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Two poems Poetry |
Breakfast at The Fisherman's Mission
for Paul Farley and Jacob Polley
And monthly come the poets,
darkly murmuring of ampersands
and the slights of malignant anthologists.
Their shades are impenetrable.
The glare of the spring tide river
is as nothing to them.
Give us they demand cholesterol and grief;
the whole shebang of western culture
congealing in the yellow-orange vortex
of that egg yolk and those beans.
We claim as ours this underworld
whose steam-clad windows intercede
between the cruel sun and us,
as our conscience seeks itself between
the night’s absences
and the morning’s brilliant fret.
We are weary, and we come to you for rest.
Watch them go. Watch them glance across their shoulders
envying our uniforms and lives.
Watch them struggle up the hill of self,
each yearning for that moment
when they'll reach the top
too breathless to pronounce.
Early Philosophy in Donegal
for Richard Kell
This morning I’ve woken
from dreams of mad pilgrimage
to find the roof mumbling in a temperate gale;
to fence-clinging starlings I’ll swear to be
the townland’s transmigrated,
pythagorean dead.
It’s the One and the many again, Richard.
The wind off the Atlantic,
indeterminate and boundless,
is singing its benign mockery of everything:
these improvised field-walls;
these ranch-houses glaring four-square in the sun;
the ten-a-pennny megaliths, and this,
that irksome commentator I,
chirruping from the touchline of the world
as if it ran the show
Let’s drink to our absence then, old friend;
to some last, unguarded lookout of the mind,
its incumbent having volunteered to go.
As these sea-cliffs love the ocean that’s destroying them,
so we, tiny and grandiose, embrace
this air, arms joining round it to construct
a perfect, tenantless O