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POETRY I |
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Window
The green bird in the lemon tree
Sings of morning
The yellow bird in the cactus
Sings of light
The dark bird in the rose bush
Sings of evening.
Vincent Woods
Proofs
In memory of Seán Dunne
1
Whenever the pages of my essay dropped
your name, I converted 'is' to 'was'.
You had lost your present tense, your future,
between my first and second proofs.
11
Everything reverberates after a death.
The silence on the day you died
(your silence; it was your subject)
was borne along shock waves for miles.
111
That silence multiplies and grows,
like the gap between our ages:
two years already stretching to three
- you whom I counted on as a contemporary.
Dennis O'Driscoll
In His Own Image
He curls into a city doorway,
his night-home refrigerator packing-cases,
his mattress last month's newspapers;
the clattering of footsteps past him has grown less,
chocolate wrappers whip in the wind and a can
dances passionately in the gutter;
shaven-headed and unshaven, he is a gathering
of man-stench and garbage-smells,
his eyes are dried-out seeds and you look
quickly away; sometime in the night one hand
will fall heavily out along the pavement, palm
upward to the stars, fingers bent so you can see
the perfect quarter-moons of his fingernails,
the life-line like a contour-map of the sky;
unlovable, abdication, God's image,
his abhorred body is the sheen on glass
that turns the curious aside to where we stand,
immersed in self as in lambs-wool coats, certain
of our place in the world, our destination.
John F Deane
Ladies Waiting Room, Thurles Station
Cool as a milk churn, bare as a mountain field,
A smoulder of sods in the grate, that winter scent -
Before I came to know her, this room did; the chair,
The butter-coloured walls, the grey wainscotting. Her
Coty powder perfumed its air for an hour -
A voice complains outside; a delay at the Junction -
And Blackie neighs in the station-yard as my ghostly
Grandfather gives him the nod. Now they've gone.
She was a girl in a red coat going back to Dublin.
Some stranger maybe combing her hair half-saw
That precious face in the mirror and remarked
The train was late. My mother, I imagine, agreed;
Politely, absently, as she often did...Briefly, I am she.
But what else she said, or really thought, is lost to me.
Anne Haverty
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A Tigress is...
Wood,Yang
(for Anna Harris)
A tigress is a girl who breakfasts
in your house without eating you.
A tigress is a girl whose first nakedness
is the perfection of her shoulders quaking your heart.
A tigress is a girl with class
as sharp as gentleness touching you.
A tigress is a girl with kisses
like chinese tortures, scorching you.
A tigress is a girl with hair as russet
as the walnut scent which lulls you.
A tigress is a girl with eyes
as dark as dreamless sleep enshrouding you.
A tigress is a girl who licks up
all your purring like milk, before leaving you.
A tigress is a girl whose image
echoes in your head like a roar affrighting you.
A tigress is a girl who is camouflaged
in the jungle of her own emotions, eluding you.
Pat Cotter
Krank
The world is running mad in every direction.
It is quicksilver, shattered, here, here, here, here,
All over the floor. Go on, hurtle after it,
Chase it, dear Paul. But I choose to follow
Only such fragments as I can easily catch,
I catch them, I keep them such time as I choose,
Then roll them away down and follow another.
Is that philosophy? It is a reason, anyway,
Why I am content to hold such a disgusting lodging-house,
And why I'd be content to get you and your bombs out of it.
From the "The Waters of Babylon" by John Arden. It is
the self-justification of a sort of criminal called KRANK,
a Polish exile unwillingly involved with various political
horrors in London.
The Spider
The spider inhabits
the last unlit corners
a few hurried steps from turmoil.
It puts out one foot to test the waters
and you see a shadow glide
over the wall, just there, an inch above the skirting -
like a black vanishing point -
and disappear into the funereal
darkness behind the fridge,
for dark is its element and sinister
its work, its march funebre
along the rope drawn
from its own heart
all the way to the abyss.
The spider has been there and back often
waving its eight legs to an inaudible
inner music and in the place of nothing
behold - a dusty grey star
loose ends hooked over the mildewed
branches of a rosebush in October
or straying towards the North
shaky as a compass needle. If
the spider performs feats of hour-long
motionless cliff-hanging, or bridging the void
with silk, it's as nothing
compared to its love of geometry. It gives not an inch
on radius even if carried too far
by its hunger for order
which suspends it between two rafters
at the exact ratio of 4/2=10/5.
Having seen enough of the world
it weaves nooses for its prey, lace traps, chiffon
shrouds spread all over the box hedge,
in the end it climbs into its dark nest
folds its symmetrical legs (4 :1: 4).
and dies the lightest death.
Eva Bourke
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