Cannon Fodder

 

Mired in the contradictory propaganda of enemies,

the stultified masses become the pawns of presidents

and governments, who, like medieval overlords, claim

jurisdiction over their lives and send them to war for

no imparted benefit but the political capital of those who, 

directing the course of annihilation from the rear, without care,

 send them to their deaths and the subsequent reparation 

of  wrapping their remains in the flags of their dreaming.

Becoming

 

Carving, relentlessly carving; the days sculpting,

long past physical peak, my most essential self

from the imposed, simulated, protocol-conscious

construct of employment years. Shaping the truer me,

daily experiences building my Alexandrian Library,

shelf after shelf filling as I would have them filled

so Goya, Hopper, Bacon, Bach, Pink Floyd and Myles

flow by my stones into my torrent; Du Fu, Kavanagh,

Whitman harmonious with Donegal’s shoreline and skies

and I may finally settle to my own frequency of life,

resonating with my own pleasures and designs.

When I have nothing to say

 

When I have nothing to say, to write;

I imagine a white expanse,

a space to be filled;

it always forms a rectangle, a page in fact.

I wait for an idea to appear in that emptiness;

and, sure enough, something arrives, sooner or later,

like a stage coach on some remote winter road

in a Dickens novel.

First, a dark spot in a snow-covered wilderness;

I wait for it to take form.

Is it a herd of yak on a Himalayan slope, that stage coach

bound for London or is it a spot of mildew?

When it draws up it may not be a poem;

in fact it may have destroyed it:

the pristine white emptiness;

the untrodden field of freshly fallen snow.

Rossnowlagh, Christmas Eve

 

The ferocity of the ocean dissipating on the beach;

its heaving waves falling flat and disappearing so I

am walking along the edge of its anger, in spume

turning into mice scuttling to the safety of the dunes.

Thousands of miles of Atlantic violence; bared teeth

in ranks lunging landward, spittle flying skyward

like savagery unleashed, uncontained, uncontainable;

white rage, jet loud, breaking powerless on the strand.

Happy Christmas, hoping the new year might see an end to the uneashed, uncontained savagery of 2023.

Life at its most horrific

 

A truck over-loaded with pigs

reversed to the abattoir door.

The men dropped the ramp,

opened the tailgate

but the pigs stampeded away

from the space, climbing backward,

frenzied, into the melee of bodies,

screaming.

Beaten with sticks,

struggling to go forward, still jerking

their bodies back into the torture;

away from the stench of death,

back to life,

even at its most horrific.

Travels

 

Sun nested on the water,

Himalayan cumulus above the horizon,

a stratus sea,

a silver road to the moon;

sky and earth mimic each other.

I survey a polar wilderness,

a vastness above me;

sometimes the sea is limitless with sky

and is infinite;

I am Marco Polo, Cook or Shackleton

and there is so much that is unexplored

beyond this window

that these travels are epic;

unimaginable wonders roll in on the wind;

my eyes are nets.

A Thought on Religious Belief in This Time of War

 

i.

 I do not sow a seed

to have seedling or sapling

wrenched from the earth.

Those welcome in my fields

celebrate the success of my crops;

those who have wreaked havoc

must answer for it on day the My return.

ii.

When God resurrects the dead,

will He not ask,

‘why are there so many children among the risen?’

Will He not then say,

‘these children were My creation;

who are these who have presumed to defy Me?’

‘I gave man dominion over the fish

beasts and birds, but not their fellow man.’

Will he not say, therefore,

‘these people have made false gods of themselves,

they have forfeited their place in Heaven.'

All is Flow

A Chagall view of life

All is Flow

In here, there is no one God,

no solidity nor weight;

all is flow.

Towns, buildings, steeples

are animals of the fields,

birds of the air;

there are no edges nor corners

but fish-like, curved all to all:

all is flow.

We make no division:

all that is rooted has wings,

all fly as free as notes from a violin.

Animals of the fields, birds of the air

light as thought;

you and I,

our loves and togetherness

all part of that murmurating life;

all is flow.

Our Finest Belonging

 An edited version of a poem I wrote in 2021 inspired by a Sorolla painting of wife and daughters lying in the grass. 

As we lay there, our grass bodies within the sea

of meadow; sweep of wind carrying us along,

flowers of rye. We, the droning bumble bees

in buttercups, the chirruping finches, chomping

cattle; sudden dartings within briary hedgerows,

rustlings, commotions but hunters’ silences too

and only a vague consciousness of the faraway

                                              cataracts of traffic.

How sumptuous the flow of light and warmth,

the sinuousness of our bodies in that current;

the colours of the field embroidered into our bodies.

We, agglomerations of the soil, but the criss-crossing

zeniths of nerve and muscle too:

at one with the swathes of breeze-blown beauty,

settled, nested into our finest belonging.

We Lovers

 

Our colours are bells;

we, lovers, live forever;

defy perspective;

grow from each other

into each other;

no beginnings nor ends

but running timeless,

seamless like trains

                  through air.

Sun in a Cage

 

Pearl-white, the day;

January frozen colourless.

The sun, golden in its cage,

a pint of lager in a man’s hand,

a quarter mile out on a frozen lake.

Light coming through a keyhole

from another world, perhaps:

Summer, honey-coloured warmth;

small enough to carry in a hand,

persistent enough to shine into my eye.

In Autumn

 

Light falling

like leaves

in Autumn;

you inside it.

Eyes grey

in their pools;

pale and thin,

dimming;

disappearing

among the wonderful

colours 

of rotting.

Same Face

 

Failing light soft as Autumn leaves

falling.

The year’s foliage becoming humus,

new soil;

smell of decomposition: fresh, dank,

mossy;

preparation of next Summer’s fertility.

You standing,

foot on shovel, king of the ridges;

colour

of last apples, ripening towards rot;

who knew

that inside the lungs were discolouring,

hardening

as Winter will curtail with sheets of ice;

or that I

would stand, years on, in dank November;

with same face,

watching for the robin in the nearby hedge.

Boned Trees

 

When they shake out the fields,

wring the cities,

we fall out,

boned trees.

How our Summers passed

and fell,

desires.

Left us gaunt and brittle,

fingers

still scraping the sun.

What Legitimacy?

 

Blasted to rubble,

and buried in it,

a child,

a baby dead before

arriving on the floor

of his own mind.

Don’t talk of rights.