Boned Trees

 A slightly amended version:

 

When they shake out the fields,

wring the cities,

we fall out, boned trees.

How our Summers passed

and fell;

seasons of desire.

Left us gaunt and brittle,

finger nails

still scraping the sun.

Today

 

Can you spin a cloud onto a stick;

collect sparklets of sunlight from a river;

walk the moon’s highway over the sea?

There are times when happiness might belong

in this list; I thought so today when you cried

and we were not there to put our arms around you.

Happiness seemed very remote just then;

you might as well have tried to fill a jar with blue sky

and I thought I heard a hollow clank from the universe.

What I Remember

 

A stream, somewhere in Connemara,

working its way through strewn boulders,

over a mosaic of rust-coloured stones.

The thousand sounds of water, finding

its races constantly blocked, celebrating

 boisterously its thousand victories.

The percussion of its falling into pools

isolated in hollows beneath the rocks;

a deeper tock under the spray’s sibilance.

The sprightliness of  mountain flow

through the gentle, soft greenery

of the fields beneath the slopes.

The exuberance of those waters rushing

through the channels of a young boy’s heart;

rushing still.

Leaving

 

Bronze, copper, gold:

the boats are on the sea,

sailing past,

sailing on the wind;

waved away by branches

almost bare now.

Ghosts man the boats;

passing silently

on currents of wind,

the year in their nets;

this one glorious moment

and then they have sailed.

A Life's Story

 

Unlikely now: the size of your fist;

hard, smooth, rounded; chiselled by weather, abraded

in the billions of quartz, sandstone and granite stones

constantly rolling in the tide on this cold Atlantic shore.

Limestone. I, unlike them, sprung from life;

carry my ancestors within me; crinoids, brachiopods

and bryozoa; their shells, hard parts crystallized now;

I am an assemblage that collected on the bed of another sea;

a tropical sea that teemed with life and its colours.

How far away that bright life was from the lithification that comes,

but time, all too soon, brings its darkness

and I have spent millions of years deep in the inanimate earth.

That I would see light again seemed unlikely

and yet, here I am, carrying the vestiges of a sea that once was home.

As you pass over me, you will not notice;

but my voice is there, in the tumult of the waves shifting the stones.

Look Down

 

It is winter;

the trees are standing

on the stones.

Tips unsteady,

their branches wavering

under the weight of their trunks;

terminal buds, chock-full

of next year’s growth,

constantly stirring,

searching for precarious balance

in the cloud-whitened

shallows.

Bare toros, stems

seem pedestals

standing on arteries,

arterioles.

floors

 

floors

we stand on

saw you

my love

on your ice floe

passing

waved but

you were gone

blades skimming

through desolate

heavens

ah lover

it was the flight

we fell for

passing

is what we are

Dad smoking by the kitchen window

 

Smoke from his pipe

were spirits rising

from the dead;

they coiled into the air,

graceful tresses,

defused and dissipated.

He needed sunlight

for this sorcery;

his ghosts, silvery white

hung momentarily,

umbilical, heavenward;

he was at peace then.

Alone

To turn, on eyes opening,

find again that blank space beside you;

come downstairs,

witness to the still-birth of another day;

a receptacle of words, restless

to be heard but no ear to hear them;

to move, room to room,

through the obdurate indifference of objects;

remembering warmth in memories

that leave you to its shivering absence.

A Town Called.....

 

Sometimes I wish I was living in a crossroads town,

less than really, a bar, a grocery store, a water tower,

far away from any place of consequence. Here heat is a cube,

in summer; people are encased in it, flies in amber.

You walk outside to look at the day, then retreat inside again;

time is irrelevant; all day is heat, every hour the same

till night comes. Nothing of note has happened since the sixties:

a fire that gathered the population together for six hours,

smoked for a day or two, then went out;

that old shop’s still there like a rotten tooth.

There’s no traffic to speak of, the wires come in on high poles,

the line of them, askew in places; you see them into the distance;

there’s nothing on the landscape to obscure the view;

turn your head, ditto in the opposite direction.

When a wind gets up, it lifts the dust, everywhere’s covered;

the view through a window gives a grey tone to the landscape,

but that’s fine, dust is part of the appeal.

People are old; they grew old while they were still young;

it is their way of dealing with the heat and emptiness; their faces

are parched soil with bright eyes embedded, and they’re gentle.

Time has stopped in my town; there’s no one racing with it,

there’s no point; that’s the way I like it.

Decision

 

You stood at the side of the road,

snow-covered and, as yet, unmarked.

I watched you from the window:

at first, filling your eyes with its perfection,

then weighing printing your footsteps

against being the first to leave a blemish.

And before you had even turned,

I knew your decision.

Questions on the Continuing War in Gaza

 

What difference: the oblivion of a newly born child

and it dead beneath a city’s rubble?

And the child born on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the grief of parents of fighters

and the grief of parents of children?

And the love of parents on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the child who is voluble

and the child whose words are dead in the wreckage of its lungs?

And the longing to live on one side

of a fence and the other?

What difference: the bones that support a child

and those bones smashed to uselessness?

And the care needed on one side

of a fence and the other?

Incarcerated

Concrete walls,

steel door.

Daylight is twilight,

though

way up, light

through a window

makes a play of leaves

on the wall opposite:

 

by this means,

we know that we are 

underground,

buried.

Our living lives

are those leaves;

how we fear

the arrival of autumn

and autumn

is almost here.

Damien

 

He’s got a gimp;

it throws his suit

like the buttons are one button-hole out,

and the shirt falls

below his jacket

on that side.

He walks faster to blur it;

speeds through the city throngs;

that adeptness pleases him;

the gimp’s

in his talk

too.

He tells you straight;

tells you

he’s telling you straight,

to remember what he says

or get used to 

being kicked around.

And always checking behind

or glancing into doorways

like he’s in debt

all down the street,

then turns a corner like he’s

trying to lose someone.

He keeps his right hand

in his jacket pocket;

the fingers are walking too;

I think it's because some woman told him

that constant movement

is freaky.

He won’t mind my

telling you;

he’ll enjoy been written about,

and feels he’d be good on tv;

he knows they wouldn’t have him;

their loss.

Betty

Betty,

the world is a marble;

getting smaller daily;

its mildews and viruses

have spread,

and they are at your feet.

I wanted to say something

reassuring,

for, at the very least, a child

should have hope

and till corrupted,

the child is beautiful;

but, what is there to say:

this has been destroyed.

Betty, 

the world is a marble;

there is no stopping it;

its mildews and viruses

are  spreading always

and they are at your feet.

.