stacked the turf;

sparks rising into the sooty darkness,

nights by fire-sides,

the stories that kindled there.

Of the waters that plummet down mountainsides

then haul, barge-slow, silt through the midlands;

the hands that guided the tillers,

ploughs,

scattered the seed,

dragged needles through oceans of cloth,

harvested the carrageen and dulse

from freezing seashores.

The language of famine,

of jigs, reels and slow airs,

of high-fielding footballers, deft hurlers;

resistance to occupation;

devotion to saints or saints’ shadows;

myth and legend,

ghosts of ever-changing skies

and a restless earth.

Of flush green hedgerows,

their sudden stirrings and rustlings;

deep shadows, half-light and shade,

the known and unknown that exist together there.

Of orchards and dances,

factions and battles,

weddings and funerals;

the stitch and weave,

the words native to that soil, climate

and people;

the words that give name to it all.

Ancient Village

 

An avalanche of white thorn

hanging above our heads

in hazel twilight.

The night lights of bluebells

thick around our feet,

faint silvery gleam of lake

between the trunks of trees,

birdsong everywhere.

These ancient walls whose stones

are moss-softened green pillows

are the skeleton of a lifestyle that once was.

Hand-built scripts of lake-side dwellers

vanishing in the evening light,

in the centuries’ accumulation

of humus and leaf-litter.

Cryptic now, fragmentary; 

no longer connected to their meanings;

too remote from their builders to carry 

the poignancy of their passing;

we stop a moment 

to admire a bend on the pathway: 

white-petalled, luminous.

Water

 

The word flows

along the tongue

and over the tip:

river on a silt bed,

smooth as glass

over a weir.

Beer-brown,

lumbering

and opulent

the word 

elemental like air,

gorged on peatland spill;

warm

in the mouth

like spittle.

In Blue Jeans

 

Lightning on the asphalt

rain dousing Camden

in July

sunlit splashes 

running shopfront to shopfront

hair drenched

cables warm like arms

counting down my vertebrae

haloes bout my feet

and your excitement

frying up

music-filled doorways passing like ponies

green wood above

the water

hucksters hippies

and the feel of incensed air

a Doors tune

like smoke

voices flapping against upstairs windows

escapees

excitement or speed

we

in blue jeans

A Question Of Scale

 

A mite is travelling up the margin of my page;

a full stop going on a journey.

I assume it has purpose, but what can I know?

I’m reading that Stephen Hawking said

“the universe appears designed”, by which he meant

it’s strikingly well suited to existence of life.

Which makes me wonder about scale:

how small are we?

Are we blindly travelling up the margin of someone’s page?

It's worth mentioning that Hawking's views on what was haening in the universe changed radically subsequent to this comment.

Morning Extraordinary

 

Sea a white slab,

sky soft bag of sunlight,

the mountains opposite

suspended in mid-air; a dream place.

Cosily plump,

swaddled in greenery,

a pigeon sits zen-like

deeply contemplating;

as though daylight arrived before day,

and the world, caught in a spotlight,

blank and unsteady

has, as yet, its constituent parts unresolved.

The shock

as you peel away from the oblivion of sleep;

the implausibility of it;

the infinity of ends that all meet.

 

The noise of short wave,

then your voice comes through

as home might sound

in the midst of Armageddon.

Untitled

 

All of us in a boat.

Sitting there.

Our blood on the water.

Our reflections in the blood.

All of us looking.

The boat unmoving.

The water undisturbed.

No one talking.

Evening settling in.

A chill with the dimming.

This poem is inspired by Peter Doig's 'Figures in Red Boat'. It's a fantastic image which I purposely left out of the post to allow the poem achieve its own effect. However, if you’re not familiar with the painting, do a search and stay with it for a while; I think it is very thought-provoking.

Waves of Men Thrown at Guns

 

Waves of men thrown at the guns

like water thrown on a fire;

the geography of their births

costing them their lives.

Who should “ask what you can do

for your country”?

Rock and clay recognize no borders;

sacrificing lives for a line on a map

is no service to a nation

but  makes a bonfire of its people.

Remnant of an Empire

 

Pool of water

you pick beauty, like an apple,

from this panoply

and set it there,

a fragment from a canvas

lying in the gutter.

I look down 

on The Four Courts

austere and grand

like Ozymandias,

“sneer of cold command”

half sunk in the sand;

remnant of an empire

shivering

in an April breeze.

We all live in here

 

We all live in here;

teeming around each other,

drinking from the same tap,

turning in our beds in unison;

recycling our breaths.

Sooner or later, each of us

turns up at our neighbour’s

offering worn-out clay,

coming away with a mirror

and the wood from a kitchen table.