1.
What shape our love:
a circle I believe.
And what colour that shape:
buttercup yellow.
What constitutes the circle:
the village of our lives.
2.
We experience no gravity,
no ground;
when we step we fly,
when we fly we swim.
Dolphin-arced,
designed for infinity;
big and little hand,
we orbit the sun.
The sun playing the water;
I could hear those notes long after sunset.
Still in love with you was the song singing
in the small hours awake;
that rise and fall,
the way the winds carry over the sands in your head;
how that play attaches to the nerve system;
how the choirs of sunlight sing you present .
The loss of habitat:
“criminal”, he says.
“Not nearly enough consideration,
governments must do more.”
“A worldwide effort,
nothing less."
“Humans have been careless,
they've destroyed enough.”
He likes neatness,
his lawns to be uniform, green, carpet-like;
not a daisy to be seen,
a bee’s desert.
So when Sebaldus heaped icicles on the fire
and watched them blazing bright as firewood,
was it his faith in the benevolence of God;
had he sat in snow at -5 warming his hands by
curtains of icicles, stalactites with flaming innards?
Or had he a nuclear bent to his mind:
the emission of energy contained in crystals,
solar-induced bond dissociation in the ice lattice.
Did he foresee the nuclear radiance and the heat
that leaves people clinging, shadows to stone?
His days are the fields his cattle graze,
the years run from under his feet in meadows
of primrose cowslip meadowsweet fireweed: the months flying
till once again pools of sunshine, daffodils, defy February gales.
His evenings are the savage streets of New York, Los Angeles,
where he dodges bullets stumbling down fire escapes,
slips in slicks of blood running into dark alleys
then he’ll drink a cup of cocoa before flicking the world to darkness.
On a Sunday morning he drives the tractor into town for mass
and he’ll chat an hour or two over a pint in his local;
when he wipes the Guinness from his lips and walks out the door,
he returns to his days, the fields where his cattle graze.
She in her house
converses a lot:
asks questions, answers them;
debates, argues;
always wins
the argument.
Her decor spare;
a tidy mind,
all planed to her liking,
stores pat;
a trim house.
Coming, going from her door
with the working hours;
has friends,
keeps them separate;
eventually they disappear.
She might be seen
passing a window,
then another;
always seems she’s looking
for something.
Early morning sun
in the front,
late evening round the back;
she in her house:
a stone in a box.
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.
