What Young Should Be

This is written in the context of the ugliness of modern warfare, where population are slaughtered.

What Young Should Be

It should be a state of invincibility,

a guarantee of safety;

believing in the powers within;

I am up to it, all of it.

It should be a view of infinity,

a horizonless plain of time;

space for all the dreams,

and I have those dreams.

It should be painless,

rejoicing in the body’s capacities;

with exhilaraion in movement;

I break into carefree running.

It should be a flood of freedom,

an unstifled education in finding oneself,

revealing many futures;

and I have those choices.

Back Gardens

 

I’m on the train, heading out of town,

passing yards and back gardens

with that unkemptness that would

never be seen on the street side.

And suddenly I think of smiles and

pleasantness; the gracious conversations

we present to people while inside

our opinions are stacked mum.

How, wading  through the back gardens, 

we might admire the front;

how we live in other heads 

having developed in semi-independent ways.

A New Level of Madness

 

The 21^st century: a new level of madness:

men, I would not leave to baby-sit my child,

with the shadows of their fingers stirring

above nuclear buttons. The same cold-heartedness

as Genghis, Vlad, Stalin or Hitler; the will

to wipe out, not armies, but children at their meals,

at school, in hospital wards, babies

who have still to recognize themselves.

Their lies as nature withers; our children's

futures left arid by their glory-seeking;

this civilisation in straight reverse.

We brutalise with greater ease, level homes by the city,

kill innocents in soaring numbers;

the 21^st century, and, incapable of learning,

we have given these  vainglorious men the care of our billions.

Droplets of Water

 (a rewrite of a poem from 2022)

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.

Summer Downpour

 

on asphalt, concrete,

glass and slate;

drumming steel, aluminium

wood, copper, tin;

slapping tarpaulin and canvas,

polyester and polythene;

raindrops, billions,

thunderously:

a summer downpour

slowing now

slowing

fingers,

fingers tapping

buckets, barrels,

blocks, boxes, bricks,

hollows in canopies,

puddles, ponds and pools;

flicking leaves,

chattering light

as the sun finds crevices in the jet sky

tipping

tapping

now below the frequency of seconds,

dream-like, 

to isolated beats,

the new world of

water-lensed

colours teeming thunderously,

giddily,

answering sound

with a symphony of light.

Distance

 

Distance

A train tunnelling through the night-time lights briefly

before the sound, self-weaving,

eventually becomes another thread in the wind.

From over the fields, a dog barks; perhaps a fox

stirring the undergrowth, a flurry of wings in a coop;

the commotion broadcast along the chicken wire.

A bird is calling from the unknown of  vanished daytime;

a child listens; a key turns;

another vastness opens in the sweeping of invisble wings. 

Still Those Conversations

 

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.

Palestine

 

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.

A problem today

 

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.

The Kiss

The Kiss

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.

 

Reading at Boyle Arts Festival

 

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

 

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.

A Withdrawal

 

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

 

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.

To the child at the window

 

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.