Donegal Changes

 Six years now in Donegal, six years retired from my teaching job in Dublin; there are defnite changes in my writing. Perhaps it's no surprise to find myself more aware of nature now, with a large garden to tend to and struggling to keep on top of the job. But also much more walking as I live beside the sea and on a country road that links into a vast network of  unpopulated roads stretching off eastward across the border, through hilly and often empty lands into county Fermanagh.

The hedgerows, linear forests, teem with flowers from the early snowdrops into primrose season, foxglove onto fireweed of early Autumn; it's a succession I could not have named until I found myself living in a rural setting. And the land often rushy, lush with other plants, just as beautiful; a different palete of colours, a different atmosphere, a different set of feelings.

 

Fireweed, Montbretia, Swallows and Me

It’s past mid-August, and the year, measured in flowers, is turning.

The foxgloves gone, they faded quickly, followed the iris, that

followed the garlic out of season.

Now that fireweed floods the roadsides with carnivals of colour,

and bonfires of montbretia are raging gloriously out of control

the swallows being skittish, flying broken circles about the house,

we enter the season of apples reddening, pears yellowing, plums purpling.

Yearly, I get this feeling of sadness as though programmed into the cycle;

it’s not the passing of beauty; beauty just changes its cloak; it’s time

stealing a gift that only time can give.

New Draft of "September Swallows"

 

September Swallows

September, swallows

suddenly in a frenzy

as though too long furled,

their true selves

must out;

fly from the wires

like crochets escaping staves;

hone their aeronautics ‒

wheel, sweep and swoop ‒

for tomorrow

they must swap wires

for lines of longitude

as though they were scored

down the centre of their brains;

be pulled south

as surely as iron filings

must fly to the poles.

The Romantic Heart

 

The enamel white moon made a ladle on the water;

Li Po, a tick full of wine with a romantic heart,

rowed his boat up the long handle towards the bowl.

It was a gentle night, the air was warm and all was still;

he, with the fondest memories of all his lovers, sat

awhile, allowing himself to be enthralled by this beauty.

He became ecstatic; alone with the universe, colossal

therefore, and filled with the dream of love, he fell

into the water with arms wide to embrace the moon.

It was sudden, chill and lightless;

deceived by his love, he fell past euphoria

into the dank cavern that is the final knowing,

while up above the moon continued to beguile

all the wine-drinkers with love in their hearts,

all those who would drink their dreams into reality.

An Updated Draft of an Unforgettable Moment

 

Sing Love

A memory from my father's last days

On his deathbed, when speech was gone,

we deciphered incoherence

and muddled on.

I remember she, visiting, took his hand

and for want of words,

he sang to her

so tunelessly, it was not a tune,

yet, still, in all his life

he never sang so beautifully.

Passing Time

 

When I was a child,

time stretched beyond sight,

out over the curve of the earth;

Summer days deliciously slow,

mid-afternoon stalled in the sky;

the drone of bees the lag of seconds.

Life.

The daily events well worn,

the cobbles of living smoothed;

time slips over them with accelerating

ease and I, past seventy, looking at its blur

like a train-passenger with glazed eyes seeing

the years speed by like telegraph poles.

At the military cemetery

 

At the military cemetry, I am struck

by the myriad patterns of the crosses;

marvelling at the precision over and

over as I walk into new perspectives.

In death, the soldiers in this postumous

parade still creating the most beautiful,

mathematically correct symmetries.

The precision: clean, uniform, orderly;

identical crosses stretching into the

distance to the glory of the dead, to the

glory of the army. Individuality un-

observed; humanity absent; an army

of stones.

City Voice

 

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.

A Poem on the Pointlessness of War

 

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

 

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.

The Experience of Transcendentalism

 

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

 

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?

How the Irish became the most knowledgeable race on earth

  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.

Karst Man

 

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. 

It was the snow

 

that brought me back,

its peace and space;

refinding myself

in its absence of clutter.

With each new fall

more deeply cleansed;

the world simplified,

a fresh start.

A Book from Stone

 

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.