Yours
is an Easter memory.
Sunlight and showers;
rainbows and clouds;
primroses
and the last days of daffodils;
cherry trees in bloom;
swallows returning;
blackbirds warbling in new-green hedgerows;
sweet singing in churches
and too-short days.
FROM GALWAY'S BRIDGE
(For M., my wife. Remembering the day we met.)
From Galway’s Bridge we tiptoed through the fern,
The ancient oaks, the acorns gone to root.
When woodlands swayed the sun danced in salute
A stately stag stood still, without concern.
A blackbird sang; the cliffs rang in return;
Across the lake we heard a day-owl hoot.
There swam majestic swans and white shield coot,
There strode with measured step the stalking heron.
A bridge, a flooded path, a helping hand.
You called my name, it echoed round the vale
From mountain side to peak to water-land;
Its music drowned the thrush and nightingale.
A smile, a touch, a quick intake of breath.
Life’s journey started there the day we met.
SHARING A KISS IN KILLARY
When mountain streams come tumbling white
Through mountains robed in winter brown;
When mountain heathers fade from sight
And reeds by lakes are beaten down;
When skylarks sing no more on high
As driven grey obscures the sky
I'll think of you in Killary.
For then my mind will exercise
To rainbows weave through silver drops
That float unseen in autumn skies
Above the cloud-clad mountain tops
And kiss the trees with golden rays
To thin the mist and fade the haze
And I'll think of you in Killary.
For 'though 'twas but a fleeting time
- A week a day; each day but hours -
It's memories will ever prime
- Like summer rain the summer flowers
-Good dreams that one day soon we will
My fondest ever wish fulfil
To share a kiss in Killary.
KNOCKNAFALIA
Standing yesterday
On Knocknafallia
I saw
The two sides
Of Agnes Smedley's mother's
Crazy quilt. *
I saw the happy side
When the late evening sun
Of early winter
Lit up the patchwork fields
Of green and brown
And yellow.
Shafts of light
Like the fingers of God
Were shed
From behind
A cloud
And fell on Melleray Abbey
And the winding Blackwater.
I stood
Resting against the wind
And I thought I heard
A faint sound of vespers
And I felt
I was close
To Heaven.
But the other side
Of Agnes Smedley's mother's
Crazy quilt
Was not far away.
Looking inwards
I thought of you
And I found
The side
Of solid blue.
It was rising
From within
Myself
Footnote
* From the novel “Daughter of Earth” by Agnes Smedley in which the author’s mother makes a “crazy quilt” which is multicoloured patchwork on one side and just plain blue on the other.
LIGHT AND DARK
A candle flame in the dark void
of my aloneness, bright burning
in the new air of you having
been within my life's awareness.
Glad memories of you dance into
the aura of my new found light;
flame fingers make shadows shimmer
on distant walls and I reach out
but you waft into the dark night
of my nothingness and dance away
with fairy steps on fairy feet
to magic tunes the fairies play.
In this world there are those for whom
every hour is a new day and
every day a new beginning
with few days left for clouds to lift
so that shadows can hold hands
and race on mountain tops.
I long for even a glimmer
of the fire my life could have been
and wonder at the reasons why
children are afraid of the dark
and adults are afraid of the light,
why time cools sunbeams
and then time dies.
SUNBEAMS
Like a dawn sunbeam
Timidly creeps from behind an easterly hill
And burns away the morning mists
Opening up the beauty and excitement of a new day
You came into my life.
My dark clouds of sadness soon were pierced
And your sunny warmth gave life
To a heart which had almost forgotten how to beat.
Just as advancing time
Gives the sunbeam growth
It loses itself in the midst of its myriad companions
To become a full-grown morning sun
So too did your sunbeam grow.
With each passing day as sunbeam met sunbeam
And each suffused itself in the other it became
A new whole. You became my sun.
A source of life and joy to me.
Soon more and more the mists of sadness disappeared,
Evaporated by your warmth.
And I laughed. Oh God! How I laughed.
I had a new life, a new hope, a mighty love.
As the morning sun climbs into the sky
To reach its highest point at noon
Our hours together lead us too.
Oh yes! We had our noon.
We reached a peak where nothing mattered but us two.
When the world was naught but a place
Made by God for lovers such as us;
Where nothing was impossible; where hearts,
Like sunbeams, reached out and touched each other
Melting all reserve until they
Yielded to a mighty power of love
And were soon entwined
Like ivy branches on a mighty oak
To become one, inseparable,
For a brief moment.
But all too soon the noonday sun
Gives way to evening and shadows return.
Little clouds drift across it's face and light breezes
Break the stillness causing leaves to gently dance.
Our time together was but a sheltered meadow in a troubled world.
Like the evening breeze ripples the near ripe grass
And whispers in the trees that night must soon approach
My sun declined. Your heart I knew I could not keep.
As they grow together in the morning so now at evening
Each sunbeam separates one from the other.
It drifts apart and puts itself to sleep
And I, alone, am left to weep.
UNDERSTANDING LOVE
Grieving for what I hoped yesterday
Might be mine tomorrow
I was standing with strangers
Looking across an open grave
At you weeping.
I learned that love is
Needing to be involved
In your life
And wanting to take on
Your pain.
THE WATERSHED
When you kissed me
your hair fell around my face
and I felt<
br />
I had slipped
behind a waterfall,
a rust-red cataract,
into a secret place
of you and me,
warmed by our breaths
and lit by your eyes.
All my life
led to that moment
when I fell in love with you.
Now
all the days that follow
lead nowhere at all.
WOULD OAK TREES TELL THEIR SECRETS
A boat-house by a ragged shore,
Two new-found lovers strolling;
Two soaring gannets folding wings
And sea-ward sleekly diving.
The lovers smile,
The gannets plunge,
While waves of passion washing
Create within an autumn day
A storm of breakers crashing.
An oak-wood near a ravaged shore,
Two linked-arm lovers kissing
Are whispering secrets of the past,
Perhaps a future wishing.
The sky awash
With skylark song,
Two lovers' arms are pressing,
And lovers' hands on lovers' cheeks
Are tenderly caressing.
When swirling leaves all holding hands
On forest floors are dancing
To autumn wind-played doleful
airs Like faery tunes entrancing
Two lovers sigh
And parting pray,
No longer arms entwining,
Would oak trees tell their secrets if
The east wind came enquiring?
PART VII
FAMILY AND RELATIONSHIP
I have left this part of my book to last; I could say deliberately but in reality it is because I find it the most difficult to deal with. I just kept putting it off. Some of these poems deal with painful episodes in my life; a life that led me along a path I would have never, ever, have expected to follow.
The poems deal with, among other things, my father’s death, my mother’s Alzheimer’s Disease and her death. They touch on my separation and divorce and, most painful of all, some consequential fallout. I also include some poems inspired by the loss of a grandchild by a cot-death and by my wider family, including my grandmother and a much loved cousin, John O’Donovan, who died too young.
I begin this section with the first poem I wrote (apart from some juvenilia which, thankfully, no longer survive.) It was written in January 1993, about a month after my father had died, and it formed in my head as I was driving to Dublin very early on a Monday morning. I had no paper to hand so I pulled into a McDonalds’ in Clondalkin, ordered a breakfast bap and wrote out the draft of the poem on a McDonalds’ serviette. The poem, 'The Clothes Line', is, I think, self-explanatory.
THE CLOTHES LINE
(i.m. M.P., My father)
With a snap
the dead ivy was torn from the old garden wall
that it had clothed for three score years and ten.
Bare stone unseen by light in living memory
starkly stood exposed and bare.
Tee-shirt and towel lay - a twisted tangled heap
-upon the bare black earth which He had dug last Fall
with plans to plant in Spring
a fresh green grass with shrubs and flowers all round.
But plant He never would.
On a mid-winter day He thought He'd stroll a while.
The slanting sun inspired hope of coming spring.
He walked to town - She hung her washing out to dry.
Then, suddenly, He died.
We mourned Him, we missed Him and we wept for Him.
On sunny days we thought
how He'd have loved
those lengthening brightening cheerful days
to stroll the beach and feel the sun upon His face.
And then the clothes-line broke.
"My line came down,” She said.
Some fifteen years before He'd tied it to the ivy
until He got the time to do a better job.
I pulled a brand-new cord through pulleys placed on high
and felt His over-seeing presence near to me.
Through tears I whispered low
"You should have known that ivy does not live forever."
THE BIRTH OF LOVE
(For M.P. - My Father)
We
were like any father, any son.
Had lived the three Rs of relationship.
Revered in childhood;
resented in teens;
respected as an adult.
Until
travelling to the funeral of someone you loved
all barriers were suddenly sundered
and we talked. Oh! really talked.
The tree-tunnels of summer
had cast their cover and
were pierced by Autumn light.
Leaves lay by the roadside,
brown and crimson and yellow
and danced before us
a merry dance
to the tune of passing traffic
when I heard you weep
and I saw your tears
and I loved you.
Sown by death,
nu rtured by tears,
my true feelings for you
were brought to birth.
STALKING A CANARY
(Remembering M.P. – My Dad)
My mother was angry
when,
in that small room,
without her leave,
my father cleared everything off the dressing table
and set up the breeding cage
he had been building
every night
for over two weeks.
When the hen had four eggs
he
had saved one-by-one
he put them all back
in a neat cluster in a moss-lined man-made nest
where she sat and carefully hatched
four tiny downy chicks
she tended,
warmed, cleaned and fed.
Till one night he forgot
to lock
the cage.
She had flown.
She had stretched her sunshine wings and taken off
through the open bedroom window .
The call to freedom
she had never known
was too strong.
Then I see my father,
stalking,
on a roof
on all fours
astride the ridge on an early summer morning
and dragging an old coat.
He opened it out, paused
and pounced.
My mother smiled and clapped.
ALRIGHT
(for D.)
Like rapier-armed duellists
we circled each other
with our eyes. Wondering
when the other would make a move,
on a grey autumn evening
when straggling cobwebs
dangled from trees
in sodden cords,
no more a golden filigree
of jewelled dewdrops
backlit by the rising sun
of a summer dawn.
Cold lips on cold cheek
turning the warmth of a kiss
into the perverted formality
of a difficult greeting.
I needed to ask you so much.
You wondered what I would ask
and we talked a lot
about the nothings in our lives.
Courage beating stomach storms
I reached across,
touched your worker's hand
and the frost was gone.
You told me of your love for him
and you smiled with your eyes.
Leaving, when I hugged you,
your little girl's arm
curved around my waist
and lingered there and we knew
it would be alright.
APPLE-WOOD
(Reflections of a wood-turner)
Spinning on a lathe
a block
of rough-hewn apple-wood
cut from near the root
of a diseased old tree
that lately yielded
only mis-shapen cankerous fruit,
inedible, useless.
The well-honed gouge
stripped the bark and
the soft sap-wood beneath.
It clicked and juddered
on split knots - the last remains
of fine old branches
that once had sprouted
pink and white apple-blossom and
shiny red fruit
fit to tempt
any Eve in any Eden.
The useless cast aside
in mounting piles of wood-dust
the singing chisel
cut the solid wood.
Shavings shot back over shoulders
in steady streamers
with the sweet smell of apples.
The cob-webbed corners of the work-shop
smelled like a cider-mill
re-incarnating and breathing life into
memories long since faded
of children picnicking under its shade
or apple-picking for sport
on Hallowe'en.
I saw you,
my grown-up sons,
my beautiful daughters,
children again, happy and laughing,
as I finger now
the smooth polished wood
of my apple-wood bowl
and I remember you.
CHIPPING AT THE COALFACE
Looking back there was a childhood
And then a wife and children
And I laboured at the coal-face in between.
There were work days, there were glad days
There were play days, there were sad days
And nothing seemed to happen in between.
There were tears and there were kisses,
Success and some near misses
And still nothing seemed to happen in between
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