No one knows
what wars were waged in your head.
That you were bruising on the inside was clear,
but locked up in silence ‒ a human safe ‒
only your eyes spoke and they of pain.
And hands shaking, cigar burning
precariously close to your fingers; a storm warning.
You, sat in our company; in your own private weather,
your own private sea.
Let’s pare away what’s not needed;
carve it back
to the vein
running rich through the stone.
Not the media noise:
lazy visuals,
pulp pop.
Let’s remove, cut and cut
till we have it massive:
the elation we feel
lying side by side.
The mangled corpse: bludgeoned; skull gaping,
gore-spattered, blood-soaked. That intimacy with
slaughter, we call it savagery; their basic weaponry,
rock and branch; that engagement with violence.
And later, with the wielding of swords, the blood-bath
battles; that crush of thrashing bodies, flailing armies,
harvesting death; we call it barbarism, that intimacy
with carnage: the hacking, slitting, piercing of bodies.
To the release of rockets that kill, maim and demolish from
distance; no blood-stained tunics nor eyeballing death;
we call it civilisation: that delivery of devastation and death
with corporate efficiency, distribution worthy of the 21st century.
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.
