PROMISE

What does a man need to be a man?
So simple, so complex when you add it down,
If you haven’t a word you have nothing
My father said, before we put him in the ground.
How can you ride the crest of a wave
And never get wet?
How can you choose to take a side?
And say you never bet.

The Spanish and French played invasion games
Promised the Indian nations,
They butchered the buffalo, stole the gold
To build gasoline stations.
The natives protested, tried to resist,
The Cherokee, Sioux and Chippewa Cree,
Crazy Horse knew they were crazy
So they buried his heart at Wounded Knee.

Americans looked to the Oval Office
For a promise to end the slump,
They were dealt a heartless hand of cards,
With clubs and spades, no diamond, no trump.
Life lived with pleasure or life with pain
Hardly matters a whit,
Tongue in a molten mouth
Welcomes any spit.

Hard to play hard to get
If you’re not hard to get for a start,
That promise you made and forgot
Doesn’t matter; you have no heart.
The promise of great romance, out of control,
Going nowhere like a runaway train,
The thought is still father to the deed,
We all promise to start over again

INDIFFERENCE

To be weary of the journey before you set out
Is a cross and a curse.
Accept the gift of complete indifference,
Just another washer in your purse.
Black stirring in the trees; crows revolting,
Rising and falling of black wings,
Cold stones of hail on winter face
The ending here begins.

Time; patient builder of impregnable walls,
Diviner and destroyer of each wish,
When petulant promise no promises keeps
How tastes the hook to the fish?
All dogs are wiser than their masters,
Grateful for a handful of sun,
Piss in the valley of virtue
Just for fun.

What use an inside without the outside?
Little is lost on the well-worn path,
I wished that I was there with you
Or still here beside you sat.
How little a thing it takes
To drown in sorrows or float on joys
Thoughts are real, words only garments,
Stars make no noise.

I'm inclined to head off to the west
Small houses, thatch and Kerr's Pink,
To sketch on vacant page of the mind
To see, not to look, reflect not to think.
The echo of the sky on the flat of the bay,
No natural order corrupted by reason
Where summer and winter are bound by the fall
And Spring is a permanent season.

BEYOND THE PALE

Secrets are revealed to no one
Onever, not ever oneself,
Perhaps the ghosts who gaze through the dark
or the eavesdropping elf.
What you're not to know is important
even if its not now, or never,
We are each of us all alone
since umbilical sever.

No need for you to cry yourself,
Borrow, as an actor, the tears and smiles of others,
The world is full of curious peepers,
Fathers and priests, sisters and mothers.
Spotlight of the mind can shine
on the face of past buried lies,
Love was never about love or
feelings, hellos, halos or goodbyes.

Secrets never bind us together,
The certainty of death cannot deceive,
Haters of clarity have nothing to say,
For ourselves alone we grieve.
Old clothes patched with older clothes
Breezes lost in the gale,
Knowledge does not lead to knowing
what lies beyond the pale.

UKRAINE REVISITED

What’s what in this land of Cyrillic colours

And shapes of capes on Cossack and charger?
What colour are tears from eyes in this place?
The pale of the pure, the golden of grain,
Or the crimson on bloody lace.
I know the milestones of history here
Like all other places; just dates of wars.
Slaughter campaigns, sanitised names,
Skeletons driving burnt out cars.
Advances, retreats on land and Black Sea
Victors and victims like you and me
And Geronimo.
The past filled with Ottomans, Lithuanians, Poles
Where are the sanctuaries, holiday homes?
A gulag is no place to go.
Life is not linear but instant; now.
Great paintings of peace depict only death.
Where hide all the peace correspondents?
And bandits with plans for each vacant berth.
Do lovers still bask under alabaster moon?
Or rejoice with the sun when the clock strikes noon
In Saint Michael’s square in Kiev.
Does the bread taste the same, the milk and the game?
The honey from Ternopil’s flowers
On the banks of the Seret River above.
The leaders; great warriors or mice with money
The people defiant and strong
Must the question be asked “Is this my home?
Is this where I truly belong?"
Who can withstand the three sided pressure
Of the gravitational field of power
Not shadows in a material world
Where seconds are splinters of every glass hour.
Ireland never knew the wrath of invader
Just dark strangers who claimed us as one of their own.
Told us the rules; where to live, where to die,
For their sins, we still must atone.
Another UK without the sweet Raine
A kingdom still ruled by a queen,
They have blackened our name, reddened our soil,
Yet each spring our grass still grows green.
Can you tell a black man he ought to be white?
Or a Muslim to change to a Jew,
Only one rule for a man of his homeland,
To thine own self always be true.

Happy New Year to all Ukrainians.

(The Dnieper and the Shannon still run free)

A TALE OF TWO PEOPLE

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,
Green threads stitching our dreams about us,

They who need others are forever shackled

Strange how life goes on without us.
We thought we knew about each other,
Like all before us and those behind
We hadn’t even begun to explore
The shallowest compartments of the mind.

Sometimes love comes softly
Like a feather in soft breeze awoken,
But you can’t see into another’s heart
Can’t listen to what’s beyond the spoken.
Life is an untidy playwright
Loose ends hanging everywhere

Hard to bottle a wish or hope,

Melody preserved by tongue and ear.

Where everlasting ends and eternal begins

Time would tell who was leaning on who,
Those without clocks can feel time
Running out, myopia of long view.
We lived in the neighbourhood of guilt
In humble cottage of clay and straw,
Your truth liberated me from me,
Brought me to the now I never saw.

No sin is original, all has happened before,

Lies are just echoes in the mind,
Happy the addiction to the holy breeze of now
All images of you left behind.
Sympathy is short-lived in the room where I sit
With splinter, shell and stone,
Happy in the know that loneliness fades
In the being of being alone.

(happy new year and era Smokey, you were everything).

MINDFUL

O would, I could dismiss my mind from duty
And enjoy a freewheel spell of older age,
I have lingered long enough at loves full manger,
Time to turn the margin of this page.

What remains, within the veins?
Stiff mixture of heaven, hell and pen,
I wish I could conceal myself in stillness
Indifferent to the lives of other men.

The mind, the only source of self-protection,
Tries to know another human heart,
Only when you find no need to know
You may live together or apart.

Nothing in life remains forever urgent,
Man’s finalities denied by each new dawn,
We all abandon substance for the shadow
The truth lies only in the blundering on.

Someone else’s dreams will get you nowhere,
Silence, a more lethal threat than word,
All the marks we made will surely fade,
Death; the ultimate truth, a voiceless bird.

History is a bag of self-deception,
To deceive another is a Trojan horse
Which backfires when we least expect it,
An endless boomeranging maiming curse.

Yet that bounteous aquifer hope springs eternal,
All fade and wither will once again renew,
Behold that wondrous tent we call the sky
Of cerulean, lapis and turquoise blue.

LIES OF SILENCE

My mind racing through a cloister of dreams,

Parliaments and pulpits ringing in my ears,

Moral dilemmas fermenting my fears

And the ones who have left are still here it seems.

The hair of the dog is a shaggy illusion,
No lock of black, no tress of white,
The soot in the heart of the drops invite
Lies of silence, the ultimate confusion.

Tumbleweed drifts, abandons high ground,
The true cure of loneliness; being alone.
Virtue remains a pointless comparison
We are all born lost, most never found.

If we don’t stay here we might as well stay anywhere
Country butter sunlight in Dillon’s lane,
The warped reservoir of memory resurrecting the pain,
Every journey is as snowflake; no two compare.

PURPLE THOUGHTS.

Streams of comedy and tragedy

Churning in same channel; that’s life.
Nights I lie pondering, wondering
Whatever became of my ideal wife?
I met her once on a train in Kildare,
Gins and tonics in Naas,
By Maynooth the plan turned swiftly sour,
Ill feeling broke out twixt her and her face.

We’re all mere shadows in a material world,

All promise is in the shaft of an axe,
Honesty and truth are lonely pilgrims,
Conspiracy travels in packs.
If there’s nothing in your past; conceal it!
Look me in the face when you tell me a lie,
If you believe in Purgatory, pray for the dead,
The guilty will feel shame; by and by.

Hunger and hate, love and the need to know,

These are the constant drivers of life,
Did God write down the word of God?
Did the butcher invent the knife?
Are we shadows of our former shadows?
Where would shadows be without light?
Law, the purple shadow that blots out justice,
Only Reckitt’s Blue makes a whiter white.

While I eye-sweep the length of the mantelpiece

Silent lofty guardian of the fire,
Two-faced clock looks down her evening nose
At beech and bog, red pyre.
Where now all those abandoned dreams?
All those thoughts we remembered and forgot,
How can you be free if you shake the hand of fear?
A parliament of sand will surely be our lot.

LEAVIN'

“I’m leavin’ in the morning” she said,                                                                                         

I said “where might you be goin’?
She said “there’s no way of knowin’,
If I stay here I’ll shortly be dead”.

So she hopped on a bus and big silver plane

To fly her to shore far away,
My choice was to stay or to stay,
My loss or sanity’s gain.

She arrived, I heard, the weather was grand,
Escape; no gossip, no mist,
And I filled my gullet, got pissed,
And she filled her pockets with sand.

She passes her time behind tiny bar,
Lattice of bars is my lot,
I fingered the things she forgot
And saved her pearls in a jar.

She’s getting’ on well now, I’m told,
In that place of sardine and sun,
One cup and saucer, one penny bun,
Priceless; or lump of fool’s gold?

IN DREAMS

Wouldn’t you wonder where you wander

In that dreamlike state,
For sleep ; the perfect traveller,
No luggage, no boarding gate.

All that’s needed is a vacant space

In the carriage of the mind.
Reality, if that exists!
Jettisoned behind.

When the prevailing wind is from the East
You can steer it to the South
And hold your breath forever
And spit the foul one out.

If you don’t enjoy sham Christmas
And the Wise Men come too soon,
You can tell the trio to sling their hooks
And call again in June.

Your hair can be tossed in a nightmare
And set straight again in dreams,
Reality’s a long dead foe
And everything is what it seems.

CHILDREN

All children are experiments,
The more they offer, the more father takes,

And righteous mother lays down her own law
To try to use child to correct own mistakes.

The child has a right, by right
To dislike its own father or mother
Or uncle or aunt, parson or priest,
Cousin or granddad, or any other.

Parents presume to own their offspring,
To decree and dictate style and behaviour,
How to comb their hair, sit on a chair,
And tell them the name of their saviour.

A lonely child is the only child,
What chance to think or maybe grow?
Target of lasers, same parents once lovers,
Strangled of sight and the right to know.

If children can’t do what they like
Why should parents and adults and others?
The tragedy was and is the long curse
That children grow big to be fathers and mothers.

RING DONG FOREVER

Farrell's machine laid the peat out in rows
of brown and black mixed, no racism here.
We felt the fresh sod, squeezed it through fingers,
the texture of  butter; turf new year.
And we watched it for weeks, three or four,
then nodded agreement, its fit to foot,
the fussy ones started, the patient ones waited
for more days and rays and Leavy's, the hut.

I made it before,  time ago with my father
and neighbours and grey shaggy ass
and bottles of tay and fat bacon sandwich
when hay was hay and silage was grass.
And we earned ten shillings, half of a pound
to spend as we pleased in Maggie Murray's
for a week of six days and sunburnt neck
in a time of no nights, just eighteen hour days.

They said it was hardship then, back-breaking toil,
And now it was cushy, time to spend in the shade.
With tractors and trailors and steel transport boxes
and no-one can tell you the price of a spade
or a slane or a billhook or grim reaper scythe,
or a half pound a tay or a quarter of plug,
But fire's still fire and roast red and warming
one bog-hole behind, one three-quarter dug.

WHERE TO NOW?

Marooned on an island in the sea of time

Surrounded by the functional furniture of life,
Where only the future is not forbidden,
Sin and innocence wrapped in layers of strife.
The ever shifting battleground of difference
Confronts me now, no sides to take,
The powerful pull of vague memories
Helps me to sleep; keeps me awake.
 
Starboard is the now, leeward is my haven,
Fore or aft? The querulous choice,
There are times in life when lies are a kindness,
Alone in the world, time takes its time, one voice.
Yet time gets away from me, still it’s always near,
Slow as molasses on a downward slope,
Perfection is as close as the horizon,
Today is crying time; yesterday, laughter was the hope.
 
Where to now for my sundered soul?
How to listen with the ear of the mind,
The grind-stone; my constant coat-of-arms,
Can’t know what to seek, what to find!
Who can paint a portrait of the wind?
Who can tell the stringer from the strung?
Everything new in this world is dated,
Songs yet to be written have many times been sung.
 
I tarry and I ponder on my island home,
The biggest lie of all, my home-made truth,
No future in the past, I must go on
On penance path, to trepidation’s booth.
If I could leap across my sun-dried shadow
I might clamber up grey shingles on far shore,
Fate advised I might go somewhere else,
I told her I had lingered there before.

 

 

 

MY TREASURE

From cock-crow to Tilley lamp
Counted my treasures,
Brought out from the safe
Of my soul, one by one.
A sliver of violet
Fresh from a rainbow,
A smile for each day of the week
Stacked up, healing breath of the sun.

The smell of fresh hay,
A thousand years old,
Caress of beech leaf
Homeward bound,
Miracle mushrooms,
Soft as marshmallows
Slipping up through pores
In the ground.

Eva Cassidy’s golden voice
Bathing in early morning rain,
Newcastle Forest at dusk
Model of Heaven in green,
Gambolling lamb,
Flash of brown trout
Side-glances of love
Heart stopping; too seldom seen.

And I packed up my treasures
In a gold genie bottle
To let them get close
To each other by night.
At new dawn as an alchemist
Pulled out the stopper
You flew out and filled up
My senses and sight.

(For Smokey on Valentine’s)

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.