Mystery

Far down; a glimmer of light

from inside the earth;

a wonder to our young eyes.

We lowered the bucket

through the ferns and darkness

to collect magic

and drew it up, heavy with mystery.

Pristine, icy; we drank

and believed it to be purity.

A Conundrum of Physics

 

What is the law that states:

a particular quantity of liquid

is available for spillage from a glass

without changing the quantity

that remains within the glass.

We’re in Slattery’s front lounge;

it’s packed, a lively Friday-night crowd;

a small lady, slightly tipsy, more than actually,

is having another glass of red wine,

and in the act of bringing it to her mouth

sends a curtain of it around the room

catching everyone at chest height

with, what I would consider, a generous

portion of her drink.

Genteel-mannered all around;

“not at all, not at all, it's only a drop of wine”

“Aw this blouse, I was never fond of it anyway”;

she drinks on

totally oblivious to the cacophony of jangling nerves.

Our Day at the Pump House

 

Won’t we remember our day at the pump house;

I played jangly old piano, you danced in sequins;

a few people came, a few more seemed to leave;

the trees were what trees should be in warm sunlight,

cast shadows dark enough for their leaves to be richest green

and the old buildings, with their stories peeling, stood there

like it was old news, and it was to them, but lives are short.

And won’t we remember you lay prone on the grass for hours;

it wasn’t the best of days and still, one day, it will be the best of days;

our day in the grounds of the old spa, the warm sun;

and I playing jangly old piano; you dancing in sequins.

Dusty heat day.

 

Hedgerows sagging;

buzzes disappearing into shadows,

droning 'oh my God its warm';

cows, still statues, contemplating

but not quite remembering what

and the house of gables with the wicker fencing

seemingly empty

but there’s a bedroom window gaping

with a lush darkness within.

Sometimes the art of poetry

 

Sometimes the art of poetry is too much:

the poem moulded to magnificence;

its message, with an oh so scrawny neck,

strangled inside it.

Donatello's Madonna of the Clouds

 

Madonna of the Clouds

As the sea moves, clouds move;

life too,

from the arms

that surround childhood.

Heaven drowns,

lives struggle,

smiles are upturned;

but that early solidity saves us.

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.