PECKER DUNNE – LAST OF THE TRAVELLERS
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WAKING EARLY SUNDAY MORNING by Robert Lowell
This is a great poem.
WAKING EARLY SUNDAY MORNING by Robert Lowell
O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.
Stop, back off. The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy –
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time’s hoard before the day’s begun!
Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill.
Look up and see the harbor fill:
business as usual in eclipse
goes down to the sea in ships –
wake of refuse, dacron rope,
bound for Bermuda or Good Hope,
all bright before the morning watch
the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch.
I watch a glass of water wet
with a fine fuzz of icy sweat,
silvery colors touched with sky,
serene in their neutrality –
yet if I shift, or change my mood,
I see some object made of wood,
background behind it of brown grain,
to darken it, but not to stain.
O that the spirit could remain
tinged but untarnished by its strain!
Better dressed and stacking birch,
or lost with the Faithful at Church –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
And now the new electric bells,
clearly chiming, “Faith of our fathers,”
and now the congregation gathers.
O Bible chopped and crucified
in hymns we hear but do not read,
none of the milder subtleties
of grace or art will sweeten these
stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square –
they sing of peace, and preach despair;
yet they gave darkness some control,
and left a loophole for the soul.
When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.
Hammering military splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor –
little redemption in the mass
liquidations of their brass,
elephant and phalanx moving
with the times and still improving,
when that kingdom hit the crash:
a million foreskins stacked like trash …
Sing softer! But what if a new
diminuendo brings no true
tenderness, only restlessness,
excess, the hunger for success,
sanity or self-deception
fixed and kicked by reckless caution,
while we listen to the bells –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
O to break loose. All life’s grandeur
is something with a girl in summer …
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!
No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life …
Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.
VARIATIONS ON A TURD
VARIATIONS ON A TURD
You see them everywhere these days
Dark mushroom clumps
Sprouting incongruously
From tarmac and concrete
In gutters and gullys
Clustered around lamp posts
And nestled in the roots of trees.
Sometimes they squat
Outside your front gate.
They even thrive on grass!
THE MEANING OF LIFE
THE MEANING OF LIFE
At the forefront of knowledge
Is the edge of uncertainty
Where reality is really
Only a projection of information
At the rim of the universe.
There, black holes loiter with intent.
They seek to break the sacred laws of physics
Which, as everyone knows, state
That information cannot be destroyed.
This is the point of no return.
All the information that ever existed is here
And black holes are held at bay – for now
What is inside is not inside
And what is outside is not outside.
We are merely holographic projections
Rendered flesh at this event horizon.
Asimov, of course, knew this
Way back when computers
Were not ten-a-penny.
He knew the truth, or guessed
That the universe is one vast computer itself
And we are merely its slavish programmers.
Though not living out purposeless existences,
As some believe,
But proving that life does have some meaning:
We are the way for the universe to know itself
JESUS SAVES
I wrote this piece of doggerel whilst watching a boring football game last night
JESUS SAVES
There is no doubt it is a penalty
A trailing leg caught the number nine
And upended him right on the spot.
Jesus shakes his head;
So stupido, our centre half
So bloody stupido.
Jose de Jesuswill be our saviour
He tells himself
Blessing himself three times
Calling on his grandmother, his grandfather,
The Holy Ghost, Castro, Pancho Villa
And all the saints in Christendom.
The penalty taker glares at him
If looks were bullets he would be finito
He is stupido too, he thinks
Smiling his little smile.
He sways this way on jelly legs
Feints that way and flops his arms
The ball is struck, the aim is fine
But Jesus has read the striker’s line
And….oh yes….
Jesus saves – this time
LOVE POEM FROM BONMAHON
LOVE POEM FROM BONMAHON
God in his heaven never bettered this;
Never hit perfection more square-on.
Rugged cliffs lip the strand,
Opening to fields behind,
The Atlantic, white-layered,
Sweeping into the bay,
Its hurry washed-out
By the tug of sand, gently rising,
Before it.
A tangle of marram crowns the dunes,
Tousled, like windswept hair;
Whilst, on the slopes nearby,
A line of white cottages
Vie for prominence with the old church
Yet, it is the call of the waves
That steals most of the aces;
Those riderless white horses
Sweeping relentlessly in,
With their whispering lisps;
‘I love you, please don’t go,
I love you please don’t go’
And I, watching the ebb-tide dragging them back,
Silently mouthing in their wake;
‘She loves me, she loves me not,
She loves me, she loves me not…’
GIGGS BOSUN COLLIDER
GIGGS BOSUN COLLIDER
Yeah, I met Giggs
He was a bosun wasn’t he?
Plying the East India route
Yeah, that’s right
Rebooting the particle smasher he was.
I saw him doing it once;
Not much scope for that kind of malarkey out here
I thought at the time.
And what did the rebooting do?
What did it find?
Nothing that I could see.
Maybe because there was something else on his mind
And now they call it the Bosun Giggs Collider.
Large Haddock Collider, I think you will find
So what happened to Giggs?
Giggs? Oh he disappeared somewhere in the South China Seas.
Now he tells me! Do you mind if I sing?
If I die tonight just bury me
In my favourite yellow patent leather shoes
With a mummified cat and a cone-like hat
‘Cos I’ve got the Giggs Bosun Blues…
FETCHING THE WATER WITH NEDDY
FETCHING THE WATER WITH NEDDY
Where I come from is who I am:
Tangled blackberry bushes
Smoke rising from a solitary chimney
The pine grove in the distance
And Father shouting
“More water in that barrel”
As we bucketed it from our well
To our asses cart,
Creel-less for once.
Other days Neddy would be laden down
With wood from the nearby thicket
Ash trees, young Sally’s, stumps of furze bushes.
Sometimes he hauled sand and gravel
From the quarry at Carroll’s Cross,
Part of Father’s master plan
To build us an outside toilet.
This would mean more water from the well
To feed the tank on its roof,
Unless it rained a lot
Which of course it often did
In our neck of the woods.
EXTRACT FROM ‘LETTERS TO MOTHER AND OTHER DEAD RELATIVES’
OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA
JOHN, BRENDAN & MOTHER
Dear Brendan,
I don’t suppose you ever realised that I helped myself to some of your First Holy Communion money. Dear, trusting Brendan, resplendent in your new suit and your shiny knees, you were more than happy to hand it to me to ‘look after it for you’. This was after the ceremony when the likes of the Mrs Kelly and Mrs Cummins had patted you on the head and told you what a grand little fellow you were, whilst at the same time placing shining half-crowns in you eager little palm. You could see the other ould ones watching like hawks, to see what denomination coin exchanged hands – they wouldn’t give any more, but they certainly wouldn’t give any less. After about ten of them had passed you by, your hair was more tousled and the stack of coins in your fists much bigger – and my eyes more bulged! And while mother was distracted among the shiny perms and shawls I was able to transfer the load to my trouser pocket. What later came out was certainly less than what went in! And I had added to my stack of Johnny Mac Brown comics before the day was out.
You were seven years younger than me, and looked up to me in more ways than one. Well, you were the baby, weren’t you? Always tugging at my kneecaps, looking to be taken places and given things – and giving father a hard time. He was forever chasing you but could never catch you. You were faster than Master McGrath himself. Still he got his own back when you eventually came inside. Even then you crawled under the bed to get away from him. But he had the answer to that tactic too, didn’t he? Prodding away with the broom handle until you were forced to admit defeat.
I missed most of your formative years; you were only eleven years old when I caught the cattle boat to England, and for the next five or six years I caught only occasional glances of you during my spasmodic visits home. You were becoming a young man and I didn’t even notice.
Mind you, I was preoccupied myself during this period; several spells at HM pleasure meant I had other things to occupy my mind. And when that period ended there were other distractions such as getting married, starting a family and being busy with all that entailed. Before I noticed you were twenty-one and living in London yourself.
You got yourself a job working for British Rail and rented our spare room in Harlesden Gardens.
Do you remember that song you used to sing when you had a few jars?
In eighteen hundred and forty one,I put my shocking pink britches on.
The Kilburn railway had just begun, Working on the railway,
The railway, I’m weary of the railway. Oh Brendan works on the railway.
JERUSALEM AND OTHER PLACES
Just back from 10 days in Israel. The whole country is a building site!
My Writing Life 