In the Lives of Feichín and his Followers on Omey

 

St Feichín Takes His Followers To Omey

Let us leave the wooded Glen of Fore,

for men must shun trees;

their lives be lived in the full gaze of Heaven;

to Omey where trees are shrivelled to the earth,

and thorns are the ocean driven on wild winds,

gorse to lash our backs. Let us go far from these trees

that conceal our transgressions.

And they went to Omey, leaving the gentle Glen of Fore;

built their monastery among the sand dunes

where the winds rode the dragons of the ocean,

and the rains were nails;

as the granites were hump-backed on the shore,

so were they

beneath the charcoal sacks of the sky.

But if they forsook the bountiful harvests of the Glen of Fore,

the Lord lavished them with fish for their tables,

shellfish, seaweed and they were blessed

and in the dim light of their church, they sang

to the glory of their Provider;

and still asked that they might bear greater hardships,

for the sins of others weighed heavy on them.

And if, in sleep, they dreamed themselves back in the Glen of Fore

feasting on deer, boar, pheasant and grouse,

come morning they purged their night’s gluttony, kneeling

hours naked in the freezing tide and waiting for the end of day

to marvel again at the light of Heaven

as the sun sank beyond the edge of the ocean

and the splendour of God was manifest on the island of Omey.

A Child At A Window

Still gathering and editing from the last six years of Poetry and Miscellaneous Yap. The years of Covid has given me a lot of drafts of poems to consider. This is a simple enough poem; those Sunday afternoon matinees on the tv opened my childhood mind up to a universe of imagination, they embedded and have fed my efforts at poetry right up to my present.

A Child At A Window

It’s nighttime, the sky’s my screen. Laurence Olivier is fleeing

through a forest, dark fronds clutching, clawing at him;

a gothic tale full of the drama of black and white.

The forest is vast and he must run blindly through it,

somewhere behind is the story I haven’t seen, and

somewhere ahead is a border with a land no one knows.

I am at my window, the land I know is quenched;

above, across the inexplicable expanse of the Heavens, is adventure;

I watch it, take it to my bed, knowing tomorrow colour will return.

Donegal Changes

 Six years now in Donegal, six years retired from my teaching job in Dublin; there are defnite changes in my writing. Perhaps it's no surprise to find myself more aware of nature now, with a large garden to tend to and struggling to keep on top of the job. But also much more walking as I live beside the sea and on a country road that links into a vast network of  unpopulated roads stretching off eastward across the border, through hilly and often empty lands into county Fermanagh.

The hedgerows, linear forests, teem with flowers from the early snowdrops into primrose season, foxglove onto fireweed of early Autumn; it's a succession I could not have named until I found myself living in a rural setting. And the land often rushy, lush with other plants, just as beautiful; a different palete of colours, a different atmosphere, a different set of feelings.

 

Fireweed, Montbretia, Swallows and Me

It’s past mid-August, and the year, measured in flowers, is turning.

The foxgloves gone, they faded quickly, followed the iris, that

followed the garlic out of season.

Now that fireweed floods the roadsides with carnivals of colour,

and bonfires of montbretia are raging gloriously out of control

the swallows being skittish, flying broken circles about the house,

we enter the season of apples reddening, pears yellowing, plums purpling.

Yearly, I get this feeling of sadness as though programmed into the cycle;

it’s not the passing of beauty; beauty just changes its cloak; it’s time

stealing a gift that only time can give.

The Romantic Heart

 

The enamel white moon made a ladle on the water;

Li Po, a tick full of wine with a romantic heart,

rowed his boat up the long handle towards the bowl.

It was a gentle night, the air was warm and all was still;

he, with the fondest memories of all his lovers, sat

awhile, allowing himself to be enthralled by this beauty.

He became ecstatic; alone with the universe, colossal

therefore, and filled with the dream of love, he fell

into the water with arms wide to embrace the moon.

It was sudden, chill and lightless;

deceived by his love, he fell past euphoria

into the dank cavern that is the final knowing,

while up above the moon continued to beguile

all the wine-drinkers with love in their hearts,

all those who would drink their dreams into reality.

Bog

 

Bog

Sinking into the soft mire, spagnum sponge;

ooze rising inches above my feet: beer brown,

freezing cold. I take a handful and squeeze;

water, so much water drains through my fingers;

I slap away the fresh vegetation; hold my hands

to my nose, am filled with the smell of fertile earth.

Heathers, mosses, sedge and bog cotton;

a wilderness, once a lake, its margins still visible:

green fields and farm houses away in the distance:

Here, in the realm of insects, plants that devour them,

sundews and butterworts, their killer genes expressed

in the mucillage, tentacles, in the traps of their leaves.

And down, down beneath my feet, rich black turf:

countless years of heat, insulation: walls and roofing;

from bountiful earth fuel from the growth of millennia.

There too, the preserved remains of the past: old roads,

wooden tracks, submerged walls, jewelery, weapons, tools;

bodies wearing facial expressions that have defied time.

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 .

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

For Mother's Day

 Waving

 It was not the wave from the door, but,

when she’d turned out of the gate, looking back,

mother was still there with a second wave,

that, like an exchange of vows, was love

declared, over and over, with the simplest gesture.

Great milestones of her life started there;

her ever-growing steps towards independence,

all blessed with that wave, a warm pullover of love

to wear wherever the steps were going; and knowing too

that those waves were always tinged with sadness.

An insight into our capability for inhumanity

 

 Inured to the inhumanity displayed in times of war, here is a horrific example of the depths we are capable of descending to. Historic it may be, but there is no real indication that anything has improved; the genes haven't changed, only the arenas in which our basest inclinations play out.

 

Jam

 

Plump juicy blackberries:

that’s where the Summer went.

Rosy-cheeked apples, damsons:

-- energy neither created nor destroyed --

Summer’s sun packaged for Winter’s want.

September, we stretched across the hedges,

beat the birds to the berries,

and filled our cans. All went into the pot;

the kitchen filled with clouds of steam;

the windows, opaque,

cut us off from the world.

Fresh bread thickly sliced and buttered,

slathered in blackberry jam

still warm and flowing; we ate greedily

while the jars, in ranks,

stood prepared to face the darker months.

Audio: Michael reads 2 poems from his new collection, 'The Sound of Water Searching'.

To The Slaughterhouse, Klimt Moment

Under the Stairs

 

That blackness, beyond the storage boxes,

tins of polish, hoover and copper kettle

was, in the beginning, a solid-looking barrier;

I had no intention of going near it.

Time passed, I ventured further. On my knees

into the space, discovering shadowy discards,

dismantled appliances, things unknown to me, perhaps

from an earlier time and still that pitch unknown ahead of me.

A cave, a bottomless shaft to Australia, to Hell?

Eventually I breached the darkness and found it stopped

right there, wood; a prosaic end to my fantasies,

a step out of childhood.

My New Collection, 'The Sound of Water Searching'

It's been a long time coming and, needless to say, I think it's the literary event of the year. The Sound of Water Searching is now available from Lapwing Publications. Available in soft cover only, it costs £10/€12 plus postage. For purchasing information email  https://sites.google.com/a/lapwingpublications.com/lapwing-store/to-buy-a-lapwing-title For information on Lapwing Publications email lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com   You can contact me at mmodros@gmail.com 

The Sound of Water Searching

From personal poems that draw on "the emptied out treasure-chests of childhood" to reflections on the work of Elaine Leigh, John Minihan, Mick O'Dea and others, Michael O'Dea is interested in the ways that memory, experience, and meditation inform the life of the poet. The poems gathered in The Sound of Water Searching give voice to his ceaseless commitment to the artistic process: a "beautiful odyssey" that takes us from Dublin to Galicia and beyond.                      

Philip Coleman (Trinity College Dublin)

Wind and Tree

 

‘You’re still here’ said the wind to the tree;

‘And where else would I be, this is home!’

But the wind was already gone.

Some days later, ‘But don’t you get bored?’

‘Even the stirring of soil beneath my roots interests me

                                      when I am home,’ said the tree.

But the wind was already gone.

When passing again, the wind asked, ‘Don’t you long to travel?’

‘This place and I are inseparable lovers.’

But the wind was already gone.

The next time the tree asked, ‘Won’t you stop a moment?’

‘Oh, to have such freedom!’ replied the wind

and it already gone.

Pandemic Times

Things have improved, there was a time, not long ago, when windows looked like they were going to be omnipresent in our future relations; it was upsetting and somehow ridiculous. Here's Kay and I not too long ago meeting our daughter; sad to say, it's likely to happen again.