Enjoy a cup of coffee

 

A man is out cold on the footpath;

arms, legs splayed limp as shirt-sleeves;

fly open, penis bare;

unkempt, ill-fitting clothes,

dirty and worn.

Passers-by glimpse,

grimace momentarily;

distract themselves urgently

with a fireworks of alternative thoughts,

erase the scene.

It’s nice to stop off in Starbucks,

settle in cosy,

let the stresses of the day drain away.

There’s something nest-like about it,

among the office-workers, students, shoppers.

Holy Well

 

Hope hangs from the trees,

prayers dance;

the sick, the love-lorn

click their fingers;

an enamel mug keeps watch.

The sun and moon try to see

but cannot;

the stars try to land

but cannot.

Stone-made water

nestling in earth’s clasp;

dream of every thirst

always watching, silent as wisdom,

still in thought.

Reaching for my Rucksack

 No holidays since 2019. I’m spending more and more time wanting to see new sights. I want to be dazzled again. So many places! Considering my reluctance to fly, near Europe is looking particularly attractive, and, of those countries, Portugal is the one least travelled to date.

I’m not a beach dweller; I get bored. What I do love is visiting Neolithic, medieval, Roman, early Christian, Pre-Christian, you get it, sites. Churches, ruined castles, palaces, archaeological digs, bridges, towers, wells, bells etc. I have difficulty passing any of them; something to be seen that I haven’t, it irks me.

Back to Portugal. Though it doesn’t have anything like the number of World Heritage Sites to be found in neighbouring Spain, France or Germany; it does have 14 that are quite close to each other and constitute a very doable touring route around the northern two thirds of the country, with Braga the most northerly site and Evora the most southerly.

Starting at Lisbon, heading north via Sintra, Coimbra, Porto onto Braga and returning via the Douro wine-making region, dipping into Spain to include three destinations there, and heading on south via Elvas, Evora back to Lisbon.

17 World Heritage Sites easily included inside two weeks. On the way, I’ll have seen Neolithic, medieval, Roman, early Christian, Pre-Christian sites: churches, ruined castles, palaces, archaeological digs, bridges, towers, wells, bells etc.

Sorted then and happy to resume my couch overlooking Donegal Bay.

Droplets of Water

 

Droplets 

along the sharp edge of a stone

like a chain of headlights

in December traffic,

sidling onto moss greenery,

streaming down an algal thread

to a pool of pellucid water

over a mosaic of coloured stones.

Beads of water, taxis,

carrying you in iotas 

to pools, your thoughts

in subterranean caverns

where the beauties are pin-sized

and, though forgotten,

were once your fireworks.

Cells

 

I think myself eternal:

a lineage unbroken

since the first cell,

carried onward in

the infinity of cells.

I think myself central

to the effervescence

that is existence;

and you too;

I think we are one.

Red Trawler, Green Trawler

 

(The shocking truth of children 'sold' by nuns from Ireland to the US as portrayed in the film Philomena is the subject of this poem. Coincidentally St Philomena was the patron saint of infants, babies and youth.) 

Red trawler,

green trawler,

bobbing

on the  sea,

Danny

once Patsy

bouncing

on a knee.

With a red note

and a green note

quiet words

over a cup of tea

they sold 

my little darling

far away

from me.

Precious As Lives Should Be

 

Bivalve shells

encasing lives:

magnificent lockets

ribbed and banded,

corrugated

and toothed shut.

Sublime

in design and plan

as befits

the preservation of life;

precious

even to blind nature.

Logical Chicken

 

then featherless chickens

saving the industry the cost of plucking

legless chickens

saving the industry the cost of their removal

wingless chickens

saving the industry the cost of bone production

beakless chickens

saving the industry damage caused by pecking

and on and on

till eventually billions of units like enlarged fists 

producing chicken meat

to the gentle sound of fluids streaming through plastic tubing.

Sunlight through the Trees

 

Coins of sunlight

falling from the trees.

Seeing, like fish

see them,

gyrating vesicles of air;

hearing their tintinnabulation

inside the wells

of our eyes;

gathering their scintillations

in baskets

that are a weave of synapses;

singing their light

back to the trees.

She Moves

She moves like water;

her dress a pool of sky

filling my bucket eyes.

I swim in currents

of her hair;

she does not know.

Tomorrow will condense

around her,

myself part of it;

she has made my life

a river of tomorrows;

I wait for her there.

A Memory of my Father

 

 

Shaft of sunlight, 

reflection off a million specks 

of dust, 

feeding his face with lines and grace

 – soft light paints old faces  

the friendliness of sweet Autumn apples –. 

Hands held down to his grand-daughter,

she looking up into his face;

the delicacy of the moment

as Vermeer would have caught it

in the light that spills down

from a hole in the clouds.

Soil

 

There is just a suggestion of mountainous terrain across the bay;

when, in the haze, they disappear so do I;

but a starling on the apex of the gable continually shifting the dial

along the short-wave is holding me present.

Sunlight is a strange thing. It lies, dead body on the patio;

takes everyone, everything down with it;

but it’s then the earth transmits most readily

what the sun is communicating.

Now the sun is counting my bones, registering their composition,

colour and structure; I, stretched out on a flag,

am almost reduced to clay,

the listening layer of soil.

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.

 

Days of our Lives

 o we’d have a coffee, maybe two, then off

into town by the side streets, looking for

red-brick houses with lilac doors and yellow

window frames. Drop into the IFI, sit over

another coffee, browsing the catalogue with half interest,

the steady drift of film-goers and idlers with more.

On down Dame Street to College Green,

enjoying our navigation of ever-shifting crowds,

the dexterous manoeuvrability of ourselves.

In Hodges Figgis we’d scan the poetry

shelves and the art books, those names and titles

settling in our heads like we were travelling the

world: Heaney, Mahon, Carver, Balthus,

Kahlo, Lorca, Basho, Holub ‒ dabs of fresh paint

and print to keep us informed for a month or two ‒

before returning to Grafton Street to knit crooked stitches

through the crowds, stop a few minutes to hear a busker

play a saw or slide guitar then around to Tower Records

to be tempted by some new ECM arrival in the jazz section.

George’s, Aungier, Wexford, Camden, Richmond Streets;

the diminishing scale of a city’s architecture, and

the backwards walk down the telescope to the landscape

of our normal lives. Crossing the border at the canal, with

its familiar vista down Rathmines Road to the mountains

beyond; we, like fish, breathing easier in our own habitat,

saw our hurdles flattened, but, perhaps, never recognized

the days of our lives?

That beautiful odyssey: Saturdays, mid-morning to mid-afternoon;

or maybe it was just one Saturday,

or, maybe, it wasn’t at all.

Friendship it Seems

 

Arms thrown open;

friendship it seems;

doubt it.

Too close to that face,

the full of your eyes:

a prison.