Hedgerows sagging;
buzzes disappearing into shadows,
droning 'oh my God its warm';
cows, still statues, contemplating
but not quite remembering what
and the house of gables with the wicker fencing
seemingly empty
but there’s a bedroom window gaping
with a lush darkness within.
Sometimes the art of poetry is too much:
the poem moulded to magnificence;
its message, with an oh so scrawny neck,
strangled inside it.
Madonna of the Clouds
As the sea moves, clouds move;
life too,
from the arms
that surround childhood.
Heaven drowns,
lives struggle,
smiles are upturned;
but that early solidity saves us.
Ballindoon Priory is on the shores of Lough Arrow in Co Sligo. On a warm Summer's day it is a place of delicate beauty and calm.
Ballindoon
Cattle grazing, quiet as jellyfish;
mid-summer's trees drowsy,
loitering in the pools of their shadows.
The ruined priory of Ballindoon
perched between meadow and lake, asleep
with its dead congregations in its arms.
Stripped now to white-lichened limestone,
colours of an Irish sky;
scoured of medieval ostentation;
freed from the half-light of doleful nave
and chant-droning chancel,
the austerity of ceremonial formalies.
No longer prisoner,
no longer locked in to itself,
but open, earth to heaven, heaven to earth.
In my hands, this head, close to sleep
is a universe closing;
to burgeon in the morning,
to be again an infinity of possibilities.
I marvel.
And how many universes have been sent to war?
How many sleepy heads have emperors cradled?
You’d cook love;
I’d prefer it raw.
You’d put it on a plate;
I’d lick it off the floor.
You’d be moving onto afters;
I’d be craving more.
Zong,
falling into the lake
light
half light
gloom
darkness
Dling, dling,
a chain
of silvery white
bubbles
following it
down
Dwn
medals
spinning the light
descending
softly
sftly
into weeds
Weathered, the language
of North Atlantic gales and fleecing rain;
of bare granite, stunted thorns, tongue-red
roan-berries and rugged wild rose.
Of meadows, richly butter-cupped;
rickety fences, bed-end gates, stone walls
and their builders’ hands.
Of sodden bogs, the skies that douse them;
the hands that stacked the turf;
sparks rising into the sooty darkness,
nights by fire-sides,
the stories that kindled there.
Of the waters that plummet down mountainsides
then haul, barge-slow, silt through the midlands;
the hands that guided the tillers,
ploughs,
scattered the seed,
dragged needles through oceans of cloth,
harvested the carrageen and dulse
from freezing seashores.
The language of famine,
of jigs, reels and slow airs,
of high-fielding footballers, deft hurlers;
resistance to occupation;
devotion to saints or saints’ shadows;
myth and legend,
ghosts of ever-changing skies
and a restless earth.
Of flush green hedgerows,
their sudden stirrings and rustlings;
deep shadows, half-light and shade,
the known and unknown that exist together there.
Of orchards and dances,
factions and battles,
weddings and funerals;
the stitch and weave,
the words native to that soil, climate
and people;
the words that give name to it all.
An avalanche of white thorn
hanging above our heads
in hazel twilight.
The night lights of bluebells
thick around our feet,
faint silvery gleam of lake
between the trunks of trees,
birdsong everywhere.
These ancient walls whose stones
are moss-softened green pillows
are the skeleton of a lifestyle that once was.
Hand-built scripts of lake-side dwellers
vanishing in the evening light,
in the centuries’ accumulation
of humus and leaf-litter.
Cryptic now, fragmentary;
no longer connected to their meanings;
too remote from their builders to carry
the poignancy of their passing;
we stop a moment
to admire a bend on the pathway:
white-petalled, luminous.
The word flows
along the tongue
and over the tip:
river on a silt bed,
smooth as glass
over a weir.
Beer-brown,
lumbering
and opulent
the word
elemental like air,
gorged on peatland spill;
warm
in the mouth
like spittle.
Lightning on the asphalt
rain dousing Camden
in July
sunlit splashes
running shopfront to shopfront
hair drenched
cables warm like arms
counting down my vertebrae
haloes bout my feet
and your excitement
frying up
music-filled doorways passing like ponies
green wood above
the water
hucksters hippies
and the feel of incensed air
a Doors tune
like smoke
voices flapping against upstairs windows
escapees
excitement or speed
we
in blue jeans
A mite is travelling up the margin of my page;
a full stop going on a journey.
I assume it has purpose, but what can I know?
I’m reading that Stephen Hawking said
“the universe appears designed”, by which he meant
it’s strikingly well suited to existence of life.
Which makes me wonder about scale:
how small are we?
Are we blindly travelling up the margin of someone’s page?
It's worth mentioning that Hawking's views on what was haening in the universe changed radically subsequent to this comment.
Sea a white slab,
sky soft bag of sunlight,
the mountains opposite
suspended in mid-air; a dream place.
Cosily plump,
swaddled in greenery,
a pigeon sits zen-like
deeply contemplating;
as though daylight arrived before day,
and the world, caught in a spotlight,
blank and unsteady
has, as yet, its constituent parts unresolved.
The shock
as you peel away from the oblivion of sleep;
the implausibility of it;
the infinity of ends that all meet.
All of us in a boat.
Sitting there.
Our blood on the water.
Our reflections in the blood.
All of us looking.
The boat unmoving.
The water undisturbed.
No one talking.
Evening settling in.
A chill with the dimming.
This poem is inspired by Peter Doig's 'Figures in Red Boat'. It's a fantastic image which I purposely left out of the post to allow the poem achieve its own effect. However, if you’re not familiar with the painting, do a search and stay with it for a while; I think it is very thought-provoking.
