The Why and the Wherefore.

Where is the pass over the mountain

That leads to Tír Na nÓg?
Is it found only in dreams?
Faery dreams, those friendly sisters
Hand in hand on their journey
To the meeting of the seven streams.
 
How many feathers are needed
To balance a bone on the scales?
The bare bone of hope and despair,
Why follow those poor misguided fools
Who cast their nets in stagnant pools?
And never a fish find there.
 
How many leaves of the sycamore
Does the wind count at dusk
Before he settles to sleep,
Is it better by times not to have the words
To say what would wound
And kindly counsel keep.
 
A blind man sees well enough in slumber
Silence conveys better meaning
To those who know the secret signs.
The wasteful unimportance of life
A wounded creature among the complete
Great oak strangled by serpentine vines.
 
Are the moon and oceans Siamese twins
And the land and sea blood brothers
Do wild geese fly in blue formation?
Is the crusader welcome home?
Might wars end if men refused to fight?
Would we join this conversation? 

Will a clock survive on just a tick?

Is forgetting and not wanting
To remember one and the same,
Is life a matter of inconvenience?
Like boiling eggs in a barrel
Or merely a pointless foolish game.

 

 

 

 

Daisy on Fiddler’s Green.

Making for different horizons today

My head and feet
Steps and questions in tandem
Yet ‘never the twain shall meet’
Until I lie on my shadow
When I enter the narrow house
Steered by collared myrmidons
Of outstretched paw and tenant mouse.
 
I pondered the passions of life
Enacted in rhyme and song
As the music of Munster
Lilting from O’Gara’s tongue.
How to stall the cry of conscience;
Realization cannot be outrun,
Death is a maker of widows
As true as the dial to the sun.
 
The false pride of principle struck me
Regularity and virtue not my lot
I live in a house of calm calamity
Forget me but forgive me not.
Whispers of fancy, phantoms of hope
Walked with me through perilous gap
The work of buried hands, buried faces,
Hope survives on a crumb and a scrap.
 
Consider mercy side-lined by justice
Justice ignored by law,
Priests who preach but never suffer
Do branches know the bite of the saw?
Love is a limited substance
The slow burning out of a dying fire
Disappointment married to expectation
The dropping of ripe fruit, the end of desire.

If we exist, then not exist,

What’s the point of it all?
If death means extinction it is nothing!
Nothing but echoing rise and fall.
To achieve long life is to ignore its passing
But for the mirror; time never seen,
Passing as the mist on the mountain
Or the daisy on Fiddlers Green.