Elegy for Sarah

Born under the pagan ring

where cold sun radiates

over the rough, spilling waters of Lough Swilly,

where the Earls exiled from Ulster sailed

for Europe, as a girl you watched the stormy shore,

in the cold air that blew down from Scalp.

Three times I climbed the Celtic mount,

searched the hills for your place of birth

lost in the ridges and rumours of mountains,

the sudden streams. 

Through the rusty heather,

wind blows clearly as your voice. 

To the pagan ring of Grianan, I climbed and looked

down on the border to the lumbering of war machinery.

I search now for you

along those Irish border slopes

where once you, a Catholic woman

in a house of Protestant men,

waited for grandfather

to see his bicycle with the miner's lamp

wind slowly down the crossing.

Grandmother, Sarah, white light falls across the mountain

through the clouds and the shadow of your picture.

I see you again on a windy day as a girl scrambling

over the waving heather on Grianan's flanks.

You were never younger than grandmother,

yet in the oval photograph with two sons

on your knee, you are a heroine

in a Dickens novel, or from the silent screen.

Note: This poem was published in Foreign National (Agawa Press, 1993) and Selected Poems (Guernica Editions, 2007).

Resonance

Sometimes all I have to do

is close my eyes

to remember the past.

The sound of the sea,

the way the waves crash on the rocks,

the sky turning dark, the curlews calling out

to each other over the distant white caps,

the moon shining over the North Sea.

I can see my father standing on the turret

with me

and we begin the slow descent

down to the moat, out of the small door

where an old wise man,

the keeper of the castle

stands.

He holds in one hand a small red horseshoe

with the other he draws a small metal ball.

“Watch this “

The silver ball flies to the horseshoe.

“That’s magic”

His eyes are smiling.   

II

Sometimes, I only have to close my eyes to

hear the power of my thoughts,

to watch my mind think how

the things are interconnected.

I remember as a five year old this early Sunday

standing on the tracks

of the railway crossing with my father

waiting for the train to Belfast

and feeling a warm mist, steaming

through the woody smell of the ties,

the oil glowing in blue and purple splotches

mixed with the scent of the sea.

The tracks seem to curve toward the horizon

following the shape of the hills

like a strange curve of destiny

going toward a waiting life.

Three Houses

Near this country’s border

a white road winds among green hills.

A cottage is joined to a larger house.

The gardener digs his plot

ravens caw to crude gods,

water from a rusty pipe

bubbles beneath rose blown petals.

On the hilltop

the surgeon’s house is quiet

beyond the trees and holly leaves.

One night on the Antrim Road

his son shot dead from a speeding car,

the stream cutting through the still glen.

Inside an abandoned house

curtains decay on broken frames,

whiskey moulders in boxes marked by royal lions,

a faded calendar hangs from before the war,

“Who’s coming around the bend?”

Only two cyclists and a whistling boy,

human cries echoing in the wind.

This poem was published in The Fiddlehead and in my book Blue Riders.

Irish Spring

There are certain images that remain:

the memory of walking with my uncle and father

along a chalky road somewhere in Ireland,

the sound of water falling

through rocks, running

into a stream.  It is the song of a singer

whose words I do not know.

We stop, climb down

a bank, and sip from the rusty pipe.

I smell the minerals in the water.

It is the clearest, coldest water I have ever tasted.

I watch my uncle, and then my father,

drink.  The thirst and the heat vanish.

We are alone in the lighted shadows

of the trees, where the wind stirs.

I listen to the stream of the earth,

the voice of the spring

becoming my own.

This poem was published in Reading the Water (Black Moss 2008).

The Last Visit to My Father

Would you recognize me?

It has been months since I’ve seen you.

You don’t look directly at me.

When I ask you,

“Who am I?”

you look distracted

reach into your thoughts

but can’t come up with an answer.

“I haven’t a clue . . . Herman?”

I show you my book.

“When did you write that?”

A flicker of recognition in your eyes,

then your attention leaves.

My sister, Ellie, tries to prod your memory

with big band era songs and family photos,

but you seem locked in your private space

uttering phrases that are hard to hear,

that only have significance to you.

In the sunset room you look at the old home movies

of the five brothers’ reunion in Donegal.

Your attention is drawn to scenes you have filmed:

the grey house, the haggard cliffs,

the long brown beaches.

These are distantly familiar to you

in a life that once was your Ireland.

You try to put it into some whole

piece by fractured piece

but your words are lost

in the crash of the surf and

the jangled currents of your memory.

Just before our imminent departure,

and perhaps sensing our leaving,

you suddenly turn to me

for the first time in the afternoon,

look deeply into my eyes, and say,

“Is that you Laurence?”

This poem was published in Personal Encounters (Black Moss Press, 2014).