Prayer at a soldier’s grave

Lord,

You created this young man to do Your will

wherever righteous  politicians may send him;

to loose his bullets into other young men

sent by other politicians, who, seeing the thing

otherwise, also uphold what is right.

His intelligence and strength used to cull those

most like himself, serving country.

I pray that this transubstantiation of body to stone slab

pleases You  as it has pleased those who sent him,

who have much to gain from his sacrifice.

The Havoc of Climate Change Already Here

Leaving the climatic effects of global warming to one side, the geopolitical ramifications are truly scary.  Take a short while to listen to Professor Jennifer Leaning  in this BBC podcast, Climate Change and Me:  https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b0b3fkps

     

A life alone

No one lives with the moon, no one could;

the moon is beautiful, too beautiful;

a sentence to loneliness.

Night after night, wandering, catching glimpses 

  of lovers through half-pulled curtains, it loiters 

to glare on their passions with arctic disdain.

Then scurries onward through the forests of the sky,

to recover its empty heaven,

the solitude that freezes its heart.

A View Upward

Two swallows, pencil points on the ends of mathematical compasses,

wheeling in a smoky blue sky, took me with them; a sort of freedom.

Lying, watching the sky think, composed of  nothing but separating atoms,
I, you might say, was reassembled in the magnificence of that one moment.

Exhilaration,  a reassembling of the way I thought, sent me cascading outward,

Napalm.

            

           (a poem about distance)

            Nice to feel the sun on your back,

            cool yourself down in the sea;

            watch the girls on the beach:

            beautiful bodies.

            Nice too, the sounds of the seaside:

            a speed-boat buzzing, 

            the tide washing onto the sand,

            children screaming.

On Murvagh Beach

There’s so little difference between sea and cloud

that the whole scene might as well be upside down,

with the bisectors of St John’s Point, a finger stretching

across the horizon, and Mullagmore, a finger, Adam’s to God,

reaching back. To the left, white clouds are hanging,

sheets from a bed, down the sides of Ben Bulben; to the right

the Bluestacks are slumped  beneath mosquito nets of rain.

Smokey light is filling the bay like ether, lulling the world,

so waves that have raced across the ocean, surviving the fury

at Rosnowlagh, now collapse, spent, onto the sand.

Murvagh beach, pooled with clouds we’re walking through;

two silhouettes moving along the bottom edge of a canvas now cause

 a tin of paint to splatter upward: a bevy of oystercatchers taking to flight.

Riverrun

Riverrun over the land:

slivered sky and light,

spindly bodies flowing,

fish and ripples one,

alive.

Clamouring in the high places,

lisping in the  low.

Spry in youth,

sedate in old age;

always journeying to their end

to run again.

Transept.

Transept.

Transept.

Transsssssssssssept.

A word like a vision,

s slipping over the lips

like water over a weir.

Transept.

Something lighter than a spacecraft

orbiting;

a fume

somehow escaping;

transssssssssssssssssssss,

a small perfection,

fragment of renaissance art,

a sssssssssnip of eternity.

Elemental

Trees keening winter nights away,

their wails woven into the wind;

heads of hair like seaweed taken from the strand,

flails knotted in insoluble puzzles.

Underground, roots twisting toward some source,

shaped by memory;

trees, like abandoned lovers,

scratching down the marble of night-time.

Above Ground Below Ground

Above ground

my limbs fan out,

carrying spoons

to fill with light.

You tear them up.

Below ground,

my roots fan out,

drinking straws

to suck in water.

You tear them up.

Without me

there is no life

above

or below ground;

and still you tear.

Where grey is the most beautiful colour: Inis Meáin

Piper's Music

The piper is a mythological entity, so, free from shackles, his significance is unlimited.

Now the piper plays the notes of earth:

the slow air of the soil settling beneath our feet,

the centuries that have run like water,

the season-spattered years of crying, laughter,

wars and famine;

the bones beneath us, the resurrected bones;

the notes of time long gone, times never been.

He plays the cycles of life and death, mountain to sea-bed,

flower to seed.

His notes are the snowfall of white-thorn in June,

flurries of its petals in January.

The air is an air long gone, still coming;

he plays it slow; too slow for running ears;

too low for ears never listening.

photograph

I find you among the strewn things in the attic

and pull you clear.

You all but demanded to be lifted

but then go mute.

I drop you back, watch a moment to see you settle;

you’re giving a porcelain vase your lop-sided smile.

It’s not the memories that holds me that bit longer;

but your smile in that heap of junk.

Smoke

In the bar in which they used to meet,

I see him, in what was their place;

eyes fixed on the floor-boards before him,

cigarette smoke dreaming upward.

And then I see her sinuously, in silver tresses,

climbing the light; her slender body uncurling

from his downturned head, and I understand,

she, a resurrected soul, is leaving him.

At One End Of A Bench.

At one end of a bench

an old man wearing Winter clothes

regards the fountains and Summer

through melt-water irises.

This man needs my ear to be a conch

so that he can call to the past down these auditory canals.

And when he calls, his wife and sons will resurrect,

return, reverse like filings into a family.

It is mid-morning in Stephen's Green;

the usual sounds: clacking fowl and fountain symphonies,

outside the thrash of traffic and voices.

In a moment:

two strangers on a bench are traveling backwards to Mayo;

elsewhere a beggar has recreated himself in a bank window

and somewhere, busy in a kitchen, a woman is conversing

though the voice that answers has not been heard for years.