The Miracle of Healing
Meant the hurt gets washed away over time.
A kind of baptism and rebirth, because
you never are the same again, never will be.
You don’t see it happening, you feel the weight
lift, you go out like a kid unknowing
what’s ahead. That time you walked
behind the swing, knocked your teeth out,
but they regrew, good timing dad said.
You skinned your knees, ramping over sunken dunes,
but cuts heal, cover over – marks on skin,
reminders of those events, scars slowly visible –
like a crust forming over jam.
Invisible scars that stick in your throat,
which no one knows exist but you, your hurt.
Miracles, as you hold the phone to your ear,
transcending continents, voices
to your head. A car travels on the road, horseless.
Water evaporates from seas – rise up, fall as rain.
An inch of bog takes a thousand years to grow.
All invisible, like the miracle of healing.
————————
Smoking Bees
The mellow smell of the wax, as
we hammered and nailed, the frames
fresh white timber like honied dew.
Trod through pock marked fields,
daze of hay, suited and booted,
with bellowed smoke, our lives so sweet.
Buzz around us with abandon,
adding layers and checking queen.
In my head, the dread of the sting,
and stung, I run and run and run.
Collecting our golden treasure,
into the centrifuge we spun,
and daring in jars we did fill,
Dad and I, my memories eye.
Gathered honeyed pots, crystallise
before our eyes, we realise
saddened solidification,
in our hot press, amongst Christmas socks.
————————
In Summer’s End
Swallows are dipping and diving now
as July comes to an end.
Their dart of red and blue on white,
avoiding the high winds, swooping low
and over rooftops, down again,
in unison, low to the ground,
perfecting their Messerschmitt moves.
Carting their carcass of feathers,
on vortexes that carry them high
into the sky, soon their muscle
bound bones, ache for warm currents
that will carry them south, from the hills
of Irish wells to Namibia;
where Kite Men Swoop.
——————————–
Of Birds
We always minded birds
that fell from the skies,
or their nests –
not ones in gilded cages.
Barn owl, dazzled by lights,
taxidermied on ole shelf.
Its beautiful feathers, ruffled
forever, till mites take hold,
extracting the carcass eternal
off its mossy mound.
Préachán perched with broken wing,
jackdaw nestled in cardboard box,
light blackened with tea towel,
until our hands release when thawed.
An lundubhs golden eye, surprise
us held aloft, seized its opportunity,
and flapped good bye.
And birds; we don’t mind no more.
——————————
Forester’s Blood
Foresters are ripping my wooded heart out,
rotten ones, who came in thirteen hundred and one.
Returning local Gaelic chiefs who pout,
where trees were revered and won.
From the mire of tree top battlefield
of trunks cut down, earth left brown; a sin.
Ploughed over ancient fort and buried shield,
arise and go now my ‘deafening glen’.
Where those to come in a hundred years
from out this hour to the next,
will never know the weeped tears
of when the arm that held the axe, unflexed.
—————————————-
Badhbh or Badb
My battle crow cry.
For centuries known at the mouth of endeavours.
Compared to soldiers who fear,
my tidal predictions.
The cries of the noble
struck down with such might,
as my little wings could carry.
The red-mouthed army will cry
around the house, cursed
down with idiosyncratic taboos.
Conaire Mór drinks,
and drinks calling poetry his name,
where his geasa has been broken,
forever, I pull on my hood of
my battle cry cloak.
———————————–
1702
Dangan Donovan –
And forged horse shoes
wrapped round necks of the fallen,
dug out of the ground,
old Uniacke found his mount,
in seventeen hundred and two.
The lined village street,
and boollying bulls,
of mud ‘n’ thatch,
of Rath ‘n’ stone.
Only those left,
have
little
to
be
moan.
Slán agus slán go feoil, James Fitzgerald.
