A problem today

 

There is no ‘one view’;

all that happens is forged differently

in every mind

and, from the same viewpoint,

all differs with turning.

Wisdom understands this,

but, lost in the tall grass of prejudice,

wisdom is an unsought capacity.

The Kiss

The Kiss

a poetic take on Klimt's 'The Kiss'

 If there is a moment that is complete,

it is this moment;

the world outside,

the lovers one in intimacy

within the glitter of their sensations,

their own private galaxy;

faces turned

to that inner sharing.

And the cloak of gold flowing around

not away,

the earth, universe in all splendour

diminished by the splendour of their love.

 

Reading at Boyle Arts Festival

 

I'm looking forward to being back at Boyle Arts Festival this year. I'm giving a reading at 3pm in Frybrook House on Tuesday 22nd.

The festival itself is a 10 day event and has now been in existence since 1985, having developed from a smaller festival that began in 1983. It is one of the best known in the country. This year, as always, it includes music of all types, art exhibitions, drama, literary events, interviews, comedy, children's events. Headliners include music from  Karma Police, The Fureys, The Irish Tenors, Bad Manners, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and others; comedian, Jarlath Regan; author, Kevin Barry; historian, Diarmaid Ferriter. It goes on, but I'll stop here.

The festival runs from July 17th to 26th.

Miners for Minerals

 

Miners for Minerals

First it was that, miners for minerals;

disposable lives for valuable ores;

their clogging lungs for the silver service

at rich mens’ tables.

Now it’s defence for minerals;

populations on the scales with rare earths

and, as always, the ores tipping the scales

on rich mens’ tables.

A Withdrawal

 

In the end, we withdrew from the city

for an end to the constant commotion,

window-size skies, absence of seasons;

and have found a place near the ocean

which doubles the skies, where seasons

come on the winds, wild flowers mark

time by the roadsides and sunsets travel

in their southwest northwest arc along

the rim of our world.

We retreated from the relentless traffic

of development to the slow roll of years,

from the thrash of city-life to the quiet

resonance of internal and external nature.

Where his eyes rest

 

Where his eyes rest,

on the floorboards;

where the sun is landed,

a light on the life passed;

silence deep;

memory flattened by sadness

dead on that floor;

dead in that torpor.

Where his eyes rest,

in that stripped room;

a perfect square

a cold square.

To the child at the window

 

The fields hemmed in by hedgerows green with thorn and briar;

by cloud, stream and drain;

May’s champagne celebration:

the exquisite snow of hawthorn’s white blossom.

The soft pillowed hills latticed with limestone walls

built of lichened white moons;

the cloud-mediated light

spread evenly across the expanse of heaven and earth.

The poles that carry the wires

that carry conversations humming by the roadsides;

the roads that flow like streams from the town,

eventually bending into unseen countryside.

The world that is not known

the darknesses beneath sycamore and ash,

the guessed at activities of slinking foxes and shuffling badgers;

the forests and cities, the peoples out beyond those hills.

To the child at the window,

a universe without borders or boundaries,

understood as it is imagined,

as free as it is wide.

The Last Night On Inishark

 

Peopled since the Bronze Age;

now, pots and pans, tables and chairs,

they left the island,

left it a great yawning emptiness.

But old Thomas Lacey was not to be moved;

not while the spirits of his boatman sons

coursed the island’s winds; their bodies, perhaps,

still rowing back from Bofin.

And when all were gone,

and no October lights shone from the windows,

he set the fire, made dinner for himself and his sons

and left the door ajar.

He ate alone;

the great hungry tide reverberating across the island,

answerless and unrepentant;

he sat with dwindling hope, then went to bed.

But they came later in the night;

strong, smiling and unchanged after all the years.

They had rowed their boat home to their gleaming island;

and built a house that would forever be close.

Next morning, he woke to peace.

The wind across the island carried the salt of the sea;

he looked over to Bofin; it was as it had always been

and would be without him.

  

Ancient Dwellings

 

 

In hazel twilight,

an avalanche of white thorn

hanging above our heads.

Night lights of bluebells

thick around our feet;

faint silvery gleam of lake

between the trunks of trees;

birdsong all around.

Ancient walls

of moss-softened stones,

traces of a lifestyle that once was;

hand-built scripts 

disappearing in evening's light,

time's amnesia,

nature's shroud.

Cryptic, disconnected 

from their meanings;

too remote from their builders  

for poignancy;

we stop a moment, 

admire a bend on the pathway, 

white-petalled, luminous.

Passed On

 

The dresser:

axe-heads, bone needles, stone dice,

flint knives, beads, limpet and whelk shells.

My mother’s plates with nowhere to go;

the silver’s in the attic. And that mahogany table:

unuseable without doilies.

In time the soil will shift;

more sandstone dressers will be found,

and so too the broken pocket-watch she gave me .

AI and Are poets about to become obsolete?

 There's a lot of talk about the inappropriate use of AI by students in education, less so about its use in the arts. But it's here and I, for one, will be very interested to see how editors and publishers deal with AI-generated scripts. 

I asked ChatGPT english and irish words for the mix of soil and dung in places regulalry trodden by cattle. After getting the list, it asked would I like it to give me a poem based on my request and using some of the words. Having given me its original poem, it said " Release it under your name or in a shared authorship format, depending on your use".

Bracais is irish for mire, pluda is soft pulped muck.

“Bracais”

There, where the gate sags,
and the trough leans under rain,
the ground is a churned remembering —
bracais of hoof and hunger,
a mire where clay and dung
no longer part ways.

Boots sink with knowing.
This is the old place,
the place beneath every threshold,
where soil and waste embrace
like labour and loss,
like birth and decay.

The cows do not mind.
They have shaped it with their weight —
slow, patient architecture
of pluda and presence.
Even filth, trodden long enough,
becomes home.

Gaza Bombing

 

From a clear blue sky

thunder,

bombs

and death

to man, woman

and child.

When it settles,

the dust is spread

over breakfast tables,

Tel Aviv to Washington;

the milk in our cereal

stained;

a grey powder

on our bread.

Holy Well

 A rewrite of a poem from 2019. I regularly return to the topic of holy wells; their magic, their timelessness. People have been offering prayers at wells for millennia, but, in modern times, there is a atmosphere of precariousness around them; in a way it adds to their specialness. Many have been neglected, forgotten, destroyed or, since drying up, have lost their following, but all, since their thread sews centuries together should be preserved and respected. 

Holy Well

The bottom of the well is a mosaic of wishes;

each one shining.

I have left my dream dancing in a tree,

a tree growing on solid rock.

Perhaps the dancers fall into the well;

perhaps their after-life is a gleam;

perhaps wishes become dreams;

perhaps our after-life is a dreaming.

Here the spring weaves itself into lush pasture;

where gods, immemorial, have changed

water to verdure,

perhaps this, indeed, is the place to sow a seed.

Welcoming Felix

So, I'm a grandad. Felix arrived in February, when I started this poem; only now completing it or at least editing it further. It's all colour for the little fellow now, but seeing him in February, it really struck me how extraordinary the process of human growth and development is.

Welcoming Felix  

Well, Felix, you finally made it. How small you are, sleeping,

half-waking to a world of black and white, soon enough to be colour.

Exploring it in  your mother’s face; later the room, the house, the garden; 

all the time gathering to yourself the world within grasp.

That growth, from the cockle you are now to the man coming;

let it be flush with the eagerness to experience life’s richness,

may it ease you into the heart of happiness.

So, Felix,

with your sight still forming; may the world come, settle gently around you.

I wish you the love that will make it easy, safe passage through the days

and the humour to break the backs of any hardships you may meet.

   xxx

Cursing Death.

 

Cursing death;

the grim reaper

has slashed again

and we are bereft.

We overlooked

the kindly hand

that delivered her

from suffering.