Sing Love

On his deathbed, when speech was gone,

we deciphered groans

and muddled on.

I remember she, visiting, took his hand

and for want of words,

he hummed to her

so tunelessly, it was not a tune,

but,  never in all his life

did he sing love so beautifully.

From her mother’s face.

  for Kay, in memory of Geraldine

At two months, she absorbs her mother’s face,

all gentleness and giving;

smiles back without a care.

Young girl, she sees encouragement, pride,

reprimand or disappointment;

learning, reading that alphabet of lines.

As teenager, she must stretch the grain,

find different measures in new faces;

re-arrange the markers of her life.

Easy smiles and shared frowns;

in adulthood, she returns to the home

of her mother’s face.

And when those eyes are finally closed,

and the face is still, its full story written;

she carries her mother’s face onward.

The best part

Falling in love is the best part;

when all is conjecture and optimism,

and your boats are high in the water.

You smile in expectancy,

in a world all giving;

and if there is taking, that’s fair too,

as you draw your duvet of pleasurable

daydreams more snugly about you.

Alone and Loneliness

Here, I have become accustomed to silence,

and silence falling,

as darkness falls.

I have learned to fill it with my own voice,

answer my questions,

debate my answers.

And sometimes I talk to you,

answer as you would,

and, in silence, nod agreement.

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I know a good poem. And the difficulty in breaking out of the chains of my own inability to achieve that poem (and this one ain't it either). I see how few poets do, and  I truly marvel at them.

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This rectangle is my exercise yard.

Snow bare now,

all my poems start,

haul themselves across the space,

stumbling in chains,

dreaming freedom.

The Country Child

       The Country Child.

The country child

runs in and out of rain showers

like rooms;

sees the snake-patterns in trains,

the sun's sword-play in the hedges

and the confetti in falling elder blossoms;

knows the humming in the telegraph poles

as the hedgerow's voice

when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting;

watches bees emerge from the caverns

at the centres of buttercups,

feels no end to a daisy chain,

feels no end to an afternoon;

walks on ice though it creaks;

sees fish among ripples and names them;

is conversant with berries

and hides behind thorns;

slips down leaves, behind stones;

fills his hands with the stream

and his hair with the smell of hay;

recognizes the chalkiness

of the weathered bones of sheep,

the humour in a rusted fence,

the feel of the white beards that hang there.

The country child

sees a mountain range where blue clouds

are heaped above the horizon,

sees a garden of diamonds

through a hole scraped

in the frost patterns of his bedroom window

and sees yet another world

when tints of cerise and ochre

streak the evening sky.

He knows no end, at night

he sneaks glimpses of Heaven
through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky. 

Leaving

The boat pulls away from the pier

while the houses are still sleeping.

I’m looking back at the empty windows

as though my leaving should mean something;

it doesn’t to them, but does to me.

I have fallen in love with this town, a fleeting affair;

being here has changed me,

and I know that mark is indelible.

The sky and the ocean are one; they are the vastness

into which I will throw this memory.

I will never be here again, so I allow myself watch, 

almost solemnly, as it flattens into my past.

Black

Lime green, grass green,

beer brown, peat brown;

pink, blue and yellow flowers;

a profusion of June colours

circular like a mountain lake;

and shimmering over all

a milky way of  bog cotton.

I gazed at it for a long time

and couldn’t smile for week.

The Kiss

Brancusi's The Kiss

You and I

made our happiness whole

inside the circle of our arms

Thought

Dust lifted into sunlight

is a vexed brain.

Our love was that way

before it settled.

Hard to imagine, now

that the house is empty.

Snow in my Garden

Snow. For the first time in years, there is a lot of it lying outside my window; I mean a lot. And, by all accounts, the main event is due later today: a blizzard on a scale we're not used to. For now though, I'm enjoying this lie in,  gazing out at the new world, pleased to see again our infrequent visitor from Siberia.

Snow in my Garden

The snow lies, bright and silent on my garden;

hedge, woodpile, upturned bucket reduced

to an undulant white suggestion of presence.

I stare, as though in an early stage of amnesia,

enthralled by this suspension of the familiar.

Suddenly a few flakes rise, meander into flight;

a few spiders climbing invisible threads, speckling the air;

then more, more and more till sight is thickly flecked;

zillions escaping into the amorphous sky,

and so it goes for hours, this muffled resurrection.

Till eventually the blades of grass, stiff as hedgehog spines,

are appearing through the thin cover of snow;

the grey air is clearing; and the last flakes are  lifting lazily

into haphazard flight; leaving the hedge, woodpile,

and upturned bucket exactly as before, but somehow, slightly baffled.

War: Never-Ending Harvest

   

Early each morning, the river is obscured by fog;

sounds come ashore like cries from Limbo.

At dawn the young women come,

spools of brightly coloured  fabric, with fishing rods;

and, magical spiders, they cast weightless filaments

out over the water;

for a moment there are more threads hanging

than there are people on the streets of London.

The river stops;

nothing stirs; the earth turns a little.

Then suddenly a rod bobs and bends

and stares through its tiny eye into the water;

straining, tensing, till in a slick of weed,

slivered as a newt, a young man's body breaks the surface:

bulb-eyed, marble-chested and tapered

to a train of drops dripping back into the river.

Thousands upon thousands, like unlit lanterns,

or candles newly lifted from wax.

And when the fog clears

the women are standing with their t anterns.

The bank is a thousand miles long

and the river is wider than an ocean. 

On Leinster Road

Warm, languorous Summer’s afternoon;

chestnuts in full bloom,

students chatting on the steps,

sipping cans of beer.

A man-roar up ahead, then again;

my alarm beeps.

Now, I see him,

purple-faced, wild-eyed;

bawling at a girl on the other side.

Beep beep. Entering his range;

now intruding onto the outer ring

of his target.

White.
‘Harmless; just passing.’

Blue.

‘Passing passing passing.’

Red.

Beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee.

He reads my fear,

his anger flares.

“Cunt.... fucking bastard....... shower of.......”

Furious summer sun

staring through a lens:

I catch fire.

Later, recovering an afternoon that was:

beautiful May, magnificence of early summer,      .

chesnuts in bloom,

students chatting on the steps;

I find charred remains

that keep flap flap flapping. 

Where the blood rose grew

This is where the executions happened;

in this yard, in the sun;

or more likely under clouds; here.

This is the place of killings, here

under the prison walls,

the high, high walls.

This is where the blood rose grew

 beyond their control,

the very spot; this is where.

Some poems just refuse to form

Some poems just refuse to form. The idea is there: the feeling, the imagery, but like pieces of jigsaw that have been incorrectly cut, the poem refuses to mesh.
And, sometimes it is that the poem  is too powerful in our heads, we haven't got the umph to bring such a mighty thing into shape.
This poem has too much going on behind it; I've posted one or two different versions before, I'll probably post one or two more. Why? Because this is an end of it for now.

The poem you said I should write.

A nurse named Yesterday arrived on your ward  ̶

her grandmother died the day before she was born.

She was gone in a matter of days.

Nurses from the agency come and go, you said;

good relationships are important for patients.

We talked about the sentence of always being Yesterday.

You died; and I cannot put a name to this poem.