He thought she'd be easy to catch.
As she fluttered her eyes
She made deep throaty noise
As she preened her black ebony thatch.
Then when it was time to go home,
He offered beside her to roam.
But she swiftly demurred
With a voice that fair purred,
With a glint in her eye like new chrome.
He felt it was only a tease.
Her favours he'd win at his ease.
So he crooned her a song
As he tagged her along.
Her protests he thought he'd appease.
Soon Cecil got braver and bold
He tried Cindy's waist to enfold.
She was sure having none
Of his efforts at fun
As the rest of the story unrolled.
She cuffed him right under his eye.
Before he could even reply
She took off towards a tree
And with agility
She climbed over forty feet high.
When Cecil recovered his breath
He thought she was playing with him yet
So he followed her up
Saying, "Come on Buttercup
Don’t waste time trying to play hard-to-get.
But Cindy being nimble and slight
Took one bounding leap to the right.
She caught onto a limb
And being nifty and trim
Ran off and escaped from her plight.
When Cecil looked down at the ground
He panicked at what he there found.
He was forty feet high
And too frightened to try
He simply could not turn round.
The fireman in black coat and hat
Told Cecil on the tree where he sat,
That though by love bitten,
Was no longer a kitten
But merely a randy old cat.
PART IV
FROM OBSERVATION
(With a bit of home-spun philosophy thrown in)
This poem, 'Business as Usual', was born in a waiting-room in a hospital and the quoted spoken words are not mine at all but the voice of a smartly dressed young man who was speaking on a mobile phone but in such a loud voice that a curious people-observer and eavesdropper, which I am, couldn’t help overhearing. The loud voice, I think, bore witness to more distress than the speaker was letting on.
BUSINESS AS USUAL
This father of mine is dying
and I don't know
how long 'twill take.
Silence.
Don't forget our meeting Friday,
we're almost to the last hurdle
Silence.
Phone switched to left hand.
You can get me on the mobile.
Anytime.
Silence.
Phone held between forefinger
and thumb.
Better not ring if there's a funeral,
but I'll let you know.
Silence.
Phone switched back again.
Fingers combing gelled hair.
Once that's all over
I'll be back
Silence.
Then we'll get on with it.
Click.
Phone transferred to pocket
with aerial sticking out -
just in case.
That's the image.
That's the pitch.
Then why
were you crying
alone
in a corner?
MISERS' GOLD
Gold that is hidden has no value or beauty.
What cannot be seen is formless mass.
Love that is secret and locked in the heart
When it is needed may very well pass
Into darkness and faded memory -
Like the glow of a sunset as it loses it's light
Turns gold into silver; turns silver to grey;
Turns grey into blackness; turns day into night.
For love that is silent
Is love of the self
And love of the self
Isn't loving at all.
“The Coalman” is, I think, one of only a few poems I have written about something that happened in the course of my work. The young man in question wasn’t long out of school but when he couldn’t find a job more suitable to his educational level he had taken a job helping on a coal delivery lorry. He was in some minor trouble but I have to say I was impressed by the fact that he had taken work, tough, back-breaking work, rather than stay idle and drawing on his parents. I felt he merited some sort of a second chance.
This poem was chosen to be read at the “Open Mike” at Galway’s Cúirt Festival of Literature in 1997.
THE COALMAN
Standing on the back
Of a flat-bed truck;
A seventeen year old coalman.
Rain, wind, grey, muck.
"It 's a job anyway,"
till I'm eighteen when I'll get the dole
and so till then I'll carry coal
on my back.
My seventeen year old back"
Head covered by a sack
Carefully folded so that
One corner fits into the other
And now it 's not a sack
It 's a cape from head to back
Made from an old jute sack.
"Not jute," you reprimand,
"For jute there 's no demand
Anymore.
They 're made of polypropylene now."
"Polypropylene!",
I exclaim.
"Polypropylene."
you declaim.
"You have no trouble with hi-tech words."
"Course not,
I've got my Leaving Cert.
Three honours, three passes
Did Irish too, got an F in that."
Stoop, pull, lift, heave.
A strain on polypropylene weave
And it 's on your back
A lumpy black eight stone sack.
"How does it pay?”
"Sixty quid," you answer back.
Leaving Cert. on the wall at home.
Set in a frame of glass and chrome.
Your nails are crescents of black muck
Standing on the back of a flat-bed truck.
CONTINUING CREATION
The man who
lays a stone upon a stone,
cuts a tree or
plants a seed,
puts a ram
among his sheep,
dams a river or
drains a bog,
shelters an injured bird or
culls a seal,
restrains his passions or
fathers a child or
sees to its death before its birth
alters for all time
the order of creation.
STILLBIRTH
(For F.D. i.m. of Leanne)
Young mother,
Yesterday laughing with the joy
Of what should have been yours today.
Today weeping for the loss
Of what could have been yours tomorrow.
Remember old mothers,
With the wisdom of many winters
And the deep face-etching of many sorrows,
Telling the unheeding young
That raindrops fall when angels weep.
Know this,
That on summer days, when skies are blue,
And clouds dawdle,
You may feel a single raindrop on your cheek
And wonder whence it came.
You will know then
Who, in a fleeting moment,
Passed close to you
And kissed you,
For a young mother you will always be
Though your baby is beyond your reach.
When I practiced as a solicitor I was asked one day to attend a patient in the local hospital to make his will. He was a bachelor who had lived happily
alone in a little farmhouse, without sanitation, some miles from the town of Clonakilty. He was, in fact, quite mentally incompetent and unable to give any instructions but the impression he left on me became a poem many years later, probably about the time a court action about his intestate estate was being finalized.
MISPLACED
"Did you see the cattle on the way in",
Said the voice
In the three foot iron framed bed.
Cleanly shaven with perfumed soap
And tunnelled deep to sightless eyeballs
That saw too much.
Miserable
In a hygienic anaesthetised
Pastel shaded ward.
Temperature and blood-pressure
Proclaiming good health thrice daily
In neatly marked rows of irregular dots
On white forms lined and cross-lined
And hanging at the foot of the bed.
Distorted image
In a stainless-steel spittoon
With spring-loaded cover
Scrawny blue-veined hands
Couldn't open. Reflecting
A man who had ploughed all day
With a pair of seventeen hand Shires
And harrowed before bed-time
All he had ploughed.
"Take me home," a croaked whisper
Captured from a lucid moment
Before the present
Was mercifully buried again
In pastoral memory.
Living
In the flaky white-washed one-storey
Farmhouse with four-pane windows
Front and back.
One wall black-stained
By the splashes
From the piss-pot
Thrown through to the dung-heap
Where the chattering magpies
Had chased the sparrows away
To greedily guzzle
The undigested tit-bits
That always fell short.
"What nature gives she can take away"
He had said
Until he too was taken away
From where
He was happy.
SEMI - CIRCLES
"Get up," she said,
"Look to the sun
And sort yourself out"
And I felt guilty
Of emotional masturbation.
She did not know
That if you face the morning sun,
And walk all day towards it
You will, at night, be back
As near as dammit
At the place
From whence you started.
I have a terrible hatred of violence of any kind and none more than domestic violence. In the course of my work I have come across many cases of it and though there are, of course, cases of women being violent towards men, by far the greatest number of domestic violence cases involve men towards their wives, partners and girlfriends. I can never understand it because it seems to me that even one instance of domestic violence should be sufficient warning that the relationship is devoid of any real love and respect. But the victims, in many cases, just keep going back for more and very often the level of violence escalates and sometimes leads to murder. During the course of my work I have come across the phrase: First come the flowers, then the black-eye. Then come the chocolates, then the other black-eye. I have found that to be very true.
THERE WILL ALWAYS BE FLOWERS
In the beginning
There were flowers,
Red, yellow, and pink roses,
Daffodils trumpeting love messages,
Exotic orchids in delicate china vases,
With cards, toys and tokens,
Vivid coloured sashes,
Lilies with gold and scarlet flashes.
On the first St. Valentine’s Day,
Twelve long stems and a real vellum card.
Delivered by a liveried man
In a white limousine.
In the good days
Sprays and bouquets,
Wrapped in lace.
Spring brought
Golden tulips
Struggling for space
In cut crystal.
Summer was
Sun and intimacy.
Blue forget-me-nots,
Woven game-keeper style,
Gave witness to ecstasy.
Three children later
True love hides its face
In the depths of red weals.
Blue and ochre eyes
Spill tears of pain
From wounds make-up conceals.
He doesn’t mean it.
I see his sorrow.
He cannot help it.
We’ll be grand tomorrow.
Making up with
Never-again promises and
Petrol-station posies.
Followed by cruel reality
Bringing new pain
In predictable seriality.
At the end
The veins in his arms
Stood out, purple and prominent.
The pale ivory of her skin
Turned pink,
Then never-to-be-forgotten blue.
Crimson crescents of blood
In her finger-nails
Betrayed her fight to live,
As the colours of the spectrum
Flashed,
Dimmed
And faded to black.
Come Eros, come Cupid,
Come out from your bower,
Come tend to her grave.
Let her memory empower.
Bring seeds and bring roses,
Bring sunshine and showers,
So that year after year
There will always be flowers.
URBAN RAILStillbirth
(Looking out the window on a train journey)
Nobody ever talks about it,
The hidden face of civilisation,
The backside of respectability
That everybody - and nobody - ever sees.
Houses with roses and flowering cherries
In front gardens
Have weeds withering behind.
White house-fronts
Of plinths and pillars
With plastic Georgian windows
Have daubed concrete for back walls
Enclosing bottles, cans, and broken egg shells.
Rusty bicycle wheels
Roost on blistered felt roofs
Of rickety garden sheds.
Mottled black plastic bags are,
Since the last bin strike,
Piled in a moldering mess
Under twiggy privet hedges.
Here and there a flash of lawn,
A green oasis of brussels sprouts,
Cabbages and runner beans
On wig-wam skeletons.
Grey clothes lines strung
From sewage down-pipes
To outside lavatory walls
With the grey-white washed rags
Of the street-front rich
Hanging in surrender to limp lethargy.
The click-clock, click-clock
Of wheels on rails
On sleepers underneath -
The sleepers within seeing nothing
Of the trash-cans, fence wires,
Foraging cats and weed-lots sliding by;
Shells of old cars
Housing hens now; lean-tos; ash-pits;
Lofts and pigeon perches and
Haggard dogs dragging limbs of trees
On rusty anchor chains
Through muddy puddles
Of their own filth.
Black numbers on white squares
On smoke-grey limestone bridges
Mesmerise the blind eyes
Gazing through furrows in city grime
Made by raindrops
Running down the window pane
With faces staring back at faces.
Click-clock, click-clock, click-clock;
&n
bsp; Going past, going past, going far past;
Going fast; going fast, going very fast.
Screech of metal braking metal,
The whispered whoosh of pneumatic doors
And the tiles and tannoy of arrival.
YOUTH’S GOOD YEARS ARE STOLEN….
Youth’s good years are stolen, never given.
They seem, in hindsight, to have never been
and looking back are nowhere to be seen
for lives, inexorably, are driven
to where our pasts and futures are riven
into two. On one side Youth’s guileless green
and on the other Age’s less than clean
experiences which souls need shriven.
True forgiveness is not easily found.
It must be plucked from cunning and untruth
while they in turn keep men to sin well bound
in chains and bindings woven in their youth.
They could have changed, they could have disengaged,
embracing peace and love when young blood raged.
PART V
FRIENDS AND FEELINGS
This poem, The Box, is about a siren used in our town to call the volunteer firemen when a fire was reported. It was an old World War II air-raid siren and it was located on top of a wall about twelve feet high and directly across the street from the front of our house and about level with my bedroom window. Jack Connolly was a local carpenter and an undertaker. He made his own coffins with remarkable craftsmanship. He also did work for the local town council and I recall him making a sort of shelter to house the siren. It was a lovely piece of work.
I was terrified of the siren and when it went off – often in the middle of the night – I would lie petrified, totally unable to move and only barely able to breathe, in my bed. Sometimes the siren would die out only to start again and again.
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