A poem based on Sebastião Salgado's images from the Serra Pelada gold mines in Brazil in the 80s
I am a hoist, component of:
sack of mud and ore;
my bones, levers,
haul gold
out of the hole.
Valueless:
thousands pour
out of the earth;
mud-covered chains
continuously turning
upward, downward
head sack thorax
legs feet
head sack thorax
legs feet...
When the band shines
on your finger,
we are
the ants crawling
down your arm.
Older now.
Do I dare say old;
yes, okay, old.
And wiser?
Each night the events and words of the day rotated,
a sluice gate opens
and more knowledge is allowed to escape.
You ask my advice;
I give and am wrong ‒ again;
there are experts, historians on both sides of every conflict
and still it is the old wars that occur.
Because, in the end, everyone follows their now
no matter the age-old mistakes
and when, again, you ask my advice, I will keep mum
until I give it.
I’ve been seeing January migrations of geese in the powder blue sky above Dublin;
arrows sign-posting exotic, faraway countries.
Now a full-stop moves from the text into the blank margin of the page I’m reading;
I watch it moving upward, wondering where does it suppose it's travelling to;
at the top it turns right, making for the gorge between the two pages;
its slow progress suggesting rough terrain: clints and grykes, uneven pavements.
Just then, a newscaster’s voice cuts into the moment:
95 people dead on a street in Kabul;
I lose sight of the full stop;
how high up must one be for our atrocities to be so small that they appear incomprehensible.
Evening soft Autumn light;
the year’s foliage
becoming humus,
new soil;
smell of decomposition:
mossy,
next year's fertility;
you standing,
foot on shovel, king of ridges;
colour of ripeness
heading towards rot;
unknown then
your lungs discolouring,
hardening
as Winter hardens.
Today, standing
in dank November
preparing the soil
for next year's growth
with your face
but older now
than you ever were,
thinner;
watching the years pass
in tides of growth:
the relentless march
of seasons pulling
me after you;
seeing the soil
as home.
His mind sparks explosions in four cylinders, maybe six;
pistons rise and fall, connecting rods turn the crankshaft,
clutch flywheel disengaged a moment, gears shifted and
torque in the wheels altered. His engine purrs; he mulls
turbo with or without variable compression, and always
finds that quadratic equations and poetry hinder performance.
Never been so aware of the lungs as bellows;
how basic it becomes when, in dying,
one is reduced to breathing and we are
watching each breath
like you are lifting shovel-fulls
and so alone in the effort
and we so useless.
A hare, whiskers taut, eyes bulging,
scouring the mainland
in the grey hour of evening
when demons go searching for souls.
Sitting sentinel on day’s shoreline,
digesting the seen and the half-seen,
reining in phantasms,
deciphering commotions in the air.
He senses, suddenly, a juddering of molecules,
some looming presence,
an approaching darkness darker than night,
and an ice-bolt hits him.
With the flesh creeping along his flanks,
he kicks back his hind legs
and bounds through the tussocks,
to the church in the hollow.
The bell’s baleful clank, strange at this hour,
draws shadowy figures out of the night
into a bedraggled huddle
in the sanctuary of the church.
Feichín, now man,
the hare’s wild gaze still in his eyes,
turns to them gravely
to announce the arrival of Satan on Omey.
It is not just his works,
but the devil himself will walk among us;
be wary of every soul on the road,
every animal in the fields.
Speak the name Jesus at every turn,
a flail to his ears;
let your minds be tabernacles of the Lord
so he finds no space for evil there.
Feichín’s brethren left no soil
on which the seed of evil could be sown,
no patch of ground to build a hut;
made Omey inhospitable to him who rules Hell;
and so it is to this day.
It was as hare, Feichín saw Satan leave the island,
felt the agitation fall from the air,
and the twitchiness in his nose subsided.
St Feichín Takes His Followers To Omey
Let us leave the wooded Glen of Fore,
for men must shun trees;
their lives be lived in the full gaze of Heaven;
to Omey where trees are shrivelled to the earth,
and thorns are the ocean driven on wild winds,
gorse to lash our backs. Let us go far from these trees
that conceal our transgressions.
And they went to Omey, leaving the gentle Glen of Fore;
built their monastery among the sand dunes
where the winds rode the dragons of the ocean,
and the rains were nails;
as the granites were hump-backed on the shore,
so were they
beneath the charcoal sacks of the sky.
But if they forsook the bountiful harvests of the Glen of Fore,
the Lord lavished them with fish for their tables,
shellfish, seaweed and they were blessed
and in the dim light of their church, they sang
to the glory of their Provider;
and still asked that they might bear greater hardships,
for the sins of others weighed heavy on them.
And if, in sleep, they dreamed themselves back in the Glen of Fore
feasting on deer, boar, pheasant and grouse,
come morning they purged their night’s gluttony, kneeling
hours naked in the freezing tide and waiting for the end of day
to marvel again at the light of Heaven
as the sun sank beyond the edge of the ocean
and the splendour of God was manifest on the island of Omey.
Still gathering and editing from the last six years of Poetry and Miscellaneous Yap. The years of Covid has given me a lot of drafts of poems to consider. This is a simple enough poem; those Sunday afternoon matinees on the tv opened my childhood mind up to a universe of imagination, they embedded and have fed my efforts at poetry right up to my present.
A Child At A Window
It’s nighttime, the sky’s my screen. Laurence Olivier is fleeing
through a forest, dark fronds clutching, clawing at him;
a gothic tale full of the drama of black and white.
The forest is vast and he must run blindly through it,
somewhere behind is the story I haven’t seen, and
somewhere ahead is a border with a land no one knows.
I am at my window, the land I know is quenched;
above, across the inexplicable expanse of the Heavens, is adventure;
I watch it, take it to my bed, knowing tomorrow colour will return.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 .
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.
Waving
