Home
On our honeymoon, we slept on a mattress in the front room, with no curtains. Then there was peeling wallpaper in Slane and carrymats in the boot of a Cortina estate. In the dark we thought we’d found a quiet spot near the banks of a Normandy river. Then woke to traffic, more exposed than expected, on a roundabout. The swings were greater then, and the roundabouts fun. But while the hinges creak a bit and we’ve metal where once there was bone, a borrowed tent with love inside’s still home.
Fables
Before the 20th century
It was baking and the crops
Banked fires against the cold
And wearing shoes as necklaces
To cross the fields to school.
My granny told me stories
Of babies in the cot
And the breaking of the sod
Clucking chickens in the yard
And why the moon landing
Was nothing but a fraud.
The ‘Flashing Blade’ on TV
And the way the puppets fought
Made the news appear quite odd
But the ‘Polis’ and the baddies
Were the standard stories told.
The years swapped the fabled
For the imagined and the real
But where my granny trod
The ghosties and the earwigs
Still fled in fear and dread.
Our ordinary lives
We don’t hunt for glory,
But nature or nurture
Makes us sharper than knives.
So we carve our own future
And sometimes get ribbons;
Sometimes dirty looks.
We take stock of what’s said;
The praise or the blame;
The cautious advice
That says don’t throw the game;
The backward glances
Of those who remain;
The curses and jeers;
The praise and the tears;
And cries of jubilation.
We are not spooked
Into believing we’re made
To live others’ ordinary lives.
Our motive’s our own
And we write our own story
In life’s changing book
Unapologetic, unexplained
Hoping to mark the sentence
With an exclamation, or at least
Have it read to the end.
Inconvenient Valentine
A chocolate rose
When winter’s
not done
And friends
must stay apart.
This year
There seems
little room
For romance
Or floral art.
You know;
Inspiration
Can be
Unwelcome
For Valentines.
These flowers
Will not open
To the sun
Or prick you
With their spines.
But allusion
turns to truism
Loss of appetite,
And delusion
Keeps lovers apart
Poetry’s not
always convenient
When it comes
To affairs
Of the heart
No returns
I am birthed,
Conscious of
my magnificence
And hence
Immune
To coddling;
Shrieking my resistance;
Weaned from the need
For your approval
Indignant
In my refusal
To accept less.
And so it continues
Through graduation
New situations
Tackled at my
Invincible best.
Until hark!
It concludes
And the ringing
in my ears
Is understood
As the alarm
Of failing systems.
I don’t want to seem rude
Ungrateful
Or even too concerned.
Surely the design
Could be better?
But in real life it seems
There are no returns.
Celebration
Jupiter and Saturn
In conjunction
The Christmas star
falls in the west.
The Solstice shrinks
From crossing the bar
Of a demonic year.
Two points in the sky
Become a brighter whole
We look for a presage
In the dark.
Hark the herald
Hear the message
Shed a tear.
Daughters and sons
told to stay away.
The news is bleak
We don’t expect
The buses to run
Church bells to speak
Or Santa to appear.
But the festive lights glitter
The home fire is set
And the candles are lit.
Though partygoers are fewer
And the streets empty
Our inner voices permit
Celebration here.
Red soil
The soil lives
My brother and I
Picked potatoes;
Fought for the furrow
Where the field rises
And water clings
To the clay.
I found a field mouse
And lost it;
While the quiet lady
Closer to the ground
Than all of us
Stooped to gather,
Shaking mud
From the clumps
Filling baskets
With woven hoops
And showing the way.
That late September
Chris gathered more
Among the neat rows
Birthing big blues
Pinks, or canners;
I can’t remember.
But the sad
And the no hopers
Thought to punish
The interlopers
Encroaching on
Their perquisites
So blood was spilled.
It’s what passes
for entertainment
In this rural idyll
The rain falls slowly
And the soil still lives.