Death has arrived into your breathing:
you labouring to stay alive.
I’ve never been so aware of the lungs as bellows;
how basic the mechanism is
now that all the brain-work is past.
Straining for oxygen all these hours;
we standing by your bed parsing each breathe,
the minute modulations in the sounds,
you hauling oxygen from the room to your blood.
A long way off, across the open strand;
small, minute even, a couple walking a dog.
Picturesque and sweet somehow, their
silhouettes across the deserted expanse of sand.
And as we stand there looking, the dog starts
to run in our direction. Tiny at first but building
into a shape we recognize, a pit bull coming
arrow-straight to us.
She sees it early, recognizes the breed,
knows it’s coming, crossing that quarter of a mile
directly for her and she is petrified. And it does,
and is now jumping at her, now a frozen stump.
The dog persists, not aggressive but it is
a pit bull and she is terror-stricken.
Across the strand, a quarter of a mile off,
the couple watch their 'puppy',
miniaturised to cuteness with distance,
playing with strangers. And perhaps too, maybe,
just maybe, one of them is nonchalantly running
the dog's lead through a half-closed hand.
From the 3rd to 5th of May poetry lovers will be in Strokestown along with many of the finest poets around including Rita Ann Higgins, Jane Clarke, Peter Sirr, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Ger Reidy, Tony Curtis, Pat Boran among others; quite honestly a very impressive line-up.
If you haven't spent some time in Ireland's Hidden Heartlands, this is certainly the perfect excuse to visit. Strokestown Park and the National Famine Museum alone are worth the visit; other attractions nearby include Roscommon Castle, Elphin Windmill, Lough Key Forest Park and more.
However on this weekend poetry is the star; I'm reading on Friday night with a group of Roscommon poets. See you there.
Festival website: https://strokestownpoetryfest.ie/
These walls, stone calligraphies,
almost six thousand years old,
predating Sumerian cuneiform,
built on the tablet of geologic time;
its pages stacked above the ocean,
stripes of the Céide cliffs
closed under the cover of bogland.
Peat that preserved their script,
a retelling of Neolithic life;
the walls of their fields like a net
thrown onto the land;
a farming community
perched above the roaring Atlantic,
their livestock in enclosures,
their lives lived in that lattice-work.
And now I think of Tom’s new walls,
the limestone boundaries of his fields;
how he has written his lines into this history,
albeit much further inland.
How he has added to the great patchwork,
six millennia in the making
and kept the stitch;
how glorious his walls stand.
Notable too in this interview, she underlines the importance of poetry in communicating human anguish.
A gap in the hedge
where briars are looping downward
under the weight of grape-like clusters
of fat juicy blackberries ‒
squelching cattle-trodden paths
lead onward to fresh, green, larder-like
half-acres of lush shining grass ‒
choked with cloud
and birdsong sweet with plenty,
among stirrings in the leaf-litter,
momentary alarms;
I step, sinking in wellingtons
in the dung-gummed earth,
into a triangular field
green as the previous,
as secluded within its sycamore,
blackthorn and elder confines.
I stop as I would passing into a new room
and know I can walk the whole country,
east to west, field to field, across this mosaic
with its opulence and endless allure.
Life Long
Still:
my once loved
is standing there
as though left out in the rain
and waiting to be brought in,
ever-present,
a hologram
at the end of the garden.
Still:
my once loved
is standing there
as though left out in the rain
and waiting to be brought in,
ever-present,
a hologram
at the end of the garden.
Still,
and the years have rolled,
I have held her there.
Miley twerks,
Marilyn gathering in her dress,
a galaxy of stars gathered around Bradley,
a sailor kisses a woman in Times Square,
5 soldiers raise a flag at Iwo Jima,
Einstein sticks out his tongue,
a child face down dead on a Turkish beach.
Michelangelo might have carved
the wrinkles on his forehead,
veins on the backs of his hands,
the fingers slender in death,
knuckles, fingernails,
lids shut over spiritless eyes.
The rosary trickling down from
his fingers is an intrusion;
no renaissance here,
Dad is a statue now.
What you’ve never grasped
is your days are flying loose,
pages in the wind,
and you busy about filling them,
never catching them.
Happiness is sunlight
on the pages;
it flies with the days.
.
All of that twentieth century history
went in, piled up;
from childhood, it stacked:
the cold war, Bay of Pigs, coup d’etats,
dictators, famines, invasions,
Vietnam, Congo, Falklands, Belfast, Kosovo;
treaties, broken treaties, military exercises,
nuclear arsenals, on and on
and we got wise
and understood that nations are hungry
and savage;
there were always answers and we knew them
from a young age.
And the great page turned, twentieth to twenty first:
still they came: Darfur, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan,
invasions, piracy, terrorist attacks, revolutions
until we know nothing,
and therefore
on it goes.
Trump's recent 'bloodbath' comment continues his pattern of being incendiary. This (not so delicately embedded in his speech-making) stoking of violence, the self-cultivated image of his own greatness, his demanding of loyalty to himself, the outrageous claims of his abilities to rid the world of ongoing problems, his narcissism are all so reminiscent of other dictators. Add that to his fondness of autocrats:
my question is how, with all the knowledge of history available to us, do we allow presidents, the people with the greatest potential to do damage, to act outside the checks and balances everyone else is subject to?
Bloodbath
Loyalty to a man or a country, even an organization
may lead to a bloodbath;
loyalty to humanity would not.
Humanity appeals;
the others order;
which, would you say, has its roots in freedom?
Plump juicy blackberries:
that’s where the Summer went.
Rosy-cheeked apples, damsons:
-- energy neither created nor destroyed --
Summer’s sun packaged for Winter’s want.
September, we stretched across the hedges,
beat the birds to the berries,
and filled our cans. All went into the pot;
the kitchen filled with clouds of steam;
the windows, opaque,
cut us off from the world.
Fresh bread thickly sliced and buttered,
slathered in blackberry jam
still warm and flowing; we ate greedily
while the jars, in ranks,
stood prepared to face the darker months.
