China On Being Forty
From the cool, cold waters of the Atlantic
To the tropics of the East China Sea,
From the lush pastures of the Golden Vale
To the desert and scrub of Sinkiang,
I watched the dark form emerge,
Weave a winding path to me from the shadows,
It was my own soul or was it man,
Found and lost, lost and found again.
From the hardened antler tips and the wooden-tipped
spears
In the caves of Chou-K’ou-Tien
To the piercing light in the graves at Newgrange,
The legacies of countless civilizations before me —
The dynasties of Shang, Chou, Hansung —
Nothing haunts like the fall of one man,
Love seeps in the narrowest crack,
Binding all up, making all whole again.
Dark-smudged leaves, trembling branch,
Tree silhouette in shan shiu form
Looms large as life on my cell wall
Where a young dissident mourns.
Night of the wounded, dying, massacre in Tiannanmen …
Crushed in the iron fist of oppression
Some won’t see their forty years,
Much less live out their lifespan.
And, one among the teeming millions,
From chains unsung set loose,
Cut to the heart by this travesty of love,
Urgent lurchings of the marriage bed,
In gift of vision and love unprecedented I found
Cell-rich semen, hallowed DNA,
All bathed, purged, in the luminous glow
And free flow of his bright red blood.
The Swimmer
I struggle in shallow waters
To keep myself afloat;
With deliberate action he dives into the deep,
With rythmic motion swims the breaststroke,
Then heaves his body half from the water,
Weight of soul in broad tanned back
Resting on the pole.
He came and went alone.
My faith’s been shattered, life on the rocks,
Swimmer of confident stroke or love,
Most beautiful of all,
Take me to the deep end of the pool.
News Today
A journalist fell down the stairs and died.
Or so the story goes. A politician
Fell off a ladder and passed on.
And a mother drove off a pier, her two unsuspecting
daughters
In the back seat, drowning all three —
All this in the course of the last twenty-four hours.
Floods leave a million homeless in Mozambique,
Carry hundreds to a watery grave,
The living sit among the rotting dead
When the floodwaters recede.
Don’t tell me everything’s alright in your world, babe,
Though to look at you, I believe it is —
All you need is love and love is what you’ve got
Right here, right there, everywhere you look,
A force to counter the dark side in us,
Set to rights the wrongs committed, the hurt caused;
Suffering is but for an instant
In the eternal scheme of things,
Death but a part of life, as
We are born anew again each day, forever.
The Funeral
Your hand reached out
In dancer’s measured motion,
Fingers held mine
In the vertex of the arch
For rivers and floods
That silently flowed
For things done and left undone,
For words spoken and more
For whar was left unsaid.
Though I looked for pity,
I found none.
I fell, fell
On daggers spread
Thick as grass —
Their hearts were cold
As his body was,
Cold as stone.
Felled
To the memory of Brian Murphy
I grieved, was angry,
I ranted and railed.
Then stopped, prayed,
Wept slow, silent tears
For the youth I feared
Murdered in cold blood.
His open, wide-embracing smile,
His beautiful, intelligent head
Beaten, kicked to a pulp,
His blood now on their hands
On the night he sang,
‘Hail, milk provider….’
You custodians of youth,
Warm blood beating in your veins,
Look right, look left, look back
And back again from whence you came.
The Talking Stones
“Oh, your teeth,” they cry, fingers pointing,
“You will lose them if you don’t do something.”
And I think to myself: Yeah, and much more
Will be lost besides when a flood of trouble subsides.
They are my sisters, younger than I,
They tell me how I should walk,
Not seeing the infinite journey stretched out behind
I walked to find you,
The one I am travelling still,
Nor the painful steps I take each day
To reach them where they are,
Lives buried in the outside tracks.
They are my sisters, older than I;
They silence me when I speak,
Not caring to know what lies ahead, either good or bad.
Lost to the home I loved,
The steps by the backdoor cried out to me in sleep:
“Come back, come back to us.”
Like Ossian returning from Tir na nOg,
I stood dumbfounded on the spot,
The stream flowed down before me unloved,
The trees leaned over weeping
For all that passed beside, between them now
Was destined for the reaper’s hook,
The knife that would know no pleading
And I could not stop the stones in their grieving
And I could not console the trees in their weeping.
Rolling
I will keep the back door open —
You may choose one day to come that way.
The front door is closed forever,
I have flung the key far and wide
Into the measureless depths of his love,
Love whereinsoever I would have
That you had bathed… And I am free,
Free as the great white clouds
That roll over and under
The still amorphous form
Of the victim’s face.
The Call
As the plop of a stone
In a dark pool,
My name rang out –
Tone deep, crystal clear.
It sounded as a name
I never heard before
And sounded yet
As it did always.
I rose in an instant,
Crying, ‘Yes, yes,’
Opened the curtains wide,
Letting the morning light through -
I looked outside for the distant figure
Or neighbour near
Who had called my name thus:
It floats still on the desert air.
What WB. Really Said - A Deconstructionist’s View
You’re just a ship, Maud,
And the bow thereof at that,
A vehicle of change
While we men are the instigators
Of great and infamous acts —
We bore Helen away and won her back.
High and mighty and impossible as you are,
You cannot change that —
Womb-man, born to receive,
Why don’t you go home
And stop turning men’s heads,
And let the status quo be?
Argo Navis
Standing in the poop of Argo’s generous line,
Riding the heaven’s bewildering light years in time;
Castaways, you know the world we leave behind,
Stowaways, our only bundle, this faith
In a light and power we cannot explain,
This hope in a love as deep as a million skies.
Ship of ships, ark of arks,
Suffer us to ride as far out as we can
In the arms of your breaking tide.
All On a Winter’s Morn
Doors slam shut, the sound of a jeep humming to life
And she was gone with her saddle and bridle and buckets
of feed.
I struggled to pull on my socks and jeans, groggy with
sleep,
The sun just about to rise over the southern horizon.
Family members wandering about or breakfasting - we
exchange
Half-finished sentences of greeting, eyes adjusting to the
light.
The dogs launch into loud yodelling as I gather up the
leads and
Head for the hill. The road now clear of early morning
traffic,
I tune in blissfully to the birds’ broken song.
Jack, the German Sheperd, takes off after a neighbour’s
pointer,
Heedless of my cries and screams. Soon back and called
to heel,
We set ourselves for the steep climb. Turning for a
breather,
Half-way up, I saw the wide vale below covered in dense
fog
As though it were the sea with tree-lines like sandbanks
breaking through
And, on our way down the other side, houses with little
patches of green,
Like islands, had begun to appear. Not having abandoned
post
For so long and living inland all the while, the sea, it
seemed,
And mysteries deep, had finally come to me.
The Card Game
I showed my card,
You played your hand against it.
I threw the ace down,
You followed it with yours
And so we played until
One day you found me crying
And you took my empty hands,
Held them firmly in yours,
Just like I had done
One sunny Sunday in the crowd
Years and moons before.
New Moon Child
Want to type a poem for you,
Paint the wall white again
And write my new logo on it —
Words of truth, of life,
Pick up my old bike, black machine,
And see you ride.
The moon is a curved line
Above the hill on the horizon
Where you sleep or dream to-night
And I am come alive in the flame of love, of fire,
Brother has for sister, and, new testament tried,
Mother has for child.
Love Offerings
Your love is light;
My thoughts like rocks
Fall down, imprisoning.
Your love is deep
As the ocean turning upon itself
Washing my soul.
Your love is love:
The boy-child opens his little fist
Of two or more crushed blackberries
To his older sister’s face.
Tabernacles
The sun sets in the west casting
Rays of gold on a full lapping tide,
Illuminating all in its path,
O lustrous sea, seaweed -
I stand, infinitesimal, a mere dot
At the river’s edge.
Touch this land, this heart of ours, Lord.
Transform us in your love,
Your radiant light.
As surely as the sun withdraws,
Leaving a cold green sea behind,
There is only darkness without you.
Over the Boundaries Page 4
