Personal Helicon
As a child, they could not keep me from wells And old pumps with buckets and windlasses. I loved the dark drop, the trapped sky, the smells Of waterweed, fungus and dank moss. One,
The Harvest Bow
As you plaited the harvest bow You implicated the mellowed silence in you In wheat that does not rust But brightens as it tightens twist by twist Into a knowable corona, A throwaway love-knot
Death Of A Naturalist
All year the flax-dam festered in the heart Of the townland; green and heavy headed Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods. Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun. Bubbles gargled delicately,
The Perch
Perch on their water perch hung in the clear Bann River Near the clay bank in alder dapple and waver, Perch they called ‘grunts’, little flood-slubs, runty and ready, I saw and I see
Postscript
And some time make the time to drive out west Into County Clare, along the Flaggy Shore, In September or October, when the wind And the light are working off each other So that
Docker
There, in the corner, staring at his drink. The cap juts like a gantry’s crossbeam, Cowling plated forehead and sledgehead jaw. Speech is clamped in the lips’ vice. That fist would drop a hammer
The Tollund Man
I Some day I will go to Aarhus To see his peat-brown head, The mild pods of his eye-lids, His pointed skin cap. In the flat country near by Where they dug him out,
From The Frontier Of Writing
The tightness and the nilness round that space When the car stops in the road, the troops inspect Its make and number and, as one bends his face Towards your window, you catch sight
Keeping Going
The piper coming from far away is you With a whitewash brush for a sporran Wobbling round you, a kitchen chair Upside down on your shoulder, your right arm Pretending to tuck the bag
The Early Purges
I was six when I first saw kittens drown. Dan Taggart pitched them, ‘the scraggy wee shits’, Into a bucket; a frail metal sound, Soft paws scraping like mad. But their tiny din Was
Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication
1. Sunlight There was a sunlit absence. The helmeted pump in the yard Heated its iron, Water honeyed In the slung bucket And the sun stood Like a griddle cooling Against the wall Of
Act of Union
I To-night, a first movement, a pulse, As if the rain in bogland gathered head To slip and flood: a bog-burst, A gash breaking open the ferny bed. Your back is a firm line
Rite of Spring
So winter closed its fist And got it stuck in the pump. The plunger froze up a lump In its throat, ice founding itself Upon iron. The handle Paralysed at an angle. Then the
Lovers on Aran
The timeless waves, bright, sifting, broken glass, Came dazzling around, into the rocks, Came glinting, sifting from the Americas To posess Aran. Or did Aran rush To throw wide arms of rock around a
Bogland
for T. P. Flanagan We have no prairies To slice a big sun at evening Everywhere the eye concedes to Encrouching horizon, Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye Of a tarn. Our unfenced country