Monet's Water Garden

 

Each lily is a flaring match,

a stud on Monet's 

liquescent

 mind.

.

May Stroll

May’s detonation of summer growth; 

walking down a lane between two hedgerows 

overgrown with cow parsley 

like confetti suspended in its fall,

I feel the intoxication 

of the bees nectar-induced drone; 

the surge of life, an internal fireworks, 

its ticker-tape brilliance, 

the exhilaration of it.

Labour

 

Death has arrived into your breathing:

you labouring to stay alive.

I’ve never been so aware of the lungs as bellows;

how basic the mechanism is

now that all the brain-work is past.

Straining for oxygen all these hours;

we standing by your bed parsing each breathe,

the minute modulations in the sounds,

you hauling oxygen from the room to your blood.

Dog

 

A long way off, across the open strand;

small, minute even, a couple walking a dog.

Picturesque and sweet somehow, their 

silhouettes across the deserted expanse of sand.

And as we stand there looking, the dog starts

to run in our direction. Tiny at first but building

into a shape we recognize, a pit bull coming

arrow-straight to us. 

She sees it early, recognizes the breed, 

knows it’s coming, crossing that quarter of a mile 

directly for her and she is petrified. And it does, 

and is now jumping at her, now a frozen stump. 

The dog persists, not aggressive but it is

a pit bull and she is terror-stricken. 

Across the strand, a quarter of a mile off,

 the couple watch their 'puppy', 

miniaturised to cuteness with distance, 

playing with strangers. And perhaps too, maybe,

 just maybe, one of them is nonchalantly running 

the dog's lead through a half-closed hand.

Strokestown International Poetry Festival 2024

From the 3rd to 5th of May poetry lovers will  be in Strokestown along with many of the finest poets around including Rita Ann Higgins, Jane Clarke, Peter Sirr, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, Ger Reidy, Tony Curtis, Pat Boran among others; quite honestly a very impressive line-up.

If you haven't spent some time in Ireland's Hidden Heartlands, this is certainly the perfect excuse to visit. Strokestown Park  and the National Famine Museum alone are worth the visit; other attractions nearby include Roscommon Castle, Elphin Windmill, Lough Key Forest Park and more.

However on this weekend poetry is the star; I'm reading on Friday night with a group of Roscommon poets. See you there.

Festival website: https://strokestownpoetryfest.ie/

Céide Fields

 

These walls, stone calligraphies,

almost six thousand years old,

predating Sumerian cuneiform,

built on the tablet of geologic time;

its pages stacked above the ocean,

stripes of the Céide cliffs

closed under the cover of bogland.

Peat that preserved their script,

a retelling of Neolithic life;

the walls of their fields like a net 

thrown onto the land; 

a farming community 

perched above the roaring Atlantic,

their livestock in enclosures, 

their lives lived in that lattice-work.

And now I think of Tom’s new walls,

the limestone boundaries of his fields;

how he has written his lines into this history,

albeit much further inland.

How he has added to the great patchwork,

six millennia in the making

and kept the stitch;

how glorious his walls stand.

Emi Mahmoud's Powerful Poem On Sudan's Unnoticed Crisis

 

This BBC link, https://www.bbc.com/news/av/world-africa-68816523, contains a compelling message and poem from Emi Mahmoud. We need to be careful, the media directs our attention, but there are other crises, some claiming more lives though not lines. Lives are of equal value everywhere;  news media manages to subsume human lives to political interest.

Notable too in this interview, she underlines the importance of poetry in communicating human anguish.  

A Gap in the Hedge

 

A gap in the hedge

where briars are looping downward

under the weight of grape-like clusters

of fat juicy blackberries ‒

squelching cattle-trodden paths

lead onward to fresh, green, larder-like

half-acres of lush shining grass ‒

choked with cloud

and birdsong sweet with plenty,

among stirrings in the leaf-litter,

momentary alarms;

I step, sinking in wellingtons

in the dung-gummed earth,

into a triangular field

green as the previous,

as secluded within its sycamore,

blackthorn and elder confines.

I stop as I would passing into a new room

and know I can walk the whole country,

east to west, field to field, across this mosaic

with its opulence and endless allure.

Life Long

 

Life Long

Still:

my once loved

is standing there

as though left out in the rain

and waiting to be brought in,

ever-present,

a hologram

at the end of the garden.

Still:

my once loved

is standing there

as though left out in the rain

and waiting to be brought in,

ever-present,

a hologram

at the end of the garden.

Still,

and the years have rolled,

I have held her there.

An insight into our capability for inhumanity

 

 Inured to the inhumanity displayed in times of war, here is a horrific example of the depths we are capable of descending to. Historic it may be, but there is no real indication that anything has improved; the genes haven't changed, only the arenas in which our basest inclinations play out.

 

Iconic Photographs

Miley twerks,

Marilyn gathering in her dress,

a galaxy of stars gathered around Bradley,

a sailor kisses a woman in Times Square,

5 soldiers raise a flag at Iwo Jima,

Einstein sticks out his tongue,

a child face down dead on a Turkish beach.

Marble

 

Michelangelo might have carved

the wrinkles on his forehead,

veins on the backs of his hands,

the fingers slender in death,

knuckles, fingernails,

lids shut over spiritless eyes.

The rosary trickling down from

his fingers is an intrusion;

no renaissance here,

Dad is a statue now.

Days, Pages, Happiness

 

What you’ve never grasped

is your days are flying loose,

pages in the wind,

and you busy about filling them,

never catching them.

Happiness is  sunlight

on the pages;

it flies with the days.

.

History Lesson

 

All of that twentieth century history

went in, piled up;

from childhood, it stacked:

the cold war, Bay of Pigs, coup d’etats,

dictators, famines, invasions,

Vietnam, Congo, Falklands, Belfast, Kosovo;

treaties, broken treaties, military exercises,

nuclear arsenals, on and on

and we got wise

and understood that nations are hungry

and savage;

there were always answers and we knew them

from a young age.

And the great page turned, twentieth to twenty first:

still they came: Darfur, Somalia, Yemen, Afghanistan,

invasions, piracy, terrorist attacks, revolutions

until we know nothing,

and therefore

on it goes.

Bloodbath

Trump's recent 'bloodbath' comment continues his pattern of being incendiary. This (not so delicately embedded in his speech-making) stoking of violence, the self-cultivated  image of his own greatness, his demanding of loyalty to himself, the outrageous claims of his abilities to rid the world of ongoing problems, his narcissism are all so reminiscent of other dictators. Add that to his fondness of autocrats:

my question is how, with all the knowledge of history available to us, do we allow presidents, the people with the greatest potential to do damage, to act outside the checks and balances everyone else is subject to? 

Bloodbath

Loyalty to a man or a country, even an organization

may lead to a bloodbath;

loyalty to humanity would not.

Humanity appeals;

the others order;

which, would you say, has its roots in freedom?