A powdering harangue ‒
the city's voice over unkempt pavements.
The footfall at 5.30,
the lighting up apartments;
desperate masses
rushing to close their doors
on the daytime hours.
That voice
gusting along those surfaces,
propelling them;
behind those cigarette-moment windows
they fold.
Perspective
Lately, I’ve been seeing January migrations of geese in the powder blue sky above Dublin. Those ever-shifting arrows sign-posting exotic, faraway countries are in my thoughts when a full-stop moves from the text into the blank margin of the page I’m reading.
I watch it moving up, turning right at the top, making for the gorge between the leaves; its slow progress suggesting rough terrain: a karst’s uneven pavements perhaps. What purpose, I wonder, can so small a creature have in undertaking this journey; where does the mite think it’s heading?
I might have found out, but at that moment a newscaster’s voice cut into my thoughts ̶ 95 people dead on a street in Kabul.
I lose sight of the full stop; for you are there, somewhere in that city at the height of the violence and you would not confess to us the dangers you face.
How high up, I wonder, must one be for our atrocities to be so small that they become ludicrous?
Dancing in the early hours
to Leonard Cohen’s oak-aged voice
swaying drunkenly to his words,
arms slack as streams of poured wine,
eyes soft as the vowels he intoned;
her feet uncertain, stepping cautiously
over the cobbles of song;
hearing each word a moment too late,
singing one beat behind;
the wine glass tipping precariously and
still the wine defying gravity
like her life was about to spill
and still it did not
a genie above a lamp for so many minutes,
holding the room expectant but
as suddenly as appeared was no more;
it seemed a spotlight went out.
A Transparent Eyeball
“I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part of God.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Acknowledging
the occurrence of all things
in myself
as being one with God;
the unfettered transmission
of His deity through me
as the sensations of living
electrify my soul;
the ebullience I experience
in re-awakening daily
to His creation;
the infinity that defines me.
Last Words
at my mother's bedside
Her life frayed to the last strand;
breathing: difficult, tenuous;
and I searching for the right words
in those last minutes
to put our love beyond doubt,
find a gentleness to salve the hardship.
Now, years later, trying to remember
what did I say when love
was reduced to faltering words.
Did I have the right words?
What words can be a parachute
as she steps from that ledge?
The Salmon in the Spring, the Hazel and the Hermit
Into an open gob the hazelnuts fell,
so that over the years the salmon grew
into a colossus.
A day came when one fell and devoured
the very instant of dimpling the surface,
it caused the salmon to spew from its intestines
the knowledge of a thousand years
that cascaded downhill
over the shilling bright stones,
through the ignorant meadows to the lake,
where it became part of the ever-turning
cycle of life, in water, weed and silt.
A hermit, who lived by the lake,
dousing his face, drank some of this potion
and was instantly replete.
In time a hazel took root in his belly
and he convulsed
so that the stones unearthed by his flailing feet
filled the lake
and sent its waters flooding out
onto to the plain where the people lived;
so they, too, in their turn, drank;
and by this means knowledge and poetry spread
from the time that was before
to the times now and those yet to come
And that, dear frends, is how the Irish became
the wisest, savviest race on earth.
When I tell you, the man who lives on those hills is made
of the same karst he stands on,
that butts through the thin cover of his fields;
that he and his forefathers, back to neolithic times,
used to construct the walls, their net on the landscape;
it’s not a poetic conceit.
I have seen him standing in spring-limpid sunlight,
his legs and arms a trellis for briar and blackthorn;
a perch for robin, chaffinch and stonechat;
I tell you, it was the place that coded his DNA;
to the spring water of his eyes, gently sloping fields of his voice,
subterranean streams of his belonging.
its peace and space;
refinding myself
in its absence of clutter.
With each new fall
more deeply cleansed;
the world simplified,
a fresh start.
Well, not really. But sometimes it feels that way.
I keep the blog to amass poems. Publishing online keeps me at it; knowing that there are readers out there gives me impetus.
There comes a point when I have to decide there's enough to carve out a collection; I've been deferring; editing is a chore and there is a serious amount of editing to be done to re-shape these poems for a book publication. But now is the time. I have about six years of material, poems that have been produced like diary entries. I will disregard about 80% of them and spend, perhaps a year, maybe more, getting the rest into a shape that I am happy to have representing me. Somehow a book seems to demand a level of care that the blog doesn't; I hope that's isn't an insult to regular readers.
I mention it because, though I do post newer drafts of poems on the blog, there'll be more now as I rework the pieces. I don't tend to get feedack but feel free if you feel the urge; for now, though, I have to address this chunk of stone.
It’s often the hands
locked and clawed
that snag the eyes.
Now yours,
so recently warm,
bound in rosary beads;
already a statue’s.
Bog
Sinking into the soft mire, spagnum sponge;
ooze rising inches above my feet: beer brown,
freezing cold. I take a handful and squeeze;
water, so much water drains through my fingers;
I slap away the fresh vegetation; hold my hands
to my nose, am filled with the smell of fertile earth.
Heathers, mosses, sedge and bog cotton;
a wilderness, once a lake, its margins still visible:
green fields and farm houses away in the distance:
Here, in the realm of insects, plants that devour them,
sundews and butterworts, their killer genes expressed
in the mucillage, tentacles, in the traps of their leaves.
And down, down beneath my feet, rich black turf:
countless years of heat, insulation: walls and roofing;
from bountiful earth fuel from the growth of millennia.
There too, the preserved remains of the past: old roads,
wooden tracks, submerged walls, jewelery, weapons, tools;
bodies wearing facial expressions that have defied time.
 |
| Photograph by Josef Koudelka |
Thin as splinters,
butterflies
borne on white wings
like flags,
flitting over the hedgerow
like scraps of paper
wind-blown.
Dallying over the brambles,
wings
bright as lighthouses;
careless
like children playing
as birds watch,
beaks like mousetraps.
A gentle breeze,
the mottles of light and shade
continuously shifting,
pleasing the eye
as asymmetry does,
but continuously,
exciting the retina,
and cumulatively;
creating a giddiness ‒
optical intoxication.
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.
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.
