GIVE AND TAKE

I tendered my resistance

It had little use for me,
And squandered my ambition,
Split the honey from the bee.
Invested hope and charity
Courage, charm and care,
Then gave away my Eden aids,
Red apple, dappled pear.
 
She took from me my gold,
From my manger took the straw
My seeing was already lost
With mine eyes what she saw
Was not what she expected,
Just poverty and pain,
She had no use for these
So she gave them back again.
 
I gave her thatch and roof
To keep her safe and warm,
From elementary dangers
Jack Frost, wet rain and storm.
She took from me my spirit
Long before I passed away,
Stretched the darkest hours
And shortened every day.
 
She stole away my laughter
My secrets and my joy,
Relieved of my innocence
I became a broken toy.
Then I became her ferryman,
One-way ticket down the track,
She borrowed too my heart,
It’s nigh time to claim it back.

 

 

 

RETURNING

I’m seven-eighths certain

I have no wish to lie
In parish-plot subsoil,
But be one with the sky.
From where I began
In the blood of a man
Sold calves from a van
That we might not die.

I’ll fly with the pollen
The dust-mote, the ray,
A moon child by night
A sunbeam by day.
I’ll bounce off the heather
Whatever the weather,
No tie or no tether
To hinder my way.

From journey to nowhere
I’ll soon be returning
In ash, spark and fire,
The splendour of burning.
No dead or deceased
No chanting, no priest,
No fear of the beast
In ether’s great churning.

Among noble trees
With halo of holly,
A soul mate for China
My gone-away collie.
Great oaks and pine,
Sapling and vine
Each other entwine
Away from man’s folly.

NEW DAYS

New days never have hangovers,
Never stilted by the days before.
The bridge of the night self-destructs
Rebuilds in advance of less and more
Of sunlight and shadows and path
Days and ways to explore
Never designed or imagined
By man alone, who measures store.
 
Today was a new day yesterday
Tomorrow the same for now,
But tomorrows never follow the rule
The stars don’t follow the plough.
And planning is like skating on ice
Like Pickwick and his merry band
Still Dickens gave him a dunking
And took him back to strong punch land.
 
Future is an imperfect tense
Past an unqualified guide of time
Present never lingers to say hello
Eternity lost in sand and lime.
New spuds count; they’re seasonal,
As new born lambs, spring tides,
Old means little and new means less
What’s gone and what is, hardly guides.
 
The pulse, crude metronome of the heart,
Seventy warnings per hour at hand,
Pointless, for we control nothing at all
As an egg-timer empty of sand.
Seconds and minutes, hours and days,
Months from winter till May,
The past a druid in decorous drag,
And time yet to come, gone away.
 
 
Don Boucicault was a noted Irishman who grounded the immortal words

“Men talk of killing time, while time quietly kills them”.


 

IF

If you think your life is important

Wait till you die,
You’ll be as the skin on a day old dung
In the haggard, by and by.
 
If you deem that your dreams are prophetic
Pause till you wake,
They will listen, pretend to be impressed,
For your sake.
 
If you count your contributions to this world
One by one,
They may be as dust mites in myriads of stars
Of the sun.
 
If you think you’ve known faith, hope or love
As it might be,
It’s likely that a tiny grain of sand knows more
About the sea.
 
If you believe in Heaven up above, the promise
Of salvation,
You’re no different from the multitudes of sheep
Of every nation.
 
 
(With all due deference to Kipling)
 
Strange; in 1865 Kipling was born in India and Yeats was born in Ireland, two British Colonies. When Kipling won the Nobel Prize in 1907 he was decreed to be British but no such claim was made on Yeats in 1923 when he won the coveted prize.

If the man-in-the moon wins the Nobel Prize for Literature will he be pigeon-holed with Faulkner, Steinbeck and Hemingway as many believe the Moon to be an American colony?

LOOKING BACK

Retrospection, feeble cousin of anticipation,

Highlights only the passed-away folly
Wrapped in tissue of lies of success.
A self-made hero blowing his trumpet
In the pit of the brass of a second rate band,
Lead in the hem of a dangerous dress.
 
The truth, the root of every noble thing
This black and white, merged in sullen grey
Of half itself, a compensating potion,
Lies in baskets, compressed by lies
Giving mock salute to what is true,
Dressed in the garb of every foolish notion.
 
The apples were sweeter, the bread was browner,
The bacon had flavour,  they say
To us who could scarcely contest
This over-the-shoulder, those were the days
Of eight month summers, a touch of frost,
Only swaddling babes wore a vest.
 
The horizontal ones were all famous too
Until they were silent and out of the game
And reach or lament of but widow or son,
For funerals and coffins are about undertakers,
My mother a saint and father a patriot,
Eight black and tans scuttled by grandfather’s gun.
 
And Monday was wash-day, clothes-line a mile
Of terylene nappies as white as new snow
And coarse shirts and long johns and quilt.
Fingers red-raw from wash-board and wringing
Varicose veins and peg in the lip
Expecting and carrying yet-to-come guilt.
 
Maybe he’ll grow up to make a fine priest
And give me his very first blessing
In front of the whole of the parish, I pray,
And shoo me through the gates of Saint Peter
Of papacy, mitre and slow-cooker eyes
No cover charge, no toll to pay.

Look forward in hope, forget the here present
No glory in what has never occurred
Forget the neglect, the torture, the pain.
And when we’re not certain of tension or tense
That is now or round the next bend,
Always look over your shoulder again.

 

 

 

The Dark, the Shade and the Light

Wild raspberries in a cloak of moss

Briars on an old stone wall built long ago by man
Or men, servile at the pitch and toss
Of an English landlord who finds himself an also-ran.
 
I dream of the dead days, days when we were muck.
We churned the hatred with fear,
Better not to dream of future or maybe luck,
And all we thought we cherished, never near.
 
Tyrant; the priest who came to visit too
And promised sweet salvation, key and lock,
A place of always rest under the poisoned yew,
Wood pulpits, rosary beads, lambs in heavenly flock.
 
We lived on spuds and cabbage, dared not fuss,
Five stolen eggs to garnish Kerry’s Pink,
While all the while the landlord lived off us
And priest and planter decreed; we had no need to think.
 
What now? Papists and pirates are vanquished; still.
Recollections of relinquished grandeur, sterile as a stone.
Exiles, pariahs, nothing left but an empty till,
Too many remembered sins, too many dogs without a bone.