What have I learned but Nothing Nothings Somethings about nothings like Heart is wild animal Wild animal is pilot. Life is absence much as presence, names, stones, the splitting of sticks missyous strewn across the holy scape like erratics. Cavern deep, rope narrow one day bow, next day arrow. Some verses will be supermarket queuing…
The Celtic Tiger, stone dead. Isn’t it awful, awful? She wandered onto the M6 Somewhere near Kinnegad, Into the brute smack Of a Lidl truck going west. The heft of headlines, snap rage. Isn’t it a real disgrace? Someone left the gate unlocked, Installed cheap low fences, Designed flimsy cages, And fired the nightwatchman. Question…
Us & Then (Exabyte) Billows of dust Thickened and dry Colour of rust Blotting the sky Comments flicker in the fallen night (A trillion stars in a trillion galaxies) Flickering, bickering, faraway old light of 1000000000000000000000000 stars Go on, get a good kick in now, and Feel the rush of a boot point scored A…
To watch from a distance the world settle in for its night from a bank high up under the Skye Road where I can make out comforting lights in windows cars in their driveways and the beam of a lighthouse all blink, blink, wait… blink, blink, wait… Somebody below is driving carefully along the low…
I am The car jolts and rocks along the track, as though dragged by chains to a chased beast. I am the beast. The indistinct greyed-over bogs and swollen rivers coming down the hills whish by the windows I am the window. Father is a good driver, but sometimes an angry driver, and now he…
Spring Fishing Am I in a trap? Did I build it myself? The punt bobs on the waves between Broochen and the point of Fournaugh This is no weather for fishing; no weather for anything bar the Seat next to the Stanley and the kettle hissing for tea And the steam of decades sunk in…
Máméan, Pass of the Birds According to legend, St. Patrick blessed Connemara from a well at the top of the pass, and slept there (“Leaba Padraic”=”Patrick’s bed”), though to my limited knowledge there was stuff going on there before that too. There is now a little chapel next to the well and mounds of stones…
Daffodils rising, raising yellow heads to bob in March winds. Driving from Aberdeen across a Scottish Motorway, Over the Irish sea in the belly of a ferry South from Belfast and west from Dublin West to Galway City and beyond, Until the road narrows to to an end by the lake Where grass still grows…
The smallest thing; flap of a finch’s wing Dart of a blackbird’s eye Rising of spring from buried roots with a cry Strange to be here again Late, behind schedule, delayed, out of time, Yet back at the beginning, where we met Busy but immobile The beat of your long-absent feathers Only memory’s furrows to…
An artist regrets having never committed Streets outside the curtains Draw me back A bad sketch of a hollow tune Hums above the others in the room For her, my vacant ruin. Waking in a strange old bed can be lonely Is this where all those veining streets lead? I might have said: my one,…
Do not forget me when the door clicks shut Let me linger and fidget as a breeze I would prefer to persist Like the smell of toast or coffee or Febreeze And my foregone exit resist The lake at its bloated winter zenith Broad boatless surface burying slowly in its creep The low jutting piers,…
Rainy Day in Renvyle Rain sweeps across the wide open, Clouds rolling in from the west, Tears from the sky set in motion Blown by a wind that won’t rest. Ceaseless the changes chase over, The shelterless landscape at speed. Soft underfoot grows the clover. Soft as a heart full of need. It’s hard to…
When she pressed on her glasses and drew the words near Their shape and their meaning began to ring clear The humdrum around her then faded away And her mind drifted back to an earlier day Where raucous and ready with small expectations She grew where her people had raised generations Her youth and her…
Cast it back, Cast it out, Freckled innocence, Blooming doubt… ********************************* The present is the presence of past. Wrap and preserve it since nothing will last? ******************************** If daily we have the same lessons, And become as the message itself Absorb and engage all the pith of the page, And freely grow fat from our…
Thus ends the age of exploration Now Rules of Grammar and stuffy constants constrain Fixed and steady, RIGID and arbitrary While whipped on a whippet of wind, Deserted, rejected, injected and binned, Age turns the skin inside out And indoors retreated, energy sapped by drought, Deflated, negated, A simple progression fated comes about, This mortal…
Turlough Here comes the flood The beat of rain in the dark, Here comes the water, Streams of pain make their mark. A shoreline appears, From the stone come angry waves, A sinking in tears, Of moments that nobody saves The flotsam and leftovers, Of the lost and the gone, Are tearing at the souls…
