In the end, we withdrew from the city
for an end to the constant commotion,
window-size skies, absence of seasons;
and have found a place near the ocean
which doubles the skies, where seasons
come on the winds, wild flowers mark
time by the roadsides and sunsets travel
in their southwest northwest arc along
the rim of our world.
We retreated from the relentless traffic
of development to the slow roll of years,
from the thrash of city-life to the quiet
resonance of internal and external nature.
Where his eyes rest,
on the floorboards;
where the sun is landed,
a light on the life passed;
silence deep;
memory flattened by sadness
dead on that floor;
dead in that torpor.
Where his eyes rest,
in that stripped room;
a perfect square
a cold square.
The fields hemmed in by hedgerows green with thorn and briar;
by cloud, stream and drain;
May’s champagne celebration:
the exquisite snow of hawthorn’s white blossom.
The soft pillowed hills latticed with limestone walls
built of lichened white moons;
the cloud-mediated light
spread evenly across the expanse of heaven and earth.
The poles that carry the wires
that carry conversations humming by the roadsides;
the roads that flow like streams from the town,
eventually bending into unseen countryside.
The world that is not known
the darknesses beneath sycamore and ash,
the guessed at activities of slinking foxes and shuffling badgers;
the forests and cities, the peoples out beyond those hills.
To the child at the window,
a universe without borders or boundaries,
understood as it is imagined,
as free as it is wide.
Peopled since the Bronze Age;
now, pots and pans, tables and chairs,
they left the island,
left it a great yawning emptiness.
But old Thomas Lacey was not to be moved;
not while the spirits of his boatman sons
coursed the island’s winds; their bodies, perhaps,
still rowing back from Bofin.
And when all were gone,
and no October lights shone from the windows,
he set the fire, made dinner for himself and his sons
and left the door ajar.
He ate alone;
the great hungry tide reverberating across the island,
answerless and unrepentant;
he sat with dwindling hope, then went to bed.
But they came later in the night;
strong, smiling and unchanged after all the years.
They had rowed their boat home to their gleaming island;
and built a house that would forever be close.
Next morning, he woke to peace.
The wind across the island carried the salt of the sea;
he looked over to Bofin; it was as it had always been
and would be without him.
In hazel twilight,
an avalanche of white thorn
hanging above our heads.
Night lights of bluebells
thick around our feet;
faint silvery gleam of lake
between the trunks of trees;
birdsong all around.
Ancient walls
of moss-softened stones,
traces of a lifestyle that once was;
hand-built scripts
disappearing in evening's light,
time's amnesia,
nature's shroud.
Cryptic, disconnected
from their meanings;
too remote from their builders
for poignancy;
we stop a moment,
admire a bend on the pathway,
white-petalled, luminous.
The dresser:
axe-heads, bone needles, stone dice,
flint knives, beads, limpet and whelk shells.
My mother’s plates with nowhere to go;
the silver’s in the attic. And that mahogany table:
unuseable without doilies.
In time the soil will shift;
more sandstone dressers will be found,
and so too the broken pocket-watch she gave me .
There's a lot of talk about the inappropriate use of AI by students in education, less so about its use in the arts. But it's here and I, for one, will be very interested to see how editors and publishers deal with AI-generated scripts.
I asked ChatGPT english and irish words for the mix of soil and dung in places regulalry trodden by cattle. After getting the list, it asked would I like it to give me a poem based on my request and using some of the words. Having given me its original poem, it said " Release it under your name or in a shared authorship format, depending on your use".
Bracais is irish for mire, pluda is soft pulped muck.
There, where the gate sags,
and the trough leans under rain,
the ground is a churned remembering —
bracais of hoof and hunger,
a mire where clay and dung
no longer part ways.
Boots sink with knowing.
This is the old place,
the place beneath every threshold,
where soil and waste embrace
like labour and loss,
like birth and decay.
The cows do not mind.
They have shaped it with their weight —
slow, patient architecture
of pluda and presence.
Even filth, trodden long enough,
becomes home.
From a clear blue sky
thunder,
bombs
and death
to man, woman
and child.
When it settles,
the dust is spread
over breakfast tables,
Tel Aviv to Washington;
the milk in our cereal
stained;
a grey powder
on our bread.
A rewrite of a poem from 2019. I regularly return to the topic of holy wells; their magic, their timelessness. People have been offering prayers at wells for millennia, but, in modern times, there is a atmosphere of precariousness around them; in a way it adds to their specialness. Many have been neglected, forgotten, destroyed or, since drying up, have lost their following, but all, since their thread sews centuries together should be preserved and respected.
Holy Well
The bottom of the well is a mosaic of wishes;
each one shining.
I have left my dream dancing in a tree,
a tree growing on solid rock.
Perhaps the dancers fall into the well;
perhaps their after-life is a gleam;
perhaps wishes become dreams;
perhaps our after-life is a dreaming.
Here the spring weaves itself into lush pasture;
where gods, immemorial, have changed
water to verdure,
perhaps this, indeed, is the place to sow a seed.
So, I'm a grandad. Felix arrived in February, when I started this poem; only now completing it or at least editing it further. It's all colour for the little fellow now, but seeing him in February, it really struck me how extraordinary the process of human growth and development is.
Cursing death;
the grim reaper
has slashed again
and we are bereft.
We overlooked
the kindly hand
that delivered her
from suffering.
I’d been here, a year maybe; and decided to see what was
covered by the overgrowth in a corner of the garden.
I hacked and cleared and found a small ravine
in the half-light of over-hanging trees, hazel and sally, with
a waterfall spilling down thin layers of rock, turning a corner
to a semi-circular enclosure, carpeted with anemones,
perfect for a bench.
I could see there was an old crossing-point over the stream,
a path climbing upward with a low bank running alongside.
Not far away, on the other side, the remains of an old dwelling;
barely more than a hovel. I imagine buckets carried to and fro,
clothes washed, boots sloshed clean as they headed in for the night;
the traffic of playing children, of adults driving their cattle,
of neighbours sharing their time.
There is an aura to places like holy wells, mass rocks, old laneways;
the marks of lives lived prompt visions, memories almost;
as though ghosts, pinned in by modern technology, have been
consigned to spend eternity in these haunts. Silences are held breaths;
the hills, drumlins, are billow-like behind me, it’s easy to picture
the farmers heading up to check on their sheep, dig their ridges;
meeting them, like this, is a solemn experience.
I wrote this a year ago, but left itvery much under-cooked; I think this is a fuller, more satisfying version.
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.
When the snow started
the flakes wandered aimlessly,
casually, slowly downward.
All drifting, passing each other;
no plans, no destination,
no rush.
And still, each carries
the unvarying symmetries of snow:
the hexagonal branching of arms:
60°, hexagonal symmetry;
mirror symmetries, radial symmetries;
crashing like rebellious rich kids.
Vanessa atalanta has an Italian ring to it,
but she flies
among the briar blossoms here in Donegal.
When I first came to this house, I found
her in every room; her wings folded above her body.
In Winter, she’d sometimes be stirring; but now ‒ never;
what did I do?
She is, herself, an airborne flower
and I am always delighted to have her, for a moment,
in my cupped hands; but in December?
On reflection, I have been removing the briars
and pulling the running ivy;
bringing the garden to heel, you might say;
there are a lot of new houses going up around here.
