TRAVELLING THIS HIGHWAY

 Travelling this highway

Places more than distance between us.

As the gap widens

So the empty feeling grows

 

Lovers can’t be choosers, you said

Our meetings timed to fill your empty moments –

As if such transience could ever be enough.

 

He rules you still though love is gone

Dead as the wasp on this window sill

Your heart would race away if you would let it;

Why care a jot what others think?

 

You were never meant for running

I can see that now;

Too much you value to be arranged.

I never believed I could say good bye;

So I didn’t.

 

  

PRISONER

 The ticking clock is silent

Articulating emptiness

Mainspring not busted

Just not required.

Time gulling it over the horizon

Speckled in the distance

The residue left behind

Not worth a light

 

Over some visionary hill

Virtual reality is real enough

More and more scream the worms

Turning every which way but one

More length, more depth

More leisure, more pleasure

More love, more life

Bur mostly more coin

 

Nothing prepares us for this

The hand that held the answers

Trembling now before new idols

Knowledge bootless as experience

New waves have old beginnings

But tired dogs own no snap

It’s the rut we’re stuck in, see?

Slow going forward but no going back

 

Sitting by time’s window

Waiting for the daily rebuff

To come winging by

Sifting little crumbs of comfort

From the embers

Screaming all the way……

 

 

 

            SHE…

            Who coaxed me screaming

            Into the world in ‘46

            When blizzards were raging.

            (Or was it me?)

            Who carried turkeys in her shopping bags

            Suspended on the handlebars of her bicycle

            (going to see the turkey cock)

 

            Who picked blackberries with purple hands

            And topped the full barrels with water

            To increase her payment from the blackberry buyer

            (her pocket money she called it)

 

            Who ate dilisk on June Sundays in Bonmahon Strand

            And washed her feet in the foamy salt water near at hand

            Who grew fat when I was ten

            And  was bed-ridden till grandma came;

            Then the doctor gave here something

            That made her thin again

 

 

 

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 rider-less 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…’