These books are steps;

climb,

climb,

climb for a better view.

The ladder

 

How impressive the ladder looks from the bottom,

disappearing, as it does, into the clouds.

How those rungs invite;

how everyone encourages you to climb,

so you do.

And all the way up: yes, up, up, up

and, at the top, no more rungs:

space, just space;

they invited you to climb to a space.

Perhaps, I think, this may be Heaven;

maybe, set my molecules free 

to wander through Heaven.

Perhaps, the thought is Heaven;

perhaps such a moment is eternity.

Legacy

 

Like earthworms,

like the carcasses of all animals,

we darken the soil,

enrich it.

In their turn,

our children will rise,

live in the sun

till they, too, revert to humus.

Our gift to them,

to those coming ‒ grandchildren,

great grandchildren:

a poisoned, decaying earth

and, as a tree nourishes its fruit,

this earth must feed its children

all that has collected around roots,

all that is unseen in water.

Internal strife

 

You see it in his eyes.

He drowns it in incessant yap,

conceals it behind constant activity;

answers nothing,

but is forever asking questions,

filling his life with places and people;

always on vacation from himself.

His travels are to distraction.

In my Grandmother's Kitchen

 

Your hands, gentle,

resting in their usual place

on your lap,

listening to our conversation.

Fingers interwoven,

a basket for your thoughts,

the shape of caring,

the warm nest you made.

How wise those hands,

saying nothing

but alert in contemplation

and ready, always, to open.

The Wanderer

 

Wanderer above the Sea of Fog, Caspar David Friedrich

Climb to the summit;

come closer to your soul. 

Traffic

 

I'm four years out of Dublin now and live in an idyllic part of Donegal. The change wasn't quite as dramatic as it might have been as I've been travelling up and down for years, spending weekends and holidays here. To say that the quality of my life has improved is an understatement and I have not regretted leaving, but I have lost something which I think this poem addresses.

I awoke to the usual rumble of city traffic

and quickly realised it was the sea two fields away;

for the first time felt the loss of a life passed; 

that boom of  activity was the myriad possibilities

daily breaking on my shore;

the roar of conflicting energies: the screeching, 

bellowing breaks, exhausts, pistons.

The cacophony of the streets, the pumping city.

I turned on my side to hear that traffic in the sea

                                              but it was not there.

Bejewelled

 

Diamond-beaded, stems

bowed under the weight.

All summer long, the yellow tips

blossomed, abuzz with bees;

now, in the slow drawl of time

following an August shower,

with the  sun trapped in a million droplets, 

it dazzles as though lit from within.

Bejewelled 

as Fabergé might have dreamed,

beyond any beauty I've  ever imagined;

beyond any beauty money could buy.

Coming In

 

White light

sluiced from trillions

of anemones’ mouths,

all open prayerful,

free-loading on the shoulders of breakers.

It flies and crashes,

pours into ravenous bays,

slaking cathedral thirsts

whose morning, pin-shaped eyes

high up on the cliffs have turned corundum

with waiting,

wanting.

Once Green

 

Even now,

with only vaporous memory of you,

I hear the clank of the shovel against a stone

as you dig the ridge,

see the manure on the graip

that you’re about to mix into the soil,

smell the groundsel whose roots

release so satisfyingly from the clay.

And cigarettes that would be the end of you,

I see the spiralling of their smoke

from your fingers

like each was a little dream

or the pipe lit and re-lit,

the friendly glow near your mouth;

an almost hobbit-like cosiness;

ah, those  green hours spent beneath the sky.

In the Clouds

 

The archipelagoes of a boyhood’s imagination:

the exoticism of islands so far east

they are unexplored expanses of the far west;

beyond them, flame-bright horizons, dreamers’ infinities.

Last evening, before sunset, beneath a sky, charcoal-blue,

Himalayan; above a misty-grey sea;

molten-magnificent and littered with low-lying islands

I found myself, again, looking out over those same South Seas.

That same enchantment, buried under years, unearthed;

a reminder that the age of exploration has not yet passed,

the excitements of childhood not yet spent;

an explorer may find limitless the wonders among the clouds.

Away

 

As a crumpled up page,

thrown there,

discarded;

in a vague way

the shape of the fist

that scrunched it;

a man

on a pavement

near a doorway

where cigarette

butts are strewn;

his face

bent close to his feet,

into his coat,

away.

What shape is our love

 

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.

Still in Love with You

 

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 .

His View on The Loss of Habitat

 

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.