Faraway it seems
and yet all around and close;
time like snow has fallen on your memory.
Those conversations sluicing
through an afternoon
in a snug in an old pub;
dna spirals of cigarette smoke,
window-light trapped in the coils
and your voice
with its oak-timber grain,
stained over time,
cured in porter and smoke.
Faraway it seems,
but still in amber light,
still lifting from the floor boards.
A woman standing in the blown rubble
and twisted steel of her house,
sees no sense in war.
Asks the collapsed walls what
strategic advantage has been gained
in blowing up her kitchen;
the kitchens up and down the street,
both sides
and all the parallel streets.
What military plans were the children
of the area drawing up
in copies concealed beneath their homework;
and what now
with winter coming
and thirst and hunger,
and no husband?
Standing in the blown rubble,
the street in her house;
sky in her house
her children waiting outside, tatters of war.
There is no ‘one view’;
all that happens is forged differently
in every mind
and, from the same viewpoint,
all differs with turning.
Wisdom understands this,
but, lost in the tall grass of prejudice,
wisdom is an unsought capacity.
a poetic take on Klimt's 'The Kiss'
If there is a moment that is complete,
it is this moment;
the world outside,
the lovers one in intimacy
within the glitter of their sensations,
their own private galaxy;
faces turned
to that inner sharing.
And the cloak of gold flowing around
not away,
the earth, universe in all splendour
diminished by the splendour of their love.
I'm looking forward to being back at Boyle Arts Festival this year. I'm giving a reading at 3pm in Frybrook House on Tuesday 22nd.
The festival itself is a 10 day event and has now been in existence since 1985, having developed from a smaller festival that began in 1983. It is one of the best known in the country. This year, as always, it includes music of all types, art exhibitions, drama, literary events, interviews, comedy, children's events. Headliners include music from Karma Police, The Fureys, The Irish Tenors, Bad Manners, Muireann Nic Amhlaoibh and others; comedian, Jarlath Regan; author, Kevin Barry; historian, Diarmaid Ferriter. It goes on, but I'll stop here.
The festival runs from July 17th to 26th.
Miners for Minerals
First it was that, miners for minerals;
disposable lives for valuable ores;
their clogging lungs for the silver service
at rich mens’ tables.
Now it’s defence for minerals;
populations on the scales with rare earths
and, as always, the ores tipping the scales
on rich mens’ tables.
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.
