Nothing more. She had other agenda —
Career-forging, fun-seeking tasks ahead.
Her voice trailed off as the list ran out
And I could not help, could not bridge
The awkward silence with a word
To hold her flight aloft:
Know the gift of innocence you possess,
Know the happiness, child, of which you are recipient,
Not donor in this dark, empty world of ours, I could have
said.
O Silent World
Part of me’s been growing
While part of me’s just been living
And now the part that has grown
Far outweighs the other, way outstretches it
As the blanket of cloud that reaches out to cover
From tip to tip the blue heavens with grey canopy
And silently is made manifest
As the white cap of snow that covers the mountain tops.
New Age Dawning
Saw the world take shape out of the mist,
Saw a new day begin. As angel or historian
Might preside, saw the dawn of civilization rise
In some far-off city to the east.
God-time, when man’s thoughts scarcely exist –
Lost in sleep, wearied by striving, toiling
And the effort required of building,
Conquering, destroying
And not surprised as he might be
By this new miracle of day,
This new age dawning,
This new beginning.
First Frost
Winter has set in. Departed
The mists and ‘mellow fruitfulness’ days,
The endless drifting into night.
Daylight comes abruptly
With a sharp nip, a cold fog.
Summer’s lush grass lies
Limp in roadside ditches,
All the flowers are gone.
In the Gloaming
Hospitality, goodwill, cheer,
New and familiar faces
Round the extended dining-table,
Laughter, merriment, tales.
Within and without the crowd
Much listening to the inner voice,
A warm tear shed to sprinkle
The heavens’ shooting star —
Loved, bereft,
At the start of yet another new year.
Returning from racing and the hunting fields
To log fires and warm fare, neighbour
Greeting neighbour under pink and russet skies
As the sun sinks behind bare trees.
Our lives engaged in age-old pursuits
Though talk is of shrinking markets,
Biological warfare, cohabiting friends.
Remote, austere, not too far removed
From the jousting knights and ladies, the yeomen,
Saints and patriarchs of old, their lives long well run.
Saturday Morning Blues
Worried that I was alone,
Feeling sick in the bath,
Struggling with the hairdryer
From a reclining position on the floor
And then I saw the little wren
Clinging to the climbing rosebush outside,
The rook perched on the highest branch
Of the beech tree above a flock of sparrows
Busying themselves in the fallen leaves below,
The wagtail dancing on the rails like an acrobat.
Thought of the cats and dogs I had fed,
Who had greeted me with yelps and miaows and excited
faces,
The horses lazing in the paddock
Glutted with corn and blackberries and harvest fare
And cried, ’Hell! Heaven!’ I may be tired,
Slow of limb, dull of heart
And suffering from this or that
But I am not widowed or deserted —
Though it seemed sometime I was —
And am not, even for one iota of a second,
Alone or on my own.
Study of Louise
Standing in your doorway,
Love and freedom on my lips
And a young man at my side,
I came in closer view of you,
Lost in rolls of curtain chintz.
You sat in a different era then
Quietly busied with the less colourful role
Only the needle you plied
Was more dagger or lance
That worked through flesh and bone.
I saw the pain, the crossed features wrought,
And from the heat of that summer noon
Returned to leave with you
The largest portion of the loaf.
Lost Years
Time it was of dying,
Of going nowhere,
Heart set on no great hope
And hand scarcely sought its complement
In the comfort of another.
‘You should not be so sad,’
Words thrown as a lifeline perhaps,
The Outsider and Albert Camus,
Andre Gide and L’Immoraliste,
Joni Mitchell and Blue,
One smiling, distant face
On the edge of the grave
I, or someone else had dug.
We are dying still
Though to life at last:
Man that didn’t trust the heart of man
And by his cruelness broken,
Is now the port of call
And the fullness of fruit yielded in season.
Gone By the Arches
The college doors are closed behind us, harbouring
Like hidden treasure our dreams in that past.
Leafy walks and long avenues — protectors
Of the lone soul’s sighing — now echo the footfall of a
step.
Coffee rooms where we sat whole mornings and
Afternoons away now host another generation.
All is lost to us of that time save in memory
Where, forever fixed, we move in silent scenes
That live and will not yield their mystery.
Where light was standing on a dark stairs
By a door that opened on your face
And touch was meeting by the steps in winter
When you were silent, taut and cold,
Where love was leaving on a sunny day
By a road you saw but never came.
Now I am still and you are wandering —
A child in some lost land, I hold these jewels
In my hand, my soul forever turning
In their first light, my heart a prisoner still
Of a past that has so freely flown and gone by the arches.
By Lough Gur Side
I saw you as you passed,
Our eyes locked, rocked in the flicker
Of dawning recognition and you were gone.
I sat by the lake, silver whispering beech
Sighing in my ears. From the thick, green,
Pliant limbs of trees, a girl with laughing eyes
Came forth, her dancing body as innocently,
Ignorantly thrust in ever-shifting,
Deep, melodious harmony.
Come With Me
Come with me to the inner room
That is not wholly an entry into the past
Nor yet a leap into the journey’s end,
Neither a respite from the present task,
But a falling out of time,
A place of battle where you came
And I assailed the ghosts of mind,
Beating against the ridges into the dark,
Undiscovered valleys of your soul,
Where I lay down to give, to lose again
And in your arms victor lie
Like some ship come in laden with merchandise.
Let Me Live
Let me live in the invisible spaces,
In the untried plac
es of your heart
And not try to conquer or bring down
Shrines and monuments to love,
Rotten as an old fruit.
‘All is vanity and decay,’
An old line thrown away
And meaningful still
While love waits in the wings.
I will live in the invisible spaces,
In the untried places of your heart
And wait for love to be born again.
The Retreat
The world is like a wave
That greets me each new morning
With greater or lesser force.
And some days it doesn’t touch me at all -
I watch its waves break
On the golden shoreline of my heart,
From where I lie, safe in my retreat with you.
Our bodies now apart,
The tears softly roll down my cheeks
For the love and times
You and I did not know
In the desert days and years
Yearning
You left me in a winter of winters
When our love was young.
I struggled with the waves,
Struggled with the weeds,
I turned with the wind.
Then you came,
Yearning for what had been.
Sorrow
Indebtedness all round,
The law of love transgressed,
Perfect love-offering on a tree
For all, once and eternally, made manifest.
Some at the foot stand aghast,
Some mock while others walk past,
Surmising still, their hour not yet come.
Babylon the great whore, meanwhile,
Sinks lower and ever lower,
Surfeiting on the blood of the prophet
And the innocent. Many wander
This way and that suffering from a famine
Not of bread but of the hearing the word of God.
Ar m’Fheiceail Dom Spideoigin Sa Tor
Language is just the names we use to identify
The things we see — bush, robin,
In the act of greeting what is, what exists
In our field of experience, waiting
For what is to be made manifest still
Through earthly and heavenly signs
And in our own hearts.
And there is no need to feel ashamed
Or be afraid to name the Trinity of being,
The Father, Son and Holy Spirit,
Or to believe that nobody wants to hear
The word of truth issuing from the mouth
Of the man or woman of God.
The Face
It was not unlovely or unloved,
Despoiled now of the rose roundness
It once possessed.
The forehead, pale as a plain
The desert winds had whipped across,
Stretched high above a gaze
That bore out fixed and straight
From a hollow place
Never to be retrenched or lost.
It had not grown old, just changed;
Fled the flush of child delight
Leaving a stranger look in its stead
In the nose that pointed to another time,
The lips, neither parted nor fixed,
Trusting, anticipating yet
A fulness sure to come.
It was your face in mine,
A light reflection in the cheekbones drawn,
With wave on wave of thought
And new sounds in the old
Rising this way and that
Ever looking for a diadem or crown.
Special Guest
For Tom Kane
Spring wasn’t complete until you came -
Then the meadows danced with the promise of brighter
days,
Young dandelions and daisy-heads closing in tight knots
In the grass where I walked that late spring afternoon.
Thoughts of parousia, deserts turning to fertile ground
And of you, relative stranger tto our race, turned
harbinger,
Leader in eternity’s immeasurable time-frame,
Bearing a torch-light down history’s dusty, obfuscated
ways.
Going Up
Can’t remember where or how we met —
We were travelling the same road,
Came out of the same darkness, I guess.
As we walked, people all around,
Words were the key that unlocked the door
Beyond the issues that distract
Like group unrest, nuclear attack.
Reluctant to interpose some remark
Between us and the light leading on,
We drifted in love, sometimes close,
Sometimes apart.
You greeted the ones you had left,
Then intimated where I was to sit —
By you with the band.
In the shifting sands of sleep,
Separated a space,
I turned to find
Your eyes lift from my face.
Ye Shall Break Forth
God is good, God is good -
A bird flew into the sun
Below the bright wood —
Lets his people live in peace
When all is said and done
When all is said and done.
God is good, God is good.
Birds were singing by the river
Below the bright wood:
Reach for love above and beyond
What you can hold,
Grasp truths half-understood.
God is good, God is good.
Children in the garden, running,
Below the bright wood:
See in their excited faces the pink flush
Of victory, ‘Look Mammy, light for you
And me, for us all, we are free.’
Touched
My life is like the brushstrokes of an artist —
Painted pinks and greys across a canvas
Of early autumn sky.
I am colour in your hands
And silence too
The wind and rustling leaves fill up
Before the onset of rain.
I will let go
And watch love take shape
In the good things that you give —
Dawn and the soft sweet chirpings
Of the swallows’ late brood.
Confession
For Ailbhe
You came of age to-day and,
Suddenly, wherever you moved or fell
Love was there to guide you —
Books, chocolates, cards
And promises of further treats,
A grown-up’s need to compensate
For the departed childhood years
Or was it for something achieved?
Your quick denial when I spoke —
Would you prefer to be six?’ —
told me you had assumed the cloak,
‘It took too long to be this,’ you said.
Later, much later, I had a truth to tell —
I came of age that day as well.
Echoes
‘Happiness in love,’
the river sang.
‘And sweetness too,’
the cowslip smiled.
Drenched in the sun’s
Irradiating light:
‘End all bounds,
All obstacles to love.
Melt our hearts,
Our souls confound.’
‘Let there be symmetry,
Order from above,’
the delicate-fringed fern stood
In mute assertion of the plan.
And to the words,
‘Will we be found
Again as one?’
Echoes answering,
Unanswered rang.
Before the Sun
A time and a time an
d a half-time,
Before the sun’s finite light
Shone suspended in the darkness,
The essence and fulfilment of desire,
I am,
The eye of beauty in me beholds
All wondrous, manifold shapes
Of beast and every living thing,
All perfume of flower;
The cup of life
Filled to overflowing
In my love held forth
To willing hearts and steadfast souls.
We have seen the glory of the sun
And sported in her golden light
But lately have seen that glory fade
As the chill winds of autumn after summer days.
The Hawthorn Tree
Look to the topmost leaves
Dried golden against the sky,
Borne to the season’s fulness of colour
In vibrant reds, dull yellows and brown.
Look to the hairs of your head
Numbered much more than these.
Why worry that most branches do not grow straight
Or are stunted, cut off in mid-course. Look up to me,
Risen above the things that hurt — selfish ambition,
Stubbornly pursued, ends in the dust.
Flesh of my flesh, child, why grieve
That you are not loved as I love you
And that some go down, mocked, misunderstood,
The way I went, faithful and true.
Gifts
I give you apricot skies
And teddybears’ chairs,
Swallows’ wings and the tips
Of all proven things.
Bending to ever raise,
Waiting at the door, lingering,
You plead and plead
For the oneness yet to be achieved.
Phases
Yellow Mississippi moon,
Red moon behind the Galtees
Or rising over Lough Gur.
I mull over words,
‘new moon, old moon faces’
And marvel at the dream
Where child in the full moon
And old man in the new
Circled round, at one and the same time,
Both prisoner and free.
Over the Boundaries Page 3
