Friday, September 27, 2013

THE POET'S LINES

 
I have just quoted them,
to a colleague sitting by,
during the teachers’ assembly,
that was trickling on as ever
in ferocious bureaucracy.
Now they are still shining silently
against the backdrop of normality.
 
Maybe summoned by a force
that’s not ours, behind the clamor,
in the fundamental silence,
they can always speak
with the suddenness of eternity,
like a thunderclap turned inward
and beyond.

Friday, September 20, 2013

HAMLETIC DISCIPLE

Life is a rope
which you pull and relax,
it is often a rough rope,
you relax because
it is bruising your skin.
Which with time
it bruises anyway,
from within.

But what is happiness?
Please don't tell me,
do not brandish this sword,
do not waste any further word.









Sunday, September 15, 2013

SEPTEMBER

                               after “ June” by Dermot Healy
 
Leaving the openness of summer sea.
The borders shattered in the swarming sun.
 
A narrowing busy light
is now alluring you in its might.
 
It’s river, purpose, direction.
And you feel drawn
 
into the rust-like beckoning
of the withering cornstalks,
 
tall ruins standing and fluttering
on furrows awakening walk,
 
land back on land
and dust in a straight gust
 
along the shiny rustle of crows.

Monday, September 9, 2013

DON’T GO AWAY

Gull, don’t go away,
stay here on your rock
at the end of the dam,
I won’t come near,
I know one step forward
would make you leave,
your time is a bright
taut string, seconds
tight and alert,
your gaze keeping clear
that verge before I merge.

Monday, September 2, 2013

CLANDESTINE

When it’s a feeling.
Of being smuggled into yourself,
for a temporary ( sorry) eternity.
Looking for bits of bits, yourself,
rummaging with papers on the train,
having exhausted any chance
to sense poetry in being blown in the wind,
but having exhausted maybe even exhaustion
and, what after? Going on rummaging
with the badly folded papers of yourself
on the train, while it clanks to heaven
whose door was closed time out of mind,
while you have been frowning, smiling too,
fumbling through lives, scrutinizing
illegal corners popping up in the famine,
the subtle famine of feelings, of being really here,
a few papers of yours fumbled on among chores,
and air blown from chinks by your elbow
on the swarming away-countenance of the train window,
in your disentangled sameness ( sorry) of days,
an eternal mobile vibrating, past-caring in the pocket,
the dream of a touch-screen flashing, forlorn,
in the business of silence,
in the queue from absence to absence.
 
Having lost all ghosts. You,
just unasked, undue.
So simply, so normally uncared-for.
On the many roads.

Sunday, September 1, 2013

On the death of Seamus Heaney

I received the sad news on the train via sms yesterday. I never knew him personally, unfortunately, but I think I read almost everything he has written and I feel as if a friend had died. Now even a poem on his death has appeared in the blog Eyewear...

I want to remember him in many ways and with many, many of his lines,
 but a line in particular is the first that has embodied for me his tremendous poetical force...from the poem Mint:

Let the smells of mint go heady and defenceless
Like inmates liberated in that yard.
Like the disregarded ones we turned against
Because we'd failed them by our own disregard.