Cities

 

City Lives.

  

They shout into space,

answer each other like whales

across great haunted distances;

they never meet,

only sound waves ever meet.

 

 

Alone in their canyons,

hives,

shoals

they roar.

Rooms upon rooms

upon houses upon houses

upon streets upon streets:

roars spilling out,

spilling over,

spilling down.

 

A million sound waves,

a million discordancies

tumbling, surging, 

pouring out

onto the streets,

into the traffic,

wheels, cogs, pistons:

 

the cannibal jazz

of cities.

 

Where Are You

         Where Are You.

 

Where are you.

Where are you child.

Among the spring green leaves

Naked as a lizard;

I hear your airy lilt,

Why are you humming.

 

From what remote well

Do these grotesque sounds come;

Dispatched, bleak cirrus

In the high skies of a child's voice,

Freezing all the forest

Into fairy-tale stillness.

 

Where are you,

Where are you child.

In what empty paradise;

Where's the tower that emits your eccentric song;

Against the frozen wings of which birds of paradise

Do you rub.

 

from Painting Women

 

 

                         Balance 

                                                                                                                                              a brushstroke tips it

  

       He adds                                                                                     counterweights

                                                              

                                                                                                                                                        corrects

  

                     She arrives                                                                by bristles of a

  

                                                              brush          

  

                                                                                  a construction                                                                 of
     
   light

  

                                      acrylic

  

                                                                                                                         on  paper                 

Where the poetry comes from

Reflection and dreaming, in a nutshell.

Where The Poetry Comes From

 

Fathomless blue;

blue sky. 

Two swallows proclaiming it

are extravagant 

dancers in an empty ballroom.

A church bell chimes 

two, three, five o’ clock;

no matter. 

Tracing curves to unending time;

a route to south Africa?

Fathomed true;

Blue sky.

With You

   

The fields, green with snow

under an apple blue sky; 

you, brimming

winter’s brightness, 

turning cartwheels;

your whole body grinning. 

The silver trees of our breathing

in full flower; 

my golden happiness

in being with you 

till the shafts of shadow

turned purple at sunset; 

       and our hours together

       colourless at parting.

Notice to children

The Aos Sí (Sídhe), the fairy folk of Ireland are alive and well and are living beneath the sídhe, fairy mounds dotted all around Ireland. They are reputed to be the Tuatha Dé Danann who retreated underground after defeat in battle by the Milesians.Though sometimes referred to as a beautiful race, and always ready to dance, they are also associated with carrying out a range of dastardly deeds,  particularly the stealing of babies, and sometimes people not so young.

 

Children’s Song 
                                     from Above Ground Below Ground
 

The piper’s notes come whistling clear,

as in the days of yore;

they leap and prance to the piper’s tune

as wildly as before. 
 

For still they dance, the fallen ones,

beneath earth’s prison door;

for still they dance, the fallen ones,

enraptured by the score. 
 

A child that plays among the stones

might tempt them from their lair

to substitute a grey-haired imp

for a boy with golden hair. 
 

For still they dance, the fallen ones,

in the heat of the molten core,

for still they dance, the fallen ones,

beneath our earthen floor. 
 

Now children who must pass the mound,

respect this ancient lore;

and when at last you curl to sleep

be sure you’ve locked the  door. 
 

For still they dance, the fallen ones,

to this endless encore;

for still they dance, the fallen ones,

and will for ever more.

 

 

 

Bird of Paradise

 

 

One of my abiding memories from a visit to the Skelligs, too many years ago now, is of gannets moving to and fro in the air between us and the islands. Of all the scenes I’ve ever witnessed, this was the most magical; it seemed we were approaching an enchanted place, a rock fallen from Paradise. Apart from the spectacular beauty of the spire-like Skellig Michael rearing heavenward out of the ocean, the gannets,  white scarves drifting on thermals, gleaming in sunlight, looked like mythical creatures freed from gilt cages to mesmerise any would be invaders.

To soar, shining, across the heavens is an image of divinity. To waft effortlessly is an attribute of a creature whose divinity is so ingrained that it is taken for granted.

I came across a gannet, its head disappearing into the sand, its wings broken like a wrecked ship, yet its beak still pristine like a perfectly forged dagger, and got a strong urge to write a poem about it. Not a very original idea: the pointlessness of vanity when all too soon our beautiful heads disappear into the soil.   

 

 

 

 

 

The Wake

1

When Katy Tyrell’s eyelids were closed,

they stopped the clock,

covered the mirror,

and she was waked. 

Entwined in her hands, a rosary beads,

‘Je suis L’imaculée conception’

was embroidered on her shroud;

everyone said she looked every inch a Cherokee.

2

 

After she was laid out, with the ticking stopped

and a sheet blocking the devil’s door, 

he said, “ Let’s sit down to a game.”

“Shuffle the cards, dale herself in.”  

“Lay’ve the window open

and mind, don’t step in her way”

Railway Child

 

 

Picking wood splinters

from my clothes, 

ear to the track

and the soft thunder

of a train hurrying

from Ballymurray. 

Day, a gift across

a stretch of line, 

was measured

in disappearing trains 

and struck on coinage

with the flattening of pennies.

The River Took Me

Once, in a sodden flaggered field

beside the river,

the current took me;

not a canoe but a trout,

a water’s flint smoothed by its flow,

a ripple’s almond.

 

All sleekness and fluidity,

all instinct;

a lidless eye running,

seeing and discarding,

gorged on movement,

passing all argument.

Religion embedded in the machinery of war

I think  it was the late seventies. I turned on the  news one evening, and there was a report showing a priest, along with a minister of some other Christian denomination, blessing cruise missiles before they were deployed in Europe.

The wording has stayed with me, the justification for carrying out a Christian ritual on instruments of mass destruction. It struck me as almost surreal. It seemed to me to be an abuse of the religion, to use one of its rituals in this context. No doubt, there are those that'll say the prayer below is appropriate, but can anyone really believe that Jesus would have blessed cruise missiles? 

 

 

 

Cruise Missiles          

Jesus, the padre prayed,

direct these missiles onto the heads

of our enemies.

 

Except that’s not what he said. He said,

we pray that these missiles will be efficient

in their function.

 

Then. Up Jesus,

ride them clean down their throats.

Except, of course, he didn’t say that either;

 

but blessed them with holy water.

After that, the missiles were dispatched,

American missionaries to Europe.

 

 

In Mayo

 

The sky:

 

            rags on bushes

            in a wintry gale.

 

The barbed-wire fence:

 

            a lunatic's music

            sprinting down the valley.

 

The mountains:

 

           tossed heads

           with their silvering sheen.

 

Telephone wire:

 

            daisy-chained voices

            humming out of tune.

 

The lake:

 

            a shirt that blew

            off a line.

 

Rowan tree:

 

            tongue on the mountain

            shaping high C.

 

 

 

At Sartre's Funeral

This poem has little to do with Sartre or Simone de Beauvoir, but the image of her sitting in a chair above  his grave got me started. I didn't see a photograph, so it was easier to envisage her as, almost, sitting by her hearth.

It is one of a number of poems that would not have been written if I had seen the image as it actually was. I wrote a number of poems on the subject of the felos in Galician carnaval (published in a chap-book, Felos aínda serra, by Amastra-N-Gallar, 2004; see link in side panel); I saw the images in black and white; had I seen  the many photographs which were in colour I would not have been able to write them.

They Gave Me A Chair.

 

They gave me a chair

so I could sit beside the grave,

like a woman painted in

after the funeral crowds had gathered.
 

 

And I, his lover, was looking down

as though this earth was some sort of heaven,

thinking

I'd prefer it south-facing

or he could do with a bit more space

or some other such nonsense.
 

 

Then alone again, I found,

fixed above all my memories,

the picture of a coffin

on the floor of an empty room

as seen from above.

Trap

I can't remember the circumstances in which this poem was written, and that's probably a  good thing.

 

Trap

 

I was in a hawthorn,

trapped in its branches;

all arms, hands and fingers

prevailing on me not to struggle. 

I was an exhibit in a jar

ragged and shock-eyed,

praying for a passer-by

where ravens perch still for hours. 

I was a storm-blown tatter

caught in another’s stitching;

my cries drifting into the sky

nonchalant like dandelion seeds.

Scarecrows

We are two scarecrows: rags and string;

what the rain softens the wind picks clean.

 

We are two scarecrows: sticks and straw;

crows fly out from underneath our jackets.

 

We are two scarecrows: nails and wire;

each day drowning as the corn grows higher.

 

We are two scarecrows: sacks and hay;

nodding toward eternity, we tip toward clay.