When all the world was young

            Oh for the days of childhood, when the sun was always in the sky, ice-creams came in wafers, we skated on the pond all winter long, men whistled on the way to work, Christmases were  knee-deep in snow and the neighbours invited you in for orange squash and bikkies. Nightime was curl up cosy in front of the blazing turf fire. Oh dear, if only!               

 

 

 

                            Eleven

 

          I am eleven;

my eyes are overflowing with light

from the spangling stream,

ears brimming with its chattering

sprays and runs,

my back lush with the magnificence 

of  Summer sun. 

 

I am in a field of cowslips,

the colour butter ought to be;

in the distance a bell is chiming

but I have no duties.

I’m lying on my stomach on a wooden bridge,

my eyelids shut, my fingers fishing for splinters.

 

Live Recording of Day-long Reading of 'Paradise Lost', Trinity College Dublin, 2012

“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven”
 

Here is the link to the live reading of John Milton's Paradise Lost as recorded at Trinity College Dublin on the 14th of December, 2012. http://paradiselostreading.wordpress.com/the-recordings/

It offers a good opportunity to put voices to Irish poets you’ve been reading for years. Among the many notables that took part in the day-long reading were Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Macdara Woods, Philip Coleman, Brendan Kennelly,  Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Iggy McGovern, Harry Clifton and Seamus Heaney. I read my lines from Book 9.

A commemoration of John Berryman’s Dream Songs is being planned for this October. A collection of newly penned Dream Songs is in the pipeline; I expect there’ll be an online recording of that event before the year is out.



 

Powerful Imagery

 

 

Francis Bacon’s Head VI can quickly inspire a poem. The claustrophobia within that cage, the tassel that suggests he has been interred with a hornet. That  grotesque scream, unmitigated by eyes. Is he caged for our protection; his protection; is it representative of a state of mind or a metaphor for his position; is it pain or aggression?

So many of his works are raw emotion; for me, no other artist hits the gut with such power. All those possibilities carry a different poem; I keep a collage of some of his and other images on our box room wall.

 

 

The Wind Claps The Slates.

 

 

The wind claps the slates;

all night they are hooves running berserk,

all night the wind is inciting them;

all night.

 

At twenty past two and twenty past three

and twenty past four I am looking at you;

how I would love to have hooves to come

crashing through your sleep, to burst into

your solitude.

 

And there I would, for better or worse,

demolish the muzzled years with as much

violence as reverberates beneath iron shoes,

as  causes such a frenzy in stone that slates

stampede.

Following Rousseau

 

 

I'm not sure this does follow Rousseau, but the idea came from his painting 'The Sleeping Gypsy', it's a revised version.

 

                                           The desert has no



throat

to crease the silence;

wing

to ruffle the air;

leg

to displace a sand grain. 

In the desert

I am

atom, planet;

as massive, as minute.

 

 

November Leaf

 

That maple leaf had all the colours I saw in you,

a pronouncement hung on a web of veins.

I found it, a star in the debris, at the river’s edge;

somehow it seemed right.

 

The greatest beauty is the fragile beauty;

it reminded me of you,

with the blue barely clinging to your irises,

your smiles precarious as November leaves.

A Memory of My Father

Shaft of Sunlight

 

Sunlight,

reflected off a million specks

of dust,

fed his face with lines and grace.

 

Soft light

paints old faces the colours of sweet

Autumn apples.

He talked on; I looked in.

Inheriting the land

The sadness of emigration is particularly marked at this time of year. An air of  emptiness settles on old country farmhouses; they stand un-stirring in the becalmed, warm and dusty summer afternoons. I thought this aspect of life was in our past ten years ago. Driving through the countryside, I see  too many houses that should be lively with grandchildren playing.

 

 

 

Inheriting The Land.

 

 

Here the sea is no more than a sigh in a shell,

conversations speed past, pole high, Dublin to Galway

and music is the wind whistling beneath a door.

Slightness describes Summer's step,

stonework its skies; a little light drips

from its edges but it's falling from a miser's hand.

Across the fields the church, within its necklace

of dead congregations, is a rusty hinge;

a place filled with a century's stillness.

And the ivy-choked trees lean closer together

like old men guessing at each others' words.

 

If you were to fly over these patchwork hills,

along the hedgerows and through the lightless haggards,

you'd never meet a soul. The old farmers are sitting

in their twilight kitchens, their families standing

on the mantelpiece in the other room that's never used

with faces tanned beneath American skies.

Only the din of crows seeps into that silence;

crows more numerous than leaves on the sycamores,

always bickering, hogging the light,

building their cities, staking their inheritance.

What the artist wishes

1.

At each beginning,

that same challenge: 

to crack perfection;

a kidney stone

that aches

in the pit of your brain. 

2.

He hopes for an effervescence,

a sparkling quality; 

for the extra melody that plays

beneath an achieved harmony.

 

from Painting Women

Roscommon Writing Award

 

Gerry Boland has emailed me with news of The NEW ROSCOMMON WRITING AWARD 2014 which will be awarded for works in English, on any theme, in any literary form. The competition is open to people of all ages and nationalities,however all must have some connection with the county of Roscommon.They can be living or born there, have gone to school or be working in the county.

The winner will receive a monetary prize of €500, (four runners-up will receive €50 each),

and will have their winning entry printed in the Roscommon Herald, the Roscommon People, and be broadcast on Shannonside FM. There is no entry fee, and all entries must be received by 30 September, 2014. Jane Clarke is judging this year's entries.
Find more information at: http://roscommonarts.com/artsoffice/news.htm

 

Poetry Workshop at the Boyle Arts Festival

I'm looking forward to giving a poetry workshop this Saturday at 2.30pm in the Boyle Enterprise Centre and admission is a paltry €5. It's just one of a number  of workshops  on the day. Also reading on Sunday evening at 7.30 in King House as part of  'An Evening of Poetry and Prose with the Moylurg Writers'. Admission again, a mere €5.

More information at http://boylearts.com/

Images from Clare

We were in Miltown Malbay for the Willie Clancy. In the afternoons, we went walking. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera, but I did have my mobile, so couldn't resist a few scenes.

The first is this view of the Cliffs of Moher looking south, but for all the world, it looks like a ledge hanging precariously high  above the ocean.

Not far from Miltown, there is the beautifully maintained holy  well in honour of St Joseph. As regular visitors here will know, I have a fascination for holy wells; places that have a special other-worldly atmosphere about  them. I hope more people come to visit them, so that they may survive.

Every time I come to Clare, I want to walk in the Burren. Bloody Cranes-bill filled the grykes.

But you have to marvel at nature's resilience, here's a small nest of plants surviving in spite of everything.

I was reminded yet again, something music-lovers have always known, Clare is a very special place.

In The Home

 

Sitting by her bed,

among those sobbing, groaning women,

in a room claustrophobic with impending death,

her spirit shrivelled inside her,

her mind fled to the fifties.

 

But later, given a bed near a window,

her mind cranked up.

It was the birds on the lawn;

the grubbing thrushes and blackbirds;

those birds kept her alive.

Messi Teleportation

It appears to be the case that Lionel Messi can teleport, but it's not quite instantaneous; in fact it takes 3 seconds.

This ability has obvious advantages in football: presented with an apparently impassable phalanx of the opposing forces, Messi flicks the switch and.................

 

with thanks to www.101greatgoals.com where this picture was originally published.

for madmen

 

 

 

How enormous are we! How far our reach!  How endless our creativity! (Sometimes it comes as a surprise that the great are still only human.)

In war, the notion of humans being anymore than their puny physical selves is completely abandoned. So in war,we debase ourselves. And for the power trips of madmen,(western and eastern), we do it over and over.

 

 

 

Goya.           

Of course not;

of course no one that ever cracked open a head

has seen a symphony pour out.

 

No executioner has seen the flow of an amber fireside

with its intimate and tangling caresses

drain from the split skulls of lovers

 

nor have soldiers who shoot dark holes

seen rafts of memories spilling, carrying the children,

                  the birthdays, the orchards, the dances.

 

When they shot the poet Lorca,

the bullets sailed in a universe, yet when the blood spurted

it was only blood to them.