ISSN 1758-6488
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Two poems Poetry |
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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
