ABOUT SINGING
An unsung land is a dead land
Forget the song
And the land will surely die.
Our forebears, though mostly illiterate,
Made music that can still make us cry
Musical phrases, like a map reference,
And the land read as a musical score
Where singing the land
Has the crowd calling out for more.
The song couplets stretch across tectonic plates
Just like mountains stretch across continents
And someone waving as we pass through endless gates.
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Pale sand, red rock, burning fire
Everything your heart may desire
Mapping the music
to which everything transcends
This is where the story begins not ends.
Religion, pagan or Christian
Permeating everything, blending,
People sympathetic and synthetic,
Careless and unknowing of secular beginning
Or religious ending.
All the colours of the rainbow
Dressed in human clothing
Aisling, dreang, radharc
And the gift of seeing what isn’t there
When the songs are left unsung
Who is then left to care?
poems
DEAD POETS SOCIETY
POETIC LICENCE
Dead poets come in all shapes and sizes
Poetic licence reigns in my head
I have my TV, but no TV licence
Could I use my poetic licence instead?
CAFE KNITTING
CAFE KNITTING
In the cafe, sitting
Sipping coffee, knitting
One purl, one plain.
Six women, three men
One man gets up,
gathers his stuff,
And leaves with this refrain;
‘We must do this again’
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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…’
BERTHA – BIG GIRL’S BLOUSE
Hey Bertha, you big girl’s blouse, we have been hearing all week about how you’re coming to blow all our houses down, so where’s all your puff? I’ve heard more wind after a feed in the local curry house, and as for rain, well it’s hardly damped down the summer dust. Mind you, the build-up has come mainly from the BBC crap weather service who couldn’t forecast the result of todays charity shield match tomorrow. Here I was, looking for a halfway decent gale that might uproot a few trees and smash a few bus-shelters, as well as enlarge a few potholes, but no, nothing is happening again.
Ah Bertha, where is thy sting-a-ling-a-ling!
IN PRAISE OF BLACK CATS
IN PRAISE OF BLACK CATS
In this selfie world of the self-obsessed
Black cats are classed as badly dressed
Black cats are very polite
And only speak when they are spoken to
Black cats sometimes lick your nose at first light
And look pleased when they have awoken you
Black cats smile all the time
Black cats never whinge or whine
The colour of their fur does not define them
Any more than my skin colour defines me or mine
This is colour prejudice under a different name
So black moggies of the world unite.
You don’t have to take this ‘selfie’ shite.
NEXT STOP PENGUIN ISLAND
NEXT STOP PENGUIN ISLAND
Whooshing through subterrania
In their rattley chariot
The penguin hordes
Huddle together for comfort
Fearful of eye-contact
They concentrate on
The darkness flashing by
And tumble periodically
From the opened hatches
Where stocks are just
As swiftly replenished
By others seeking carriage
To Penguin Island
DUNGENESS
DUNGENESS
Boats that belong to better days
Mingle with iron flotsam
Washed ashore on a sea of shingle
Fishermen’s shacks sit like pygmies
In the shadow of the power station
Their colourful facades
Browbeaten by nature’s extremes
A stone garden sprouts incongruously
Beside one such dwelling;
It does not bloom in spring
But neither will it die when winter comes
BAD DREAM
BAD DREAM
Maybe it was a dream I once had
This part of Ireland with no lights on
A place where strangers
Looked over the border
With razor-blade eyes
Where tall trees swayed South
From one vast plantation
And bowler-hatted drum-bangers
Stomped the streets like toy soldiers.
A game – perhaps that was it;
Where the lowest common denominator
Was religion…or the lack of it.
AMERICAN FOOTBALL
Harold pinter wrote the following poem as a comment on the Gulf War and the USA involvement in it.
It was rejected for publication by the Independent, the Observer, the Guardian (on the grounds it was ‘a family newspaper’), the New York Review of Books and the London Review of Books. The last named, in particular, aroused Pinter’s ire by accompanying rejection with the assurance that the poem had ‘considerable force’ and that it shared the author’s views on the United States.
Harold says; ‘I started to write this poem on the plane going to the Edinburgh Festival in August 1991. I had a rough draft by the time we landed in Edinburgh. It sprang from the triumphalism, the machismo, the victory parade, that were very much in evidence at the time. So that is the reason for “We blew the shit out of them.”‘ Most editors used the words ‘obscene’ justify its non-publication. But that is the whole point:This poem uses obscene words to describe obscene acts and obscene attitudes.’
I GUESS NOT MUCH HAS CHANGED SINCE PINTER WROTE IT IN 1991
AMERICAN FOOTBALL
Hallelullah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!
Hallelullah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.
Praise the Lord for all good things.
We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.
We did it.
Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.
My Writing Life 