CELTIC TIGER.
( First published May 2002)
We have turned the circle on our fathers,
We have emptied all that tasted of their time
And now in these new days
Full of fortune, full of pealing bell,
Speak the Elysian Fields,
Speak long of bloom and blossom.
Still and all, as jig and reel
Race to take our step
The old gods, motionless,
Watch us eye their script,
Watch us slowly scan the plot--
Be blessed now and evermore,
The point of ripeness
Is the point of rot.

THE CHILD
(A friend bereaved by a cot death many years ago told me how he tried to cope with the tragedy and asked if I might compose some verse describing this.)

And even though we parted
Before your breath
Could form my name,

Even though your head
Never turned toward me
Nor heard the prayer I made

All that age ago,
My eyes still follow you,
I watched you grow with all the rest

Down the years after,
At school and at play,
Departing and coming home

I heard your step, your laugh,
And you take your place
Around the table, and stand there

In the family photograph.
But watched you grow solemn
From time to time

And your smile fall away,
And your dark eyes lower,
Watched you grow solemn

As if now and again
You dreaded I'd awake some day,
And find you gone.

LOUGH NEAGH. THE WAVES OF DREAM.
Midnight is close.
The waters of the lough,
Calm since the day went down
Sigh in a sigh of breeze.
From east, the lunar dawn
Spreads its silver sheen
And silver waves
Move in the breeze's moan,
The waves of dream
Cresting in the risen moon.

THE NATION.
( September 2002)

(A call for a new concept of nationhood, that Ireland must move from the constitutional straight jacket to that of the intellectual and cultural. This is a restoration of what is termed the "Ireland of the Light" as distinct from the "Ireland of the Struggle." The Ireland of the Light is embodied in the great Schools of Armagh, Bangor and Clonmacnoise, 6th-11th century when Ireland was last a genuine centre of Europe and the World and had real distinctive identity. It calls for a new bond of Protestant, Catholic and Dissenter in the name of the cultural and intellectual achievements of these traditions from the monastic age through the age of Archbishop Robinson in Armagh and the cultural and scientific achievements in the centuries afterwards. Conventional notions of nationhood are seriously diminished, subsumed into global conformity culturally and economically. This was the wild, ignoble Ireland of the Celtic Tiger. The new nationhood is identified by what we can give to the world that it does not have without us, that there is genuine identity and sense of destiny only in being a centre in some distinctive manner.. The writer forwards his Theory of Ethereality and the following poem as a personal contribution to this proposed dynamic.)

l
THE NATION.
I am the one of ninety eight
The man of new rebellion.
I talk to Dwyer and to Tone,
I tell to them across their grave
The old dream for which they fought
Is still in bloom, is full alive
That we have bartered pike for pen
To step the noble steps again,
And drum beat must sound again,
And the great call be heard again,
And old things be made again
And old things be done,
Old things be made again
And old things be done.

I speak the Ireland of the Light.
I speak of a nationhood
Whose crown is set upon a head
Where scroll and quill bow and greet,
And call on golden deeds of old
That saved a dying continent
And made us glorious to the world
Re-set its theme, re sound its chant,
And drum beat must sound again,
And the great call be heard again,
And old things be made again
And old things be done.

That call in me arose and broke
Across a hundred centuries,
The great elk and the wolf call
From their valley place or rim of hill-
A piper seated on a trunk of oak-
And the soaring scan of his blank eyes
As hour and hour he piped their tune
'Till cold warned the sun was gone.

All around us much is dying.
All around us, much is dead.
The old nations, dulled and drained
Are wise no more, have lost their song,
Their old sit with lowered head,
Their young move with wringing hand-
Is this the shedding of the skin
In turn toward us once again?
And drum beat must sound.
And the great call be heard.
And old things be made.
And old things be done.

I name Archbishop Robinson
Who raised the fallen banner
Of the Great School, I name that man
A Keeper of the Light, and all after,
All who sought the deeper way
Of scroll and pen, of plan and mortar,
All who faced the world's stare
Onto our epiphany-

Roman ways and ways of Greek
Are ended. Age is come,
Old age where older eyes are wide awake,
Eyes fresh from the fresh dream
And now the Masters enter,
The lords of Armagh and Bangor
Enter, and all rise, all stand attention.
Quill move. Colour follow. Old light re born.
And drum beat must sound again,
And the great call be heard again,
And old things be made again
And old things be done,
Old things be made again.
And old things be done.

THE IMMORTALS
(In memory of the great Celtic victory of 1967)
Because the Lisbon hour was taken
Parkhead is changed forever.
By day, by dark, by morning star
The deed that raised the peerless crown

Spreads its light along the way.
Their names are there, the names are read
They who sailed on fortune's tide,
They who made return in glory.

Gemmell and McNeill and Johnstone,
Craig and Murdoch, Wallace, Auld and Stein,
Fallon Sean and Fallon John and Simpson,
Lennox, Clark and Chambers, all in line.

And who can compare with them
That leader and his home made men?
Who can overcome their fame?
Great as deeds at Bannockburn,

Great as any Scotland sent,
Recall again their do and dare,
Recall the wave on wave defiant,
The surge of that relentless hour.

And time can never take the day,
And time can never take the dawn,
As one by one they fall away,
And one by one they rise again.

THE LARK
Somewhere
when monks
opened
their lapis dial

to dip a quill
the lark sprung
from her dewy bed
into the dawn void.

RUSSIAN PIETA.
I watched the vast swaythe of dead
Spread on acre and square mile
Across the fields of Barbarossa.
I watched them move from where they lay
On the still and vast terrain,
Each rise and bow and turn
Before the dark could drop,
And led by a Michaelangelo
One by one raise their limbs
To stretch out upon a mother's lap.
And winter in the north wind come,
And summer in the bluebell follow,
Forever there, mother and child,
Forever in the sculptors hand
A dead head facing the empty sky,
A living head to the silent land.

TITANIC
(The assertion of the female
from her birth in the Arctic
and her revenge folowing rejection by the
male construction.)
From the centre
Of the polar galaxy, her body forms.
Out of the spiral rims,
The immaculate, unbriny stars,
The slow, turning, winding layers
Raises up her arms.
Soon a descending figure
Will touch the arctic crown,
In the long twilight shimmer there
Stand under dusk and dawn.

After the forming came,
After she took that form
Followed toward the calling heard
In rhyme and beat of the shipyard,
Followed the welding spark and flare-
The cast her out, they turned her away
At every rivet thrown and struck
As the great shape, belly and back,
Along the gantry, plate by girder
Raised its triumphant body.

Now she turns her head
Toward the watery void,
And on her solemn face,
And on her flowing mantle
A glow as the Aurora Borealis.
It is neither day light nor moon light,
It is neither dusk light nor dawn light,
And she, abiding her oath,
Remains motionless until
At the chosen hour
Steps from her place
Into the mist of Labrador,
And moves south.

SOMETIMES I LONG TO BE.

(The earliet race of people were traditional fiddlers and pipers and dancers, a mystical people who lived when moon and sun and earth were young before conventional life began. He wants to be with them, the living and the dead.)

Sometimes I long to be
In some Precambrian valley
Under the moon's early face.
Somewhere there look down
And watch her shadow trace
Along the eager dust and stone,
She, riding the strange sky
Of forming plough and galaxy.

Somewhere there, somewhere then
In the barren moonlit valley
Hear fiddlers and piping men,
Hear their reel and slow air
Thin as the tone of a played saw,
This ones cran, that one's slur,
All the familiar styles
Along the moon filled miles.

So much youth was in that moon.
The unblemished countenance,
Her full glow in the noon
Of dark and lightest dance
Before the points of heaven.
And as I stare into her stare
I think toward the moving west,
And things moving in the east,

And I think again, in that place
Of no tomb or print of motion,
Of neither root nor bone
That some well featured race
Moves around when dawn light
Darkens risings of the night.
And I break into a prayer.
And I long to be there.

Sometimes I long to be
Among the long departed.
Sometimes, so close, so far,
Draw fallen eye and head
Toward the milky galaxy,
To the plough and the pole star.
And pipe and fiddle rise again.
And dancers in the rising moon.

LAND OF MY FATHERS
I entered down a telescope
Into the bound of galaxy,
Millions motionless in spiral,
Chasm of shade, unmoving flare,
Millions over the clearest night
So vast, so silent there.
But thought I heard a faint hum
That the silence seemed to brew,
I thought I heard singing come
From the distant deep of stars
Fading, rising, filling up
Into surging choir sounding
Land of my Fathers,
And then the vast crescendo
In that fantastic glow
Tapered suddenly away
Until the ear could find no more,
Faintest tremble, murmur gone.
I watched for hour after hour,
It never made return.

SELLAFIELD.
(In this poem, Sellafield is presented as Strongbow and Cromwell come again. The modern invader is crossing the Irish sea in waters purified by the ice ages and from which life emerged in the distant past. Just when we are moving into new times and giving thanks, another invader is landing on the shore.)

We scanned these seas for Viking
In the dawn sun, for Norman boat

Stared into fog, our ears sprung
At tidal whisper, our heart beat

Loud in the still night. Those waters
That took the crystal ice-age roof

Had long before under moon and stars
Danced around the birth of life

And guardian of the ancient plan
That shoals team rich seas

Now find the plot undone
Reversing vast complexities,

The rhyme of oar we cannot hear,
The sails unseen and speeding prow

And we, into our thankful prayer
At war's end, watching new things grow,

Struggle out of long dreams
Have not reached "amen" before

Our voices drop, old faces and names
Enter with the dreaming's stir,

Old dreading, old despair
In the tide and the wind and rain

Turning us to the conqueror,
Strongbow, Cromwell come again.

THE PRAYER
This was his final prayer
As he sat before the hearth,
Lungs scraping for air
Spoke with rattle breath-

It was in your distance
I found your closeness.
In your unanswering
I heard your morning song-

And then he slumped forward,
And his lips fell apart
As if he died of what he said,
As if he choked on thought.

THE SPACE MEN
And when their engine failed to stop
At the lunar burn back to earth
The mission sped its fresh way
Through planet path, through asteroid,
And thirty years on, passing Pluto
On the edge of the solar homeland
They moved out into the abyss,
They faced the bound of galaxy
Still upright in their space ship,
Three dead men at the helm.

OMAGH
It was a time of hymn and psalm
It was a time of upward head,
Hope had spread out its balm
And how our hearts were lifted.

Who could now doubt that the Lord
Had reached and touched his people?
That Heaven kept its solemn word,
Heaven at last heard our call

And the chorus of its new song
An end to bullet and bomb.
But we were all wrong.
The worst atrocity was still to come.

THE FAREWELL
(Written for Tommy Makem's funeral and recited at his Requiem August 2007, Dover NH)

Farewell good Tommy
Earth and sky are calling.
Farewell fair and noble friend
The parting hour
Has tolled its bell,
The parting hour is come
When we must turn
And set you free
Into the arms of eternity.

Farewell good friend, farewell.
Your deeds have changed us,
Your days have lived in us
That we must speak the flame they lit,
Our fullest thought, our fullest sigh-
What beat that heart
Will live forever,
What filled those veins
Can never die.

Farewell again, farewell.
And even though our heads are down,
Even though our grief is full,
The stirrings in us stir again-
No dark will fall upon you,
No dark can come upon your way
As you journey, on and on,
Into the water of sunset,
Into the milk of dawn.

THE SOLDIER.
I thought of that 18 year old
Full of fright and innocence
Struck dead by a bullet
An hour before the Armistice.
I though that as he fell
Wails began to form and rise
From where his body lay
As a chord come out of the ground,
Woman and child and man
More and more, hour on hour
Sounding a vast chorus,
And through the day I thought
As the surge went on and on-
These must be the voices,
This must be the voice of those
Who will not now be born.

HIMALAYA VISIT.
And there above Slieve Gullion,
Sudden over Drumbunion
And the Breague and Mullyash
The Himalayas soared
In a vast August cumulus.
It was around the noon hour
They appeared above us,
Rising and rising again,
Chomolumgma, Cho Oyu,
Makalu and Dhaulagiri,
Nanga Parbat, Kangchenchunga
And the dark stare of Lhotse Shar,
The white anger of Annapurna.
And then the south west strengthened
And the great peaks began to move
And thinned one on the other
And vanished into the East.
By evening, in dark blue clarity,
Our rounded, glaciated land
Appeared again, risen again,
Born again in the cloudless vault.

ONE.
Sunset sky
Is many.

The dawn
is one.

THE WAKE.
The corpse's face, a half moon
In the candle light
Made its dim reflection
Across the sallow room.
Hour and hour went by
Steady in the night's care
Until the call came
To close the coffin,
And all gathered in a ring
To pray their final prayer
As murmur followed murmur,
And made a soft amen,
And the moon that kept that night alive
Began to dim and wane,
And the moon that set behind that hill
Will never rise again.

THERE IS A DARK
There is a dark
Where the dark
Can be no darker,

That is where
The newborn flower
Leaves the bulb.

There is a light
Where the light
Can be no brighter,

That is the day
The summer solstice
Turns its head away.

DEATH MASK
I watched her face in death
A look not seen alive
In all the years I'd known her,
Face as strange as someone else.
I watched throughout an evening
And thought as I stared on
That must have been her look
The hour before she was born.

I HAVE LIVED THROUGHOUT THIS SURGING TIME.
I have lived throughout this surging time
From the horse and plough to Broadband.
I have smelled the burn of hoof on shod,
On the wings of Web I soared and sped
Within this sixty year old rhyme
And thought no age made such a stand,
None sat so proudly on their throne
Of all the ages known to man,
But night time falls on Navan Fort
To the heavy pound of Macha's heart.

I've heard it said by older men
That age returns the mind of the child,
That's what I heard, and said again
What drives the soul and body wild
Past all the comfort one can ply
In the breathing of their very last
As there in that first infant cry,
The pining for the mother's breast.
And night time falls on Navan Fort
To the heavy pound of Macha's heart.

I have lived upon this surging land
To hear another old one's thought
That what I seek will not be found,
Or found, is not what's sought.
Yet give all thanks and thanks galore
And set this down with scroll and quill-
Though life may love us more and more,
Death loves us fonder still.
And night time falls on Navan Fort.
And the heavy pound of Macha's heart.

OFFSPRING.
Drink maddened, the sheets
Torn and torn dress
As he vent his rage
On her unwillingness.

Years after and the offspring
Growing, I watch, I see
Its timid smile,
The frightened look in its eye.

THE MUSICIANS

(Youthful memories of the fiddlers and piper
arriving and performing at our home
in their frequent gatherings, thoughts
of music and migration.)

I knew them in their arriving
Night after night, and felt the stall
Of feet, the slow door opening
At the entrance to their ritual.
Many a time I arose a while
To sit with them in their circle,

And watched the fingers fall and rise
In unison. No drum
Marked time nor bodhran beat
Broke the lock on their eyes,
The bow arm pendulum,
And the heart pound of their feet.

Years after I knew I heard
That race of sound again, the cran
And shake, triplet and turn
In the gathering of migrating bird
Confused with certainty, wheel and cry
Their wild fling in the sky.

But they were gone, the music men
When I awoke to search from them,
The fiddler gone, the piper gone,
And cold gathered to the ashes,
And cold gathered around their chairs
When I awoke to search for them.

Along the headrig of a ploughed acre
Facing north in the north wind
I trail the skies to evening's shore
Until the darkness sets me blind.
And dawn and day, by day, by dawn,
I'll wait, I'll watch for their return.

LOST WORDS.
Some time after she awoke
Her dry lips moved to speak
To me. Just then, a doctor
Called my name from the corridor -
"She will not see out the day,"
He said, and spoke of drifting away,
And when I made return
She seemed asleep again
As I waited for the message.
But her eyes were closed forever.
Her lips would move no more.

THE PHILOSOPHER.
By twenty we have worked it out,
By thirty all confirmed.
Forty tells us of a mist
Rising into fifties' fog,
By sixty, map and compass fail,
Seventy we bow our head
Drifting into wind and tide.
At eighty we are back to ten,
Full of fairytale. Amen.

THE MIST IS OF SLIEVE GULLION.
The mist is on Slieve Gullion,
Morning mist at the dark and dawn
Moving under morning air.
The winds that gather there,
The north wind's early breath
Is sudden milk, is sudden cloth
When the first stretch of day
Touches her cold, cold body.

The mist is on Slieve Gullion,
Mist returning in the evening
When the cleared head clouds again
To the south west song,
And the song come spilling tale
Of wild deed and sober deed,
Whisperings, and horn call,
And bearings for the dead.

No mortal eye can witness
A bodily resurrection,
No mortal touch unrap a face
At the rising forming stone,
But watch from our early Ring
In woollen weave and weave of silk
The mountain mouths of morning
Feeding at the dawn milk.

BETWEEN WHISPERS
Between whispers
This is what I heard-

Hate dies, like love,
Unless its spooned and stirred.

ADAM AND EVE
(Fulfillment and completion)
I heard Adam say to Eve
In the sound of heaven's choir,
"Are you in dark behind that glow,
In flood beneath that fire?"

And I hear Eve to Adam speak
As she moved toward his place-
"This fire and glow that's happening
Could start the human race".

"Oh that may be the truth" he said,
But another thought I'll tell,
That on this very blessed night
Sin could start as well".

Then let us sin" said Eve to him
As she stroked his bearded face,
"If this is what we have to do
To start the human race."

"But what will heaven say of this,
And what is heaven's plan
If we but do this holy night
What's never yet been done?"

"Oh talk no more" she sharply said,
"Nor dither more about
Before there comes a surge of flood
And puts the fire out".

Then Adam whispered in her ear
As he sat her on his lap,
"If I but once do what you ask
Might find it hard to stop".

"I'll take that risk" she answered him
"For it seems its a woman's grace,
If men should never know their lot,
We want our human race".

If There Be No Resurrection
(A second calling on the North to be a centre
in the image of past deeds of greteness. All the great creative symbols such as Newgrange and the monastic age are in vain if this age does not become an Ireland of the Light. The poem includes a line from the psalms- in vain do the builders build.)

If there be no resurrection
In vain do the builders build.
If after all that wintering,
If after all that tomb and wail
A rising shimmer not appear
And out of there, and moving clear
Shapes step across the hill,
Shapes stand with scroll and pen
To write down the unwritten,
To sing the great unsung-
In vain has Ireland lived her time
Vain the dawn been held,
In vain the dreamer, vain the dream
In vain did the builders build.

If we make return to the land
Thanking God for his peace
And settle down nine to five
Humming the odd verse
Of this and that remembered love,
Fill a measure, raise a glass
To the newest fad and trend,
All, all and all is vain,
Chanter, bellows, bag and drone,
And vain have tears meandered,
In vain the swells of guilt,
Vainly call and cry ascended
After death and the dead lowered,
In vain have the builders built.

Then let us dare to drop our wounds,
Let us dare to walk unaided
Moving onto hallowed lands
Untrodden since the steps at Clonard,
And stake our claim, and the banner raise
And face toward those dawn- lit days.
If not this way, if not this flow
The people murmur and sigh
For blessed times under pharaoh,
And one rise up, inhale and cry-
"Where now the promised land?
Where is the sweat our people spilt?
Where is roof and rafter’s bond
With the house that the builders built?"

If the world does not sense us,
If the world do not rise an ear
And fin vibrato, wing strum,
Clamour up upon our shore
To whisper pointing out toward us,
Whisper under brightening eyes-
These are the ones, enter here,
These are of oldest wisdom,
These are the new wise-
In vain and vain the ages’ stir,
Whatever named, whatever willed,
In vain the ice, in vain the fire,
In vain are all the centuries.
In vain did the builders build.

PSALM 94.
Recited by so many
Down the prayerful ages
I thought the ninety fourth psalm
Like the iron foot of Peter
Thinned away by pilgrim's touch
Underneath the dome,
Had worn down to the single thought
The psalmist spread into verse.

SECOND MARRIAGE.
I watched them
As they moved as one
On their Ibiza honeymoon
Step by step along the strand,
And in the glow of evening
Sat to face the Med
Hand holding onto hand,
Head touching head.
And then from somewhere
Came a rasping scream,
A wild female figure entered,
Writhed and raged
All around their place of bliss,
Half dance, half frenzy,
Pulling clothes and tearing hair
Throwing things in the air.
A minute of the fury raged.
Then she slowed, slumped away,
Moaning, chanting in her grief.
She stared around before she went.
The face of his departed wife.

THE MEMORY
I heard from Sigmund Freud
That nineteen centuries after he died
Christ, in his risen body
Would still avoid
The spot where he was crucified.

But I heard from Carl Jung
That every year around the spring
Christ and the two thieves meet,
Bleeding hands, bleeding feet,
And break into song.

YEATS IN PURGAT0RY
Monochrome November. The chapel wall
And headstone set with the setting sun.
Grey flowers line the twilight soil,
The mourners and their prayers are gone.
Now moon and dusk are changing guard
As the dark chestnut arms and oak
Reach out to light behind the dead.
Above Ben Bulben skies awake,
Meteor and meteorite
From dark to dark streak the night.

Out of rising fire and haze
And silence as a lunar place
A sound from a sudden drone of blaze
Forms voices, thin and bass-
"Yeats! William Butler Yeats!
From these lips of flame we swear
With all that ripens, all that rots,
Your verse is not of judgment here,
Your verse and art are skin, are shell.
But her rejection saved your soul."

"We watched you sit up from your dream
And words form in the full of night.
We sang to you of prophet and psalm
Within the realm where you wrote,
And did we not at verses' end
Oil the rhyme and chorus flow
And whisper in your blaze of mind
Of brightest light, of darkest shadow?
And shadow follow every line
And dark the Doric discipline?"

"We speak unspoken utterance.
We speak the point of rattle breath
Of final senses in their trance,
The flare of dawn consume the earth,
And watch your solemn, old age face
Staring out within the fire,
Staring distance from that place
That she might once again appear
And move where contours loosen day
Under the moon and the Milky Way".

Flame by flame the fires rise,
Flame unfed and fading drone.
The lowering song where song arose
Departs the scene and now Yeats' verses burn,
Colours flare from verb and noun
As one by one the pages perish,
All the sap-full stanzas wane,
Curl and shrivel, enter ash.
No stir of motion breaks his eye.
The face stares on impassively.

O SWAN UPON OUR GENTLE WATER
O swan upon our gentle water
Where will yóu be ín the morning?
Where are yóu be whén we rise,
Winding through the polar air
Far, far above the ocean?
You who ate our crumb, our morsel,
You who sailed beneath our eyes.
And what is stirring in that head
To unsettle those great wings
And stretch out their fullest span,
And your white shape soar away
And blacken into the dawn?

POMPEII
Voices locked in the ashfall mould,
a hardened shell
of two thousand years

Until the random strike
of an excavator's pick
released their final roars.

I MET HER BY A SUNSET.
I met her by a sunset.
As far west as I could go
I walked with her before
the darkness fell to its place.

We stood there together
and spoke of a tomorrow
when we might meet again,
and our steps retrace,

But then, I thought we'd move on,
hand in hand
into the narrow dusk
until the morning's grace

Might discover us,
and leave its first shadow
on the night's imagination
of her forgotten face.

ICE AGE
As Donard's head
crowned out
in the breaking ice,

a knife of ocean
cut off Ireland
at the joint of Howth.

A PARTING
I thought before hands held
He sang her a final song,
A song she maybe heard of old
At some fair or christening,
And verse after long verse,
A song without a chorus.
It would be maybe evening
When the last note was done,
And when she turned her face
To him, he would be gone.

I thought she followed hill and star
And the song full in her head
Into a springtime later
We stood at the parting bed,
Watching death in love with her,
Her white face, her whiter hair,
And thought a tune began to seep
Watching the eye's far spill,
Watched the eyelids flicker and fall
As they fell on her first sleep.

DEATH
Death
is never
an experience
of the dier,
but a calculation
of the watcher.

THE THOUGHT
On returning from the sea and land
in tattered clothes, bare feet,
at the end of my travels found

The deepest thoughts that greet
do not come at thought's command,
but after thought's defeat.

GIANTS CAUSEWAY.
Beyond the restless edges
Of the tectonic plates
Antrim’s form is cast and set.
Beyond the fracture lines
That woke up Alp and Himalaya,
The third, the final lava spill
Fulfilled all assertions.
At a place east of Dunluce
Its slowing motion darkened
Into the black clot,
Year on year after year
Cooling in the sun’s heat,
Warm in the cool of the moon.

And there, out from the solid depth
Faint sound as chanting rose,
A rise of chorus move rhythm
From low early tone,
Rising pitch, racing scale
Broke out to its sky
In a final convulsion.
They face toward the ocean
Like seals crowded on a shore,
The face to the horizon
In their hexagonal wait
Century by century
At tidal wash and parting,
Antrim's forms one by one
Step back to the clot of dark,
Step forward into dawn.

THE DEEP
There is no depth in new discovery
Of this or that measured way.
I who have read and thought and read
Across the ocean of philosophy
Find the hunger unfulfilled,
Find no harbour for the journey,
And now as year turns on year
I seek the deep of an old song,
I seek a weave that cannot wear
A tale of loss beyond redeeming,
A tale to rhyme in heart and bone
That say to me, and say again-
Close up that book, lay down that pen-
And when your singing voice is spent
Lift the pipes and strap them on
And set the chanter and the drone
And pipe away that old lament
That lives around the soggy eye,
And pipe until the morning star
Is faded in the milky sky.

THE FIRST MOURNE CHRISTMAS.
(A ballad for a departed friend)
The moon shone all along the Bann
On Lisnavaghrog shone,
On Kinnehalla valley
And the rising ways of Mourne,

She made her light on every home
And lit the fall of snow
Where people moved around their place
Two thousand years ago.

And as she set one frosty night
Under Glaskermore
A star appeared above the hills
That had never shone before,

And they who mapped the heavens
All gathered in alarm
Whispering their prophesies
Of kings and queens to come,

And they spoke the winter solstice,
The year's most holy day,
Watching the star grow brighter
Beneath the Milky Way.

And one by one their voices rose
Around the harp and drum,
The young and old together there
Into their ancient hymn,

But as they sang, another song
Came as a starry choir
And echoed every word they made
Around their rising fire,

And the words that came together
Sang of the solstice dawn,
Sang of a coming in the east
In the flare of the winter sun,

And sang that what they chanted
Was heard in every wind,
And that same dawn was rising
On every sea and land,

And that same star that lit the sky
Above the hills of Mourne,
Was the star that shone on Bethlehem
The night that Christ was born.


I ROARED OUT YOUR NAME
I roared out your name
With the lungs' full savagery,
A long unechoed roar
Into the blur of May.
All stopped.
None turned a head
Animal or singing bird,
As still as struck with frost,
Until one upon another
Murmurings and motion came,
And as sound refilled the day
I apologized for the disturbance,
And turned, and moved away.


SONATA.
After the tonic had sounded
The fledgling spread its wings, soared
Away from the roost
On key after key, chord on chord

Into a later season reappeared
Out of the cloudy south, and landed,
Full wing, body and head
Unto the deserted nest.


REFORMATION
What trembling hand
Shaped that mould,
What fire
Brought on the melt,
Pouring anger
Onto rage,
Pouring Calvin
Into Celt?

RITES
Concorde's shadow
Like a Manta Ray
Speeding the ocean floor,

And a sonic boom.
I thought of initiation rites.
And vows of silence.

THE TRY
(Jan 27, 1973)
It was Bennett who raised the moment,
Bennett who set the spell
That there, out of mine and valley,
Out of dream and song and dream,
There, in the deep of the Arms Park
Against the Kiwi masters,
And the glow of Slattery and Willie John,
Carmichael, Duckham and Mc Loughlin,
Of Gibson, Wilkinson and Bevan,
The curtain of epiphany arise.

That JPR take up the step
As the jig time move into reel,
And Pullin flow, and flare of Dawes,
David dancing into line
Into the ever speeding dance,
Quinnell arrive, and great rhyme,
Great rhythm of hand and feet,
And then- that all could slow and fade,
Something fall to break the spell-
Edwards appear from his abode,
Edwards take the final pass
Like a falcon scooping its prey,
Race off beyond mortal touch,
And dive into Avilion.

THE RETURN
I knew, the feeble old mother said,
I knew I'd see you again,
Forty years since we parted
And wondered where you'd gone.

But I knew before this day was out
In the world here or the other,
Knew we'd meet before tonight,
Said the old and feeble mother.

QUARTET
Unless the seeker
is in a melt
and longs to set
they can not enter
the mould
of the C sharp minor
string quartet.

Acupuncture
(To purge and begin again)
I think of a white haired figure
Bent over Ireland
With their acupuncture needles
In the hood of the left hand.
Woman or man under
The shawl of fallen locks
I watch slow bony fingers
Insert into a drumlin col
Between Armagh and Monaghan,
And raising a head and lowering,
Breathing coming as a sleeping child
Implant, slowly, deeply
Into joints of rock and bog. Then
In the tongue of the Bann
Entering Lough Neagh
Pierce firmly throatward,
Needles set along the Boyne,
A needle entered in Kinsale
And one deep at Ferrycarrig.
Again I watch the bony fingers aim
Poised above Slieve Gullion
Between the Ring and mountain,
Between the mountain and the Ring,
And all day slaved away,
All night under the moon
And into the dawn hour’s entry,
Oak came and broom and hazel,
Ash and sycamore and elm
Sprouting at the filling east,
Filling hollow, crowding hill,
And away at an eye’s meander,
Far at the river’s side
A rough sailing boat
Smaller and smaller there
Departing on the Foyle tide

HOPKIN'S DANCE OF VOWEL
AND DIPHTHONG
April. Bud ready.
Sweet shower. Proud sun.
Then forgotten January
Stirring on its roost
Spread a whitening wing
Into winds of west,
And curved beak, and spiral claw,
And frost twisted petal mouth,
And frost peeled broom tongue,
The frost sharpened thorn tooth
Drip poison in the thaw.

THE WOUND.
And then the sore no longer bled.
For weeks, months I lay and stood
To sew and stitch that gaping hurt.

But an old song reopened it.
A wound healed in the head
Had broken out in the heart.

BELONGING.
I could see no belonging
In her face,
In laugh or frown
Or sleep or wakening
Saw no trace
Of kin I'd known,
Of parents, uncle, aunt
Or any of her sisters,
And then began imagining
She must be born
In some far kingdom
And left here an infant,
Until one moment
When bad news came,
Her mother's features
Flashed across her pain.

CARUSO
An Archangel's srike
on the gong
of the world.

LATE NIGHT THOUGHT
All pain
divides.

All suffering
unites.

RING OF GROWTH
I though at the post mortem
Rings as trunk growth were found
And one thicker line discovered

Told the state pathologist
That must have been the year
Her beloved parted.


I HEAR FROM THRONGED CALVARY.
I hear from thronged Clavary
The dud thump of hammering.
I hear the roars of Christ
To nails piled through the wrist,
Hour after hour a gale
Of wild noises, wild howl
He and the broken thieves.
But death will not come,
The hourglass will not flow,
The sun refused to budge
Since masks broke on loved faces
And dice throwing soldiers froze.
It's time to move away
And free them from their tortures.
It's time to let the sun drop
Into the evening, onto dusk,
And the crack as an ash branch
Of bones splintering
Their voices enter silence.
I hear a great shout go up.
Torches are breaking into light
To the sound of brass and drum
Rising around Golgotha.
I see Christ carried shoulder high
Triumphant to the tomb.

ROBERT BURNS.
What a brain
Mapped that heart.

What a heart
Fed that brain.

O GREAT SUN
Oh great sun, rising with blinding glare,
When old age swells your girth
And you droop into a lightless glow,
The dying embers there
Will have wrought immortal shades on earth
When you last sink below.

LOUGH NEAGH. THE WAVES OF DREAM.
Midnight is close.
The waters of the lough
Calm since the day went down
Sigh in a sigh of breeze.
From east, the lunar dawn
Spreads its silver sheen
And silver waves
Rise in the breeze's moan,
The waves of dream
Cresting in the risen moon.

GHOST
I see a new heavenly light
Appear in the evening east,
The soul of a dead star
A million years after
Its bloated body
Had given up the ghost.

ONOMATOPOEIA.
The sounds of the Universe
Are rising in my hearing,
From galaxy and nebula
Filling the night with noise.
I hear the hum of the Milky Way
And the distant thunder of Andromeda,
I hear the purr of Sirius
And the crack of an exploding star
Somewhere beyond Orion,
But silent from the east
In the pound and slump of twilight din,
Silent on the horizon
The moon, the moon, the bloodless moon.
The moon brightening in silence.

SIGHT.
I watch a blind man's fingers move
Around the contours of his lover's face,
The fingers of a man born blind
From cheek to chin in stroke and trace,

And touch the forehead with the palms
On eyelids open, eyelids tight,
And knew as I watched his empty eyes
He saw her face in broad daylihght.

THE JIG
Ireland
Still steps the jig
That Strongbow danced
To Ferrycarrig.
Israel
Still plays upon
The harps that hang
By the Babylon.

CRASH OF THE NINTH
I thought Beethoven's Ninth
Had crashed and in the gloom
Of dawn, crochets and minims found

Strewn all along the ground,
And workers sifting through the length
Of Tochter aus Elysium.

THE SMILE.
As we bade our last farewell
To her, candle above the coffin
And the pale wax drops

Hardening, felt a tear
Might dampen her face,
And then I thought a smile began,

A slow smile appear
At the dim light's tremble
On her solemn lips.

THE DARK, THE LIGHT
The darkest night
Most brightens morning glow.

The brightest light
Throws the darkest shadow.

THE BLIND HARPER'S PRAYER
Then blest bé the nightfall,
And blest bé the dawn,
And blest bé the dusk again
That calls the evening down,
And blest bé its calling
On hollow and on height,
And blest bé the blésséd dark,
And blest be the light.

I pray the lonely moon
As she wakens in the east
To cast her eyeful gently down
On every sleeping beast,
And every beast that stands awake
To follow shadows' flight.
And blest bé the blésséd dark,
And blest bé the light.

I pray the solar lover
To find the moon's pale lips
And both clasp in an embrace
Into full eclipse.
And let the full corona there
Dance around its night.
And blest bé the blésséd dark.
And blest bé the light.

SUMMER SCHOOL
The descendents have returned,
The offspring of those
Who in your living days
Would not touch a reaching hand,

Walked past your begging lines,
Now stalk school and resting place
To scavenge on your carcase,
To vulture on your bones.

THE SUPER- SUPERFICIAL
More pedestal than statue,
More halo than head,
More package than parcel,
More water than blood.

This is indeed the hour,
This is indeed the call,
This is indeed the age
Of the super-superficial.

I WILL SET FIRE TO THE ETERNAL HILLS. (Villanelle)
I will set fire to the eternal hills,
I will strike shadows where men dread the dark,
And childs' cries will linger, and old age calls

When I pronounce on early jigs and reels.
And I will light up hollows where men lurk,
I will set fire to the eternal hills.

And I will white the crows and black the gulls
And hang a red brest on the rising lark,
And childs' cries will linger, and old age calls,

And even if clouds mount the blazing swells
And voices plead with rains to drown my spark,
I will set fire to the eternal hills

That when glowing faces brown, burn to skulls,
Drooped heads light up, bright cracks fissure and fork,
And childs' cries will linger, and old age calls.

I will set fire to the eternal hills.
I will strike shadows where men dread the dark.
And childs' cries will linger and old age calls.
I will set fire to the eternal hills.

HOW DID THE LAST DODO DIE?
How did the last Dodo die?
How did it live its final day?
Where did the final bones lie
Before they vanished in the clay?

And did a male or female pine
For a lost lover, torn apart,
And make a long, final moan,
And die of a broken heart?

THE JOTTER
(Old love too deep to tamper with.)
I returned to some old verse
In the middle pages of a jotter
About a lover and his lass
I had written there years before,

And after staring for a time
Ringed words to make a change,
Soften rhythm, soften rhyme,
Pluck, stitch, re arrange.

I read aloud and re read
The lines of my amendment,
But old words reared their head,
And jarred there, and broke my chant,

And noun recoiled and drew in
Its adjectives around it
As verb and preposition
Soured to my edit.

And when I went to read again
I found a fractured couplet,
And fresh lines broken down,
And fresh words thrown about.

I pulled and probed their clinging
To part one from the other,
The more I forced the editing,
The tighter clung together.

I stopped, erased my pencil scars,
Set the jotter in its place
And left them there, old lovers,
In their newly locked embrace.