THE TRIBE OF EARTH

PETER MAKEM

For Gráinne and Colm

The introduction to the poems can be viewed by clicking on the 'Links' button.

This web-page contins selctions from my overall four-part collection,The Tribe of Earth. Background to some of these poems is in the index at the end.

THE SESSION.

I knew them in their arriving
At the back door and the gentle
Latch open, the slow feet stall
At the entrance to their gathering.
I remember once I arose a while
To sit with them in their circle
*
And the faces all lit with the rise
Of the hearth fire. No drum
Marked time nor bódhrán beat
Broke the lock on their eyes,
The bow arm pendulum,
And the heart pound of their feet.
*
I watched the piper in his blank stare
And finger flow along the chanter,
Maybe an hour sat by the drone
In shadows of the dancing flame,
Maybe an hour, tune after tune
Until sleep aroused me into dream.
*
But they were gone, the music men
When I awoke to follow them,
The fiddlers gone, the piper gone,
And cold gathered to the ashes,
And cold gathered around their chairs
When I awoke in the empty room.
*
Yet late that day I knew I heard
Their stir of sound again, the cran
And shake, triplet and turn
In the gathering of migrating bird,
Call and circle, wheel and cry
Their wild fling in the sky.
*
Along the headrig of a ploughed acre
Facing north in the north wind
I trail the skies to evening's shore
Until the darkness sets me blind.
And dawn, and day, by day, by dawn,
I'll wait, I'll watch for their return.

TITANIC
(A foreboding of great wars to come.)

From the centre
Of the polar galaxy, her body forms.
Out of the spiral rims,
The immaculate, un-briny stars,
The slow, turning, winding layers
Raises up her arms.
Soon a descending figure
Will touch the arctic crown,
In the long twilight shimmer there
Stand under dusk and dawn.
*
After the forming came,
After she took that form
Followed toward the sounding heard
In rhyme and beat of the shipyard,
Followed the welding spark and flare.
The cast her out, they turned her away
At every rivet thrown and struck
As the great shape, belly and back,
Along the gantry, plate by girder
Raised its triumphant body.
*
Now she turns her head
Toward the watery void,
And on her solemn face,
And on her flowing mantle
A glow as the Aurora Borealis.
The moon is down. It is full darkness,
And she, abiding her worth
Remains motionless until
At the chosen hour
Steps from her place
Out of the mist of Labrador,
And moves south.

AND LET THAT DAY BE DONE.

(The universal longing for liberation from a tyranny.)
And now and then that utter cry
Out of the deep of the daily hell-
How long, how long must be endure-
A cry from the core of body and soul,
And out of the echo of that lament
We settled into our long groan
To let that all be over now,
And let that day be done.
*
We raised our psalm, we raised our song
To shape the deep of the vale of loss,
We plucked the strings of daily grief,
We filled the reeds of hope, of promise.
But the long sigh never left us
Year on year and year again
To let that all be over now,
To let that day be done.
*
And then a touch of the west wind
Began a stirring on the frost,
And the thaw appeared and spread out
In the ever loosening of the east.
And wound by wound began to heal
And scar began to fall
As the shrunken tyrant drained away,
As the flow of freedom covered all.
*
And whether of heaven’s bounty,
Whether a cycle of the world,
Some landing of the turning fates
Some way of things untold,
But let that trauma come no more,
Remain away, forever gone.
And let all that be over now.
And let that day be done.

THE KING OF IRELAND
I met him in a London trench
Digging a route in some development.
I met him full of his heavy work
All that early morning,
And head bowed, and steady rhythm
Labour his way through the hours.
He was the king of Ireland.
He was of a royal line
Lost into some war or battle
In the heart of the Middle Ages,
Lost in a far away dispersal.
And now in his mid-morning break
Sat on the throne of a ditch,
The scepter shovel in his left hand
And five pointed crown of a torn hat.
I watched him stare away
Into the London haze,
I watched the distance in his eyes
And standing up after a while
Lower his head again,
Return to the thousand year-long exile.

COT DEATH
(A friend many years ago told me
how he tried to cope with the tragedy.)

And even though we parted
Before your breath
Could form my name,
*
Even though your head
Never turned toward me
Nor heard the prayer I made
*
All that time ago,
My eyes still follow you,
I watched you grow with all the others
*
Down the years after,
School time and play time,
Departing and coming home
*
I heard your step, your laugh,
And you take your place
Around the table, and stand there
*
In the family photograph.
But watched you grow quiet
From time to time
*
And your smile fall away,
And your dark eyes lower,
Watched you grow quiet
*
As if now and again
You feared that I’d awake some day,
And find you gone.

ACAPUNCTURE
(To purge Ireland and begin again.)
I think of a white haired figure
Bent over Ireland
With their acupuncture needles
In the hood of the left hand.
I watch slow bony fingers
Insert into a drumlin col
Between Armagh and Monaghan,
And raising a head and lowering,
Implant, slowly, deeply
Into joints of rock and bog. Then
In the tongue of the Bann
Entering Lough Neagh
Pierce firmly throatward,
Needles set along the Boyne,
A needle entered in Kinsale
And one deep at Ferrycarrig.
Again I watch the bony fingers aim
Poised above Slieve Gullion
Between the Ring and mountain,
And all day worked away,
All night under the moon
And out of the dawn hour’s entry
Oak came and beech and hazel,
Ash and sycamore and elm
Filling hollow, crowding hill,
And away at the edge of the land
At the far off ocean side,
A rough sailing boat
Smaller and smaller there
Departing on the Foyle tide.

THE JOTTER
I returned to some old verse
In the middle pages of a jotter
About a lover and his lass
I had written there years before,
*
And after staring for a time
Ringed words to make a change,
Soften rhythm, soften rhyme,
Pluck, stitch, re arrange.
*
I read aloud and re read
The lines of my amendment,
But old words raised their head,
And jarred there, and broke my chant,
*
And noun recoiled and drew in
Its adjectives around it
As verb and preposition
Soured to my edit.
*
And when I went to read again
I found a fractured couplet,
And fresh lines broken down,
And fresh words thrown about.
*
I pulled and probed their clinging
To part one from the other,
The more I forced the editing,
The tighter clung together.
*
I stopped, erased my pencil scars,
Set the jotter in its place
And left them there, old lovers,
In their newly locked embrace.

DEATH OF EDEN
(The self-destruction of the world)
Plenty and poor fall in each other’s arm.
Side by side spiral, limb crossed on crossed limb.
The soft breeze now gone to gale, the young stream
A wrath of torrent. And yet the alarm
Was clear, known in deep of day, deep of dream
As all around the indifferent calm
Voices from loud and from whispering lips
Spoke cataclysm, spoke apocalypse.
*
They were false who preached to us in these times
That wisdom would rise and be the champion
Of a coming age. They were false whose rhymes
Brandished new worlds, new ways against the drone
Of custom, they and their novel themes
Forgot the sheer frailty of reason,
That tomorrow is a mere invader
Come to disturb the passion of the hour.
*
How many million deaths and risings came
To shape, to mould each creature to their glow,
Mould them out of the purifying flame?
That bonding of the ages shaped into
Their final presence, to the final form,
Each now posing proud in their blissful flow,
The perfect image of their vast journey,
The perfect image of that destiny.
*
Truth was their quest. Beauty the journey’s end.
The prophets and the mystics spoke their call,
They spoke ways that nature alone command-
Glory beyond the ethereal chisel
Of Michaelangelo, a flare beyond
The dawn-lit dark of Rembrandt, the shell-
Risen Venus in her glory. And yet,
All this exterminate without a thought.
*
Maybe this is the final civil war.
Maybe now our hidden darkness reveal
Its full destruction, hide itself no more.
Too far gone to turn, too close the bell’s toll.
We have let the rot take root. Scar by scar
We killed the jungle lungs, raised the sea’s swell,
We awoke the polar sleep, rained the floods,
Brought the Sahara to the emerald glades.
*
And so our ever watchful moon looks on,
She from whose early touch life here first stirred,
And mother earth in full lamentation,
The old cries unheeded, the prophets dead,
The great pilgrimage of evolution,
That holy, blesséd journey now betrayed.
And Eden’s garden empties once again.
And rhymes arise speaking of redemption.

THE HEALING
(Confronting the loss, facing east, as the
direct route to healing.)
I watched you facing the lowering west
As twilight waited on the rims of day.
I watched the evening pilgrimage,
You come and stand in solemn stare
At the distant parting of the dusk,
And a lone star come out to scout
And others follow, and fill the night.
And then one day you were not there.
I heard you’d turned, you moved away
And faced into the unknown land,
Faced eastward into the gloom,
And step by slow step entered there.
I heard that close to midnight
The dark had filled you to the core,
The dark had clotted, had set hard
Around all hope and plead and prayer
As you lowered there into the loss.
You lowered into the abyss.
That age went on. And on again.
The day not soften. Sleep not sooth.
But then, I heard that an owl’s eye
Had shaped a form in the formless void,
I heard of a brightening gathering
Where no warning told the hour
And a voice soft as a move of leaves
As one who never spoke before
Shape your name, shape your name,
And say in slow and gentle tone-

' That dawn of old will not again
Spread its light on your waking eye,

But day is here, and day is come
Out of the dark that held your hand,

And the one you were, you are no more.
And the one you are, you ever were.’

THE BALLAD SINGER
And they knew her hour had come.
The change of face, the far off look,
Knew the song was gathering, the song
Now in full term, ready to be born.
And all settled into its place
As the long inhale readied her poise,
As the melody began its journey
In a warm and measured tone.
And climbing into a middle verse
The voice grew solemn, agitated
Into the full vibrato of the tone,
Into the lingering of the highest note
Held there in the roof of her range,
And the chasm of the locked eyes,
The sway of head, the gripping hands
Shaped all the dreaming ever dreamt,
All the thinking ever thought,
There, in the core of that lament.
Verse on verse went on. And now
Into the homeward way,
Softer, gentler, her opened eyes
Still distant, moved into the last line
Holding on to the last note
Before finally letting it go.
And one by one all those around her
Loosened from their trance,
And she, moving out of their way
Went off to boil the kettle, make the tae.

GOOD FRIDAY SONNET
And Plato Hume came brandishing the scroll,
The guns gone, all gathered under his stare
For the second coming of Sunningdale,
All ready with the people’s signature

Then Aristotle Mallon cleared his throat.
‘But how will this all flourish on the ground,
That bread and butter, daily grind and grit
Spread its wings over any other bond’?

Yet as he spoke, higher voices raced loud
That flag and emblem stay their mystic flair,
That the poll be destiny’s new abode
And ‘Queen and Country’ still the cry, the prayer.

And the guardians of the pact nodded ‘Yes’.
From that hour, all locked in tribal impasse.

FAREWELL AUL’ HEART
(Written in the local Derrynoose accent, addressing the reality that we never see
or pause to thank the organs that keep us alive into old age.)
Farewell aul’ heart I’ve never seen
Yar batein’ pulsin’ face,
Farewell aul’ lungs, the same to you
An’ the strong way ye run yar race.
Ye wrought away for the four score
In the day’s rise an sinkin,’
Ye wrought away without a stap,
And nivar lucked for thankin.’
*
An’ kidney twins- what can I say,
The pair a ye at your work?
Over the years ye drained away
As much as would fill a lough.
An’ stomach, bowel and miles a’ tubing,
How did ye keep all goin’?
Eighty long labourin’ years
And rarely blocked the flowin.’
*
Farewell aul’ brain, farewell again
Ye kept all yar secrets well.
All the comin’s and goin’s there
Away in the deep a’ the skull.
And you were mine, and mine ye stayed
An sight and hearing all for free,
And all the thoughts and memories-
Ye kept all jist for me.-
*
An’ whinever the odd aul’ pain and ache
Come t’ worry me, slow me down,
You brought yar healing to the sores
An’ fought t’ make me well again.
An’ whin the final ways bruck down
There ye were t’ make yar stand.
Ye’ fought t’ ye could fight no more,
Ye fought t’ the bitter end.
*
Farewell aul’ body I nivar knew
That I was loved so dearly,
I niver knew your sarvant ways
That waited on me hourly,
An’ I nivar knew, an’ I nivar thought
This day would come t’ grieve ye,
For it’s only now I’m tornin’ roun,’
T’ love ye, as ye lave me.

THE DRONE REED

(Dedicated to the memory of my father
Jack Makem, uilleann piper, whom I often
watched making drone reeds for his pipes.)

Solemn as an aborigine
At the distant sight of the Uluru dome,
As an agéd Apache scenting water
In the Arizona drought
His eyes followed a boortree stalk
In a far corner of the garden,
And after a long, long pause
Stepped slow toward it, broke it away
And took it off in a treasured hand.
At home he cut five measured inches
With the freshly sharpened pen-knife,
Striped the bark, bored clear the soft core
In scoopings of a cobbler’s awl,
And in a steady, steady flow of breath
Poised with the same sharpened blade
Made a diagonal cut along the stalk
With the precision of a surgeon’s lance.
Drop by drop after from candle flame
Sealed off the reed ending with red wax
Securing all with a coil of hemp,
And things after left there to settle.
In the early morning following
He fitted the reed into its place,
Strapped on the pipes, elbowed the bellows
And a shriek awoke, a wild, untamed,
Tormented answer. Like a healing blessing
He gently turned the drone pipe until
The howl levelled to a deep hum
In solemn answer to the calling chanter,
And the tune spread out its wings,
The tune spread its wings and soared.

ROÍSÍN DÚBH
(Roísín Dúbh appears out of the slow air
on the uilleann pipes, a mystical affirmation
of Ireland in sound and sight.)

A dawn of drone loudens across the land,
Waves of melody answer, rising clear
As the pipes render their most hallowed sound,
The double reed, the chanter black-wood bore.

And vague female features now fully form
In the tune’s flowing, in the octave bliss
Of that wild soar they flare the dawn’s balm,
Flare the beauty of her eternal face.

Note by slowing note Róisín Dúbh still stares
Into distance, and as the swell of pipes
Nears its last command, a faint smile gathers
At the light’s trembling on her solemn lips.

And the face fades into the fading drone,
Linger there as a shadow, and all gone.

PRAYER OF WORDSWORTH
Lord, thank you for this great fault.
Thank you for this mistake-
The twenty three point five degree tilt
Of the axis of the earth.
Thank you, thank you for this.
All my art is born of there
Out of the cycles of the seasons,
All my verse is weaned of there,
Ways of death and resurrection,
Migrating wing and hoof and fin,
Ways of landing, ways of rising
The ways of the changing winds,
The ways of the lengthening nights,
Of the long, lengthening evenings.
Lord, without this aberration
No lines above Tintern Abbey,
No thoughts come of a Recluse
Nor planning simmer of a Prelude,
No pantheistic spasm of bliss
In the flare of the early daffodil,
No! All a Godless, myth-less place,
All a prayer-less void,
All an artless, barren way,
All a vast monotony.
Thank you Lord for this mighty fault.
Thank you for the solemn mistake.
Thank you for the blesséd tilt.

NEOLITHIC.
(The ancients arrive in Ireland following the departure of the last Ice Age, and display their mystical possession in the great stone structures as moulds of access to their experience of Being.)

All is settled down now. The hills are plush
And grown rich in their deciduous flows,
The beech and ash, the larch and the wild rush
Merge season easily. Snow kisses and goes.

But shortening day broke our fathers’ wander,
A stir of memory drew their eyes to east
To reach out stone by stone in the day’s stare,
Stone by stone follow the passionate quest.

And in the bloom of nightfall under moon
And meteor and under star, memory
Stirred again, flowing from its laden way,
Memory flow to greet the eager dawn.

So day presented night with measured work.
And night lit up the places day made dark.

A POEM OF YEATS
Here W.B.Yeats re assesses his traditional mainstay position regarding the primordial memory of nature as the ultimate source of knowing and inspiration in his threefold method. He now accepts the totally different and deeper notion of the primordial memory of Being. This identifies the dominant human drive as the possession of Being. From the image of the corona of the eclipse, a symbol of this hidden possession, he re- visits the ancient’s motivation regarding the creation of Newgrange, that it was not a mere mathematical alignment regarding the cycles and seasons, but essentially the creation of a mould of access to a universal experience of Being. Newgrange is then presented as the great primordial poem of Ireland, annually flaring its spasm of ecstasy. The following is the poem he would have accordingly written to express all this.

Then what corona does our daylight hide?
What coming moves its dark across a noon
And halo appear at the head’s abode?
T he quiver of cold come, the twilight tension
As bird-song chorus dies, as wings loose intent
And the ? of staring eyes, static head,
The cattle in the field as a stone arrangement
Facing to where their shadows fled.
*
I watched that lunar coming
Darken alive the hidden core
Of knowing’s secret. No more I sing
From my own 'memory of nature'
But from the new aurora strain,
Outside the chorus of my early song,
Beyond the flesh and bone of Darwin,
Beyond the strech of Freud and Jung-
*

For even in my early travels I found
The deepest thoughts that greet
Do not come at thought’s command,
But after thought’s defeat,
A kingdom of mystery so hidden
So ever close, stirred its distant urge
Demanding verse, and so I made return
To the ancients’ early pilgrimage-
*
No mere surge of measuring way
To unite the season and the cycle,
To even flare mid-winter extasy
But the primordial driven call
That tells of the greater belonging
The ancients answered later on
With pyamid and poem and song
They settling by the bend of Boyne,
*
And there with layers of fresh cut rock
Raised and shaped the Newgrange poem,
Rhymed and rhythmed, versed the work,
Following blind as a deep of dream
That from the arousal of those lines
There in the core of that structured way
Five thousand winter solstice dawns
Flared their spasm of ecstasy.
*
Let things settle. The cycles have their day.
Let dawn rise into its harmless noon
And broad daylight its common knowing way.
But the great reminder journeys on
In the stone raisings, the stone reaching,
Things nature intimately stirred awake-
Corona flare at the lunar crossing,
Aurora dance on the vault of dark.

I SPOKE TO DEATH THE OTHER DAY.

I spoke to death the other day and said,
'Then tell me clear. Why? Why destroy our core
Existence, spreading out those wings of dread
On such perfection? Mocker of nature,

Breaker of hope, dark invader, absurd
At every move those billion years and more.
Answer me! Ours was life. You left instead
The white bone, the bare skull, the socket stare.’

‘I know,’ said death, ‘I know that. But listen,
Your glorious life is come of my command.
I am the mould of all. The mould is mine,
Holder of the key, binder of the bond.
I am the raising of all that’s risen.
I am the prophet and the promised land.’

THE FAREWELL
(Requiem for Tommy Makem. August 2007.Dover, New Hampshire.)

Farewell good Tommy
Earth and sky are calling.
Farewell fair and noble friend,
The parting hour
Has tolled its bell,
The parting hour is come
When we must turn
And set you free
Into the arms of eternity.
*
Farewell good friend, farewell.
Your deeds have changed us,
Your days have lived in us
That we must speak the flame they lit,
Our fullest thought, our deepest sigh-
What beat that heart
Will live forever,
What filled that mind
Can never die.
*
Farewell again, farewell.
And even though our heads are down,
Even though our grief is full,
The stirrings in us stir again,
The stirrings in us rise and say-
No dark will come upon you,
As you journey, as you move on,
Through the waters of sunset,
Into the milk of the dawn.

IRELAND OF THE LIGHT.

(The role for Ireland as a world centre in the modern age . See inxdex.)
I speak the Ireland of the Light.
I speak the heart pound of the Four Ages.
From oldest times into these final days
I speak the pilgrim toilers, of all who wrote
And shaped and made their travel
Now watch on a spread of landing wings
The tidings of the fifth age come, reveal
To all the inner, inner deep of things,
And drúm béat múst soúnd agáin,
Ánd the gréat cáll bé heárd agáin,
And óld thíngs bé máde agáin
And óld thíngs bé dóne,
Óld thíngs bé máde agáin,
And óld thíngs bé dóne.
*
I think of Johannes Scotus chanting
His verse across the ninth century.
Though Greek of passion, the Irish soul
At last spilt out, drew west and east
Into its embrace. But in that song
Of the great returning heard the way
Of an older memory, he the final,
Most lauded of that monastic feast.
And there the story moves. Did he know
More than those Boyne ancients knew?
*
I tell the primitive profundity.
I tell the pure unbroken memory
Before the muddy waters
Entered its pristine flow. Those ancestors
Lived free-born in their knowing state,
Lived out the natural mystical
Until the gods of reason sealed their fate.
Another Eden there, another Fall.
And drum beat must sound.
And the great call be heard.
*
The two Greek chieftains in their vast brooding
Sought to trap the passion of their fathers,
One calling down, one raising outward
Gathering all the tuning to their chord.
And yet these verses made no final song,
No pole star turn the night of stars,
No reason span the chasm until that hour
The pipes sounded their octave soar.
That was it. That opened up the way,
Allowed the flow of the hidden artery.
*
That we can never be
A province one again, let us gather
At the lost knowing, the lost thinking
That the ancients found. Let us assemble
To the great transforming melody
Moving wide around it in a ring
And raise sounds there for all to hear
To ready the head for a coming day,
Ready the pen, ready the scroll,
Ready the sails for another journey.
*
All around us much is dying,
All around gone pale, gone bare.
The proud old lands lead out no more,
Have slowed their dance, thinned their song,
But we who healed in far off times
Again bring tidings from the distant rims,
We move again, our thoughts in rhyme,
Re set, re sap, re flow, re bud, re bloom.
Drum beat must sound again,
And the great call be heard again,
And old things be made again
And old things be done.
Old things be made again.
And old things be done.

THAT YOU BE NAMED AMONG THE NAMES
(Written in memory of Armagh city novelist
John O Connor on the occasion of a blue plaque
unveiled in his honour, 20I6)

That you be named among the names,
That you be named to stand with those
Who raised the bounty of their times,
I call down your ready treasure,
I call down your glow of art
To raise applause, to roll the drums,
And you be named and numbered there,
And you be named among the names.
*
We think of all the quiet hours
Your pen moved from page to page
On returning from your wanderings,
Your gathering of the people’s ways,
And think again of the toil on toil
To shape beyond what age can touch
That after you and all are gone,
Your word, your line, your book remain.
*
Then let us say, and say again
That you be named among the names,
And on this chosen hour, this call
Ascend your rightful pedestal.
And you forever light our road,
And shape our longing, fill our dreams,
And you be named where hearts are raised,
And you be named among the names.

CAUSEWAY.
(The Many and the One. A specific mystical
interpretation of the phenomenon.)

Beyond the restless edges
Of the tectonic plates
Antrim’s form is cast and set.
Beyond the fracture lines
That woke up Alp and Himalaya,
The third, the last lava spill
Fulfilled all assertions.
At a place east of Dunluce
Its slowing motion darkened
Into the black clot,
Year on year after year
Cooling in the sun’s heat,
Warm in the cool of the moon.
*
And there, out from the solid depth
Faint sound as chanting came,
An ever loudening chorus
Rising pitch, racing scale
Broke out to its sky
In a final convulsion.
They face toward the ocean
Like seals crowded on a shore,
They face to the horizon
In their hexagonal wait
Century by century
At tidal wash and parting,
The forms of Antrim one by one
Gather back to the bond of dark,
Reappear at the call of dawn.
.

KAVANAGH.

(Patrick Kavanagh longs to be liberated from the harsh tensions of life, the daily responsibilities and expectations of his art and the ongoing lack of acknowledgement. He decides to enter Newgrange on mid winter day the great flare transform his bardic status and dynamic,
and he move in glory among the ancients.)

Weary of the drumlin. Tired of all that.
Weary of verb and noun and rhyming feet
On the lone road. Weary of the bare page,
The waiting pen, the daily, daily siege.

Will no release arrive to end this curse,
Consume this scourge of the soul, verse on verse
Demanding to be born, and strain and sweat
Mating word with word, line to line? And yet

No honour there, no praise, no thanks, no stir
Of heart. But I’ll be soon away, be gone
Toward mid-winter twilight. I'll enter
The ancient’s holy place, entering as one
I and my verse, that we together there
Bond deep, and soar in the flare of the dawn.

THE FEAR.
I have no written evidence that I
Had family before grandparents day,
All my lineage represented by
An entry in the parish registry.

Beyond this, I watch an old woman bent
Across a stick, and at her side a man
Buckled down, both staring outward, both gaunt,
Fix their eyes on me in a steady burn.

Things long gone awoke. Departed guilt came
Again. I waited on some words to flare,
A solemn voice maybe warn or condemn,
But no lips moved, nor no face softened there.

And the fear rise. That stare go on and on.
Features as they spoke before words were born.

MERCATOR
My map of the world hangs in Mercator.
Stretched Siberia, vast Antarctica,
Contracted lands along the equator
At South America and Africa.

Slow light in winter softened the contour
All along the edges of the ocean,
Rising, fading, rising into my stare
In the image of a crucified man.

Those swollen polar extremities fixed
Into the wide meridian drew out
At the center more and more as I watched
Land and ocean exchange the fading light.

But dark always came before I might see
All retract to its globularity.

THE SONG.
(Thinking of the times of the ancestors at this
same place in their humble hard lives,
thinking of hunger, emigration and dispersal.)

By the ditches stitched with whin and broom root
I made return again one winter dawn,
The snowdrop teething, crocus fill my thought.
But no new age redeem those lives again.

Many a year I came to visit there
To tread the acres of their bitter strife,
The dead drills, the dark farewells, the hunger-
Nor music sooth this monument of grief,

No Handel chorus, Verdi Requiem,
The Seasons of Vivaldi, Wagner’s Ring,
Adagios I heard or rousing hymn-
Nothing reach whatever deep was calling,

Until that song appeared, that melody,
That high-pitched rendering of Glenswillee.

I PREACH NO SECOND COMING.
(The dominant human drive presented as the possession of Being.)

I preach no second coming. Tell no wheel
Of the cycles and the gyres- that old song-
Mere tensions, tremblings of an age’s soul.
I speak of the possession of Being.

And now, coming in the clouds of heaven
Prophetic warnings gather in their flare,
That changeless, dreaded drive alive again,
The poise, the face, the fang, the eyes, the stare.

And the first original sin is told,
Spoke in the plight of reason's grim decay,
Its servitude unearthed, its plight revealed-
The slave to the mystical tyranny.

I preach no second coming. I just tell
Of Eden empty. Tell the second Fall.

LAST THINGS
The gravity of age is draining out
Thinking ways that once rendered full delight
In younger times, thought then arousing thought
Before those lovers parted with their lot.

Less wise now being a wiser man, I plant
No flag on any hill and am content
To journey as the eel, to take the flow
As the starling gathering, grown old now,

Full of migration and autumn moorings,
Of things rising to go and falling things,
Full of the valley ways, full of the hill,
Long gentle soundings, long, long cry, long call.

The gravity of age has drawn me there,
Awaiting wings to land with, wings to soar.

WHO SPEAKS THE MYSTIC WRATH
This poem identifies the dominant human drive as the ‘possession of Being,’ the base of all human aspiration, the mystical source of the projections of both good and evil and. why what is termed ‘the rational’ can rarely prevent conflict.
This is is not because of base human instincts or a reign of evil or a will to power or of such as economic and territorial ambition or any of the conventional interpretations of the psychoanalysts or philosophers. The actual dynamic is a mystical phenomenon, that the highest human aspirations are of the possession of Being as above, and where notions of gain and loss are totally transformed. In this sense, what is termed evil and good are of the same mystical origin in a hitherto unidentified layer of human existence. Conflict is identified as ritual.

At dawn the guns’ll bark.
The talking ways have filled their hour.
Last moment pleas, the scurrying work
Of diplomat and clerk are over
And the dam begins its spill,
And the dam walls free the flood.
Maybe only at an old age call
To move along the rows of dead
Might lips tremble, whisper pass-
Oh then? But we were not sober then.
Something set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.
*
It was marked from early times
That reason is a frail companion.
It was spoken how the measured tone
Could not quell the pipes and drums.
Yet no voice brought alive that core
Of bonding- the deepest hatred, deepest pity
In that one flow of blood, boundless tender
Heroic deed, boundless barbarity.
*
Who speaks the mystic wrath,
We the tribe, the tribe of Earth
We possessed beyond the ways
Of all presented intensities?
And tell the mystical as the natural
Risen out of its deepest memory,
Out of the place of drive and fury-
But in the wake of that mystic call
The rising sounds of a ready chorus-
Oh then? But we were not sober then.
Something set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.
*
No more that mask of human nature
Stray it stare. The ancient way is risen.
No milk can cool its boiling core,
No reason heal the blindless passion.
See their features set a hermit’s ecstasy,
See the chasm of the eagle’s eye
As they more and more inhale
The rising incense of their ritual,
*
And war it is. War is all.
The tidal surge is risen,
The tidal surge won’t turn
Until its moon is spent.
Prayers float there, supplication
On the shore-bound swell
And rock and great rock shaken.
After, the seas, the shrunken penitent
Seas far out lap remorse-
Oh then? But we were not sober then.
Something set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass

IRISH PIPERS! KNOW YOUR ART!
(Dedicated to Uilleann piper Tommy Fegan
from Camlough for his life-long promotion
of the instrument in Ireland and abroad.)

Irish pipers! Know your art!
Know the deep of your belonging,
You the chosen one, raised up
To be a prophet of the land.
Irish pipers, know your calling-
Remember that the drones and chanter,
The bag and bellows, regulators
Are come of the stirring of the people
To reach the deeps and distances,
To gather the lost and forgotten,
The tenor drone of the land’s pain,
The base drone of the land’s prayer.
*
Before you enter your melody,
Before the wrist release the harmonies
The inner rhythms must gather there,
The inner memory raise its pulse
Into the bond of the chanter reed,
Into the flesh and bone of the tune
That out of there and risen
In the sudden octave soar
The full sigh of the piping soul,
The full flare of mystic bliss.
Remember. And all then return
To the arms of the drones,
The return from where you’ve been-
Out of the highest arc of the heavens,
Out of the deepest drooth of earth.

CANTICLE OF BIRTH
And we know well that solemn hour,
The crossing, the passing over.
We know, deeper than the deep of blood
The memory of a journey made
Far beyond the stirring of the sap,
That most distant order
Where endings and beginnings touch.
And now as she stands facing east
Moan on moaning rise and rise.
And the pant and the heave is on
As hooves and nose appear
Out of the pain. A quiet falls.
The moments gather, and out of there
A loud throat-full fills the void,
And as echoes follow, rumble away,
The newborn slides out unto the earth.
*
Now she faces to where it lies
Glistening in the dew of birth,
And it raise itself as the sun-flower
Turning to the morning sun,
Move, move toward the mother,
And they touch their heads together,
Intimate murmur, sound to sound,
Separated and returned.

THE MIST IS ON SLIEVE GULLION.
We impose on the mountain and the mountain imposes on us, dramatically so regarding Slieve Gullion and the Ring of Gullion, unique among Irish mountains.The notion of milk refers to life, and that of cloth refers to the individual legendary characters who inhabit this place with the vaious colours of the cloth depicting their individuality.
The mist is on Slieve Gullion,
Morning mist as the break of dawn
Brightens under morning star.
The winds that gather there,
The north wind’s early breath
Is sudden milk, is sudden cloth
When the first stretch of day
Touches the cold, dark body.

The mist is on Slieve Gullion,
Fading mist in the flare of sun
As the cloths in full colour come
Into their blossom, into bloom.
And the memories there spill their tale
Of wild deed and solemn deed,
Harp strum and trumpet call
And bearings for the dead.

But milk and cloth are fading now
As darkness draws the light away,
As night dreams refresh the pillow
To ready for the coming day.
And we watch again from our Ring
In woolen weave, in weave of silk,
The mountain mouths of morning
Feeding at the dawn milk.

YEATS IN PURGATORY
The spirit of WBYeats meets the ancients on the arrival of his remains to Drumcliff churchyard in September 1948. They tell him that his poetic affirmations, the victorious consummation of his life, are now the substance of his purgatory on the journey into paradise. He is told that he must immolate his life's work in the manner of the ritual burning at Eamhain Macha in order to be united with the spirit of Maud Gonne. There are echoes of Dante and Beatrice.

Monochrome November. The church wall
And headstone set with the setting sun.
,Grey flowers line the twilight soil.
The mourners and their prayers are gone.
Now moon and dusk are changing guard
As the dim arms of beech, of oak
Reach out to skies beyond the dead.
Above Ben Bulben, stars awake,
Meteor and meteorite
From dark to dark streak the night.
*
And out of neither dark nor day,
And out of neither void nor place
Voices gather, spread their way,
Voices louden, thin and bass-
‘Yeats! William Butler Yeats!
From these lips of flame we swear
With all that ripens, all that rots,
Your art is not of judgment here,
Your verse is not a life’s array
Come to march a triumphant entry.
*
‘That early hearing as a song-bird sound,
That first awakening, the first command
Of youth’s solemnity stirred your head
To seek a pen, and there she stood
And smiled, and turned, and moved away
Into the mist from where she came.
Human or vision, twilight or full day,
A half awakening or a half dream
You moved at once to step her road,
Left all things behind and followed.
*
‘We watched on you, dream after dream
Where things gathered in the full of night
And told of deeper, wider rhyme
Commanding every line you wrote,
And told beyond your solemn reach,
Beyond the gyres, the cycles’ torch
A pole star shines beyond the pole
Full of the eyes and full of the smile,
And the climb of Dante on the mount,
Virgil gone, Beatrice striding with her saint.
*
‘The Navan Fort appears again.
The dome of the new-built temple comes
As a ring of honour stands attention.
Now evening twilight stirs a low chant
Ever loudening to the moving feet
Ever moving in their circling route.
Close to the base of the temple spire
A strike of flint breaks into flames,
And frenzy of chant, frenzy of fire
Engulf the immaculate monument.’
*
Flame on flame the fires rise
And Yeats’ verse begins to burn.
The light dances on his eyes
As colors flare from verb and noun,
As one by one the pages turn,
One by one the pages perish,
All the sap-full stanzas wane
Curl and shrivel, enter ash.
And ash is all. And the ashes cold.
It is death again. Still. All stilled-
*
As a bloom of lunar dawn
In the void of night, a shape appears.
Coming at the place where death had gone
It moves, brightening in its own light.
Half fire, half form, the steady flares
Allow a vague body to fill the sight,
And all is wild again. All is wilder,
The dancing shade, the rounding face,
Features shaping in a flame’s stir,
Features forming out of the dead verse.

I WILL SET FIRE TO THE ETERNAL HILLS.
(Villanelle)

(How the identification of the Being of beings transforms human thought in all aspirations and disciplines. Maybe also an epitaph for some recent intense Irish singers. )

I will set fire to the eternal hills,
I will strike light where ages roam the dark,
And young voices gather, and old age calls

When I pronounce on early writs and wills.
And I will call all lowered heads awake,
I will set fire to the eternal hills.

And I will white the crows and black the gulls
And hang a red-breast on the rising lark,And young voices gather, and old age calls,

And even if clouds mount the blazing swells
And voices plead with rains to drown my spark
I will set fire to the eternal hills

That old songs and sermons re-tell their tales,
The dusk of scriptures dawn a new born arc,
And young voices gather, and old age calls.

I will set fire to the eternal hills.
I will strike light where ages roam the dark.
And young voices gather, and old age calls.
Iill set fire to the eternal hills.

THE TRY
And the moment appeared to Bennett,
The moment filled his step
That there, out of mine and valley,
Out of dream and song and dream
And the solemn deep of the Arms Park,
There, against the Kiwi masters
In the glow of Slattery and Willie John,
Carmichael, Duckham and Mc Loughlin,
Of Gibson, Bevan, Wilkinson
The great epiphany unfold.
*
And JPR take up the step
As the jig time move into reel,
And Pullin flow, and flare of Dawes,
David dancing into line
Into the ever speeding dance,
Quinnell arrive, and great rhythm,
Great rhythm and throb of feet,
And then- that all might fall away,
Something come to break the charm-
Edwards appear from his abode,
Edwards make the final rhyme
Like a falcon scooping its prey,
Move off beyond mortal touch,
And soar into Ynys afállon.

THEIR FOOTPRINTS ARE FOREVER
(The most ancient footprints carry the permanent
truths of human existence in the experience of the possession and creation of access to Being.)
And step by step they followed
The evening and the morning star
Into their early pilgrimage
Where feet had never trod before,
And settled there in a waiting place
By spring well, by bend of river,
Settled where their footprints led,
The footprints made forever.
*
These are the prints that carried them
To make markings on their cave wall
Shaping with rough pigment there
The ghosts of bird and animal,
And these the steps that brought them
To the deep of mid-winter sun,
With line by line of rough cut rock
Raised their poem of death and dawn.
And there they entered, facing east
‘Till the blinding flare was over,
Standing in footprints where they stood,
The footprints made forever.
*
All these steps rise clear again
From storm and from calamity,
They appear into the centuries
Out of the moon and out of the day,
Along the ditch, along the hedge
From hard land as clover,
On hollow or on brow of hill
Their footprints are forever.
*
And all who gather in that way
To know the passion, sooth the deep
From every age, of every land
Must move along the ancients’ step,
Must follow there in the hallowed bond
That none can break nor sever,
Their footprints guard the road they made,
Their footprints stand forever.

THE PRESENCE.
I thought I heard a voice on Navan Fort
Rise and fall in the twilight wind. I thought
A face appear and fade into the dawn,
The voice settle there in a solemn tone-

‘We are the first of Ulster, we warriorAnd holy ones. We are the first of all
To raise up the deeds of wars and lovers,
Who took the skies’ guide to shape our temple

And flame it to the spirits. Dig no ring
For bone, for artifact, but watch for us
In the call of the rook and the wran’s song,
In the sweat of the dew, the spider’s lace,

Watch for us, watch for us, our scent, our smell
In fresh hazel, water at the dawn well.’

I SPOKE TO DEATH THE OTHER DAY.
I spoke to death the other day and said,
'Then tell me clear. Why? Why destroy our core
Existence, spreading out those wings of dread
On such perfection? Mocker of nature,
Breaker of hope, dark invader, absurd
At every move those billion years and more.
Answer me! Ours was life. You left instead
The white bone, the bare skull, the socket stare.’
‘I know that,’ said death, ‘I know. But listen,
Your glorious life is come of my command.
I am the mould of all. The mould is mine,
Holder of the key, binder of the bond.
I am the raising of all that’s risen.
I am the prophet and the promised land.’

IRELAND OF THE LIGHT.

(See notes at the back)
I speak the Ireland of the Light.
I speak the heart pound of the Four Ages.
From oldest times into these final days
I speak the pilgrim toilers, of all who wrote
And shaped and made their travel
Now watch on a spread of landing wings
The tidings of the fifth age come, reveal
To all the inner, inner deep of things,
And drúm béat múst soúnd agáin,
Ánd the gréat cáll bé heárd agáin,
And óld thíngs bé máde agáin
And óld thíngs bé dóne,
Óld thíngs bé máde agáin,
And óld thíngs bé dóne.

I think of Johannes Scotus chanting
His verse across the ninth century.
Though Greek of passion, the Irish soul
At last spilt out, drew west and east
Into its embrace. But in that song
Of the great returning heard the way
Of an older memory, he the final,
Most lauded of that monastic feast.
And there the story moves. Did he know
More than those Boyne ancients knew?

I tell the primitive profundity.
I tell the pure unbroken memory
Before the muddy waters
Entered its pristine flow. Those ancestors
Lived free-born in their knowing state,
Lived out the natural mystical
Until the gods of reason sealed their fate.
Another Eden there, another Fall.
And drum beat must sound.
And the great call be heard.

The two Greek chieftains in their vast brooding
Sought to trap the passion of their fathers,
One calling down, one raising outward
Gathering all the tuning to their chord.
And yet these verses made no final song,
No pole star turn the night of stars,
No reason span the chasm until that hour
The pipes sounded their octave soar.
That was it. That opened up the way,
Allowed the flow of the hidden artery.

That we can never be
A province one again, let us gather
At the lost knowing, the lost thinking
That the ancients found. Let us assemble
To the great transforming melody
Moving wide around it in a ring
And raise sounds there for all to hear
To ready the head for a coming day,
Ready the pen, ready the scroll,
Ready the sails for another journey.

All around us much is dying,
All around gone pale, gone bare.
The proud old lands lead out no more,
Have slowed their dance, thinned their song,
But we who healed in far off times
Again bring tidings from the distant rims,
We move again, our thoughts in rhyme,
Re set, re sap, re flow, re bud, re bloom.
Drum beat must sound again,
And the great call be heard again,
And old things be made again
And old things be done.
Old things be made again.
And old things be done.

THAT YOU BE NAMED AMONG THE NAMES
(Written in memory of Armagh city novelist John O Connor on the occasion of a blue plaque unveiled in his honour, 20I6)

That you be named among the names,
That you be named to stand with those
Who raised the bounty of their times,
I call down your ready treasure,
I call down your glow of art
To raise applause, to roll the drums,
And you be named and numbered there,
And you be named among the names.

We think of all the quiet hours
Your pen moved from page to page
On returning from your wanderings,
Your gathering of the people’s ways,
And think again of the toil on toil
To shape beyond what age can touch
That after you and all are gone,
Your word, your line, your book remain.

Then let us say, and say again
That you be named among the names,
And on this chosen hour, this call
Ascend your rightful pedestal.
And you forever light our road,
And shape our longing, fill our dreams,
And you be named where hearts are raised,
And you be named among the names.

MOVER OF MOUNTAIN,
TURNER OF GREAT WHEELS.

Fresh ideas on the understanding of what exists and its knowning is celebrated. The reference to the Solvay conference is of the famous 1927 meeting in Brusells of the world's top scentists to disuss the problems raised by quantum theory in the early failed quest for a unified field theory.

1
That single touch broke dawn alive
As Adam’s figure and the Sistine flare.
No twilight eased a scouting move,
No night-full sky the morning star
But an apparition that held intent,
A new pole star turn its firmament .
I stake a freedom more than prison bars,
I bring boiling thinking, toned by verse,
And in this unwintering of landed fears
I have unblocked all clots of impasse.
Then tell it to the valleys, tell the hills
That I have raised and spread and won,
I am a mover of mountain,
I am the turner of great wheels.
2
Dusk and dawn covet the tuning world.
The tilt of earth shares the solar bond.
Old things appear, old things revealed
As night spreads its stars on the sleeping land,
As the intimate tidal touches gather
Under the stare of the lunar mother.
And all is wave and wave. All spiral,
Bond and orbit, all and all of union,
Molecule as planet, particle
As nebulae. Death is a straight line.
Yet motion hides beyond the sense’s spells,
And death is raised past its sensing tension.
I am a mover of mountain.
I am the turner of great wheels.
3
I think on that Solvay conference,
The rage of intellect afflicting the room,
I think of their desperate circumstance
And yet, no bud would bloom, would blossom,
All their pruning toil, the vast probing saga
Would not unite the alpha and the omega.
But they still hammer on. Still full in plight
To name a looser, and the other crowned-
But I am the bringer of a wilder plot,
Of a deep not in their deepest bond,
I rhyme a script beyond their scrolls,
Hum a melody not of their tune,
I am a mover of mountain,
I am the turner of great wheels.
4
And so I make return to the ancients.
I tell again their primitive profundity,
I tell the offering of their monuments,
The triple circles of the pure memory
Before Greeks set thought on its sober state,
Before knowing was blunted by thought.
And the heart commands all philosophies,
And the head returns to art’s lock,
The swells of intellect but ancient cries
Their growth as ivy on the early oak.
And yes, yes, I know them well, all their ways,
The staring eyes, migrating journeys,
I sing afresh their ancient tune,
I know what was already known.
I am a mover of mountain.
I am the turner of great wheels.

SECOND COMING
(The arrival of the last ice age)
Cold winds from the north grew wilder, puckered
The face and flared hair. Loaded bush and tree
Flew comet tail and bent. For long before we
Had heard the whinge of animal and bird.
It is the ice again! It is the ice!
Something has provoked the long peace,
Something has rekindled an old passion,
Swollen, risen out on the horizon.
It is the conqueror again. She tramps
To war again, she marches on, taking
All in her stride, growth and rising, old ramps
And barriers of former battle, ring
And guarded rampart, then piles up and slumps
To silence. That was the second coming.

RESURRECTION
(The birth of the drumlins)
And there they lay, the prone and supine land,
And there the features faded, the bodies
Broken, ground down until all that remained
The granite skulls, the silent centuries.

Even the vague memory of a promise
Had died into that dreamless deep. Even
The final hour of hope had turned its face,
Surrendered to a death of no return.

But then, a twilight touch aroused. Death stirred.
The stillness moved, an ever growing light
Aroused forms and features as they gathered
In the parting dark, in the parting night,

And the drumlin heads forming one by one,
The crowning heads all ready to be born.

THE WORD
(Art is only identified in the Being of art.)

I speak no more of poetic power
Come of the verbal flesh and bone, no more
Of that inheritance. I rise instead
To speak the incarnation of the word.

And now ring verse and chorus with that gong,
The moulds of access, access to being,
The new belonging. The mystic blossom
All freshly come in this risen form.

Then in the matching and the mating call
Of verb and adverb, adjective and noun
This inner core is ripening in its shell
And husk and pod rhyming in the tension

As the flare of trance fills its spaceless spot
Out of the shell of the closing couplet.

HOW DEEP MUST THESE MYSTRIES BE?

How deep, how deep must these mysteries be?
The boundless wrath of brain, year after year
Locked in impasse, in blank intensity,
Thinking struck with age, worn out with wear.

To know! To know! Yet maybe what is there
Is not of the sense’s stern reach at all
That art alone command, that art declare
The core within the pod, within the shell.

Then wings of revelation no longer
Bond only the scriptures, but story, song,
Poem belong to the ripeness of the core,
And the scattered shell raise these lines and sing-

The darkest night most brightens morning glow.
The brightest light throws the darkest shadow.

I PREACH NO SECOND COMING.
This sonnet represents a fresh interpretation of ‘original sin.’

I preach no second coming. Tell no wheel
Of the cycles and the gyres- that old song,
Mere tensions, tremblings of an age’s soul.
I speak of the possession of Being,

Of a coming in the clouds of heaven,
Prophetic warnings gathering in full flare,
That changeless, dreaded drive alive again,
The poise, the face, the fang, the eyes, the stare.

And the new original sin revealed,
Told in the plight of reason's grim decay,
Its servitude unearthed, its plight re-told,
A slave to the mystical tyranny.

I preach no second coming. I just tell
Of Eden empty. Tell the second Fall.




I MET WITH COLLINS IN HIS OLD DAYS
I met with Collins in his old days
Moving in slow steps across the room.
I watched him lower into an armchair
And gather breath, and move his gaze,
And the clear eyes enter a settled stare.
It was late evening. Autumn had come.
Leaf by leaf outside on the windborne trek,
The bare sycamore, and the baring oak.

And there you are, I softly said.
My travel over now. My journey made.
I see you firm on the window scene
Where the early days appear again,
The early days parade their promise,
That turn of head, the firm command, the rise
Of laughter at the end of day
Bring lofty purpose to a people’s journey,

And tell that of all who strode those times
You were the one whose glance
And voice aroused the ancient banquet.
You were the one to stir that old romance,
Those ancient days, full of their deeds and rhymes,
The gentle way, the warrior poise and strut,
You meet the tear of Deirdre with a tear,
And meet the fiery eye of Finn with fire.

But then that rogue arrival. The entry
Of the reign of age. Now under its stare
Soul and body lapse into the disease
As old clarities stall, wilt and wither,
Old stirring ways empty in the dreary day
That nothing now heroic lives or dies-
A tune unknown in the early drafting,
A tune not natural to nature’s song.

But to have gone at the blessed hour.
Gone in the blinding dawn of the deed,
The point where the bud gives birth
To the blossom, to be of there,
The place where deed and death
Embrace. And you slowly raise your head.
And your eyes dampen. I watch a tear
Follow, anoint your cheek and disappear.

Out of the hum of a gathered throng
Now hear the clamor of your name. All those
Who followed the trumpet of a cause,
The millions in their chorus- ‘Raise us! Raise us!
You fresh into your martyr bliss
Raise up our tragedy into song!’
And you inhale the vast beseeching storm.
And breath out a healing breath upon them.

As one still in pining for a long parted
Lover, the distant years move ever closer.
Comrade after comrade, moving there,
Ever fresh of face, head by proud
Head follow into your sleeping time.
And when the early hours come
Your watch begin, watch the twilight brighten,
Watch their golden chariots cross the dawn.

I’d better go. It will soon be dark.
The day is closing on the baring oak.
And the flash of a flame in the hearth fire
Shows sudden shades of features in your prime,
And age returning in the lowering flare,
And breathing rising as a rise of dream.
I’ll leave you there. I’ll gently close the door.
I’ll say good night to you. And say no more.

SELLAFIELD.
We scanned these seas for strangers
In the dawn sun, for foreign boat

Stared into fog, our sleepless ears
Sprung at shoreline sounds, our heart beat

Ready in the still night. Those waters
And their tidal ways lived among us,

Ever there as the night of stars,
And we, full of this, full of song, of verse

Still brood on a strange rhyme of oar,
The whispering of a speeding prow

That even now in our thankful prayer
At war's end, watching new things grow,

Moving out of long dreams
Have not reached "amen" before

Our voices drop, old faces and names
Enter with the prayerful stir,

Old dreading, old despair
In the tide and the wind and rain

Turning us to the conqueror,
Strongbow, Cromwell come again.


ALL WILL BE IN THE HANDS OF ONE.
The hands of one, the hands of one,
And all will be, all will be,
Above the land and above the sea
When night is fallen, day is done,
All be in the hands of one.
*
The emperor of emperors,
The president of presidents,
King of kings and lord of lords,
The chancellor of chancellers
And the premier of premiers,
Commander of all commanders
The banker of all of bankers,
Prince of princes, chieftain of chiefs,
*
And the hands of one, the hands of one,
And all will be, all will be
Above the land and above the sea
When night is fallen, day is done.
All bé in the hands of one.
*
Then yen, yen, and dollar, dollar,
Skekel and rouble, riyal and rand,
Frank and pound, peso and puca,
Krona, guilder, real and rupee.
And kwanza, zloty and Swiss franc,
Yuan and escudo, dram and delase,
And dirham, won, quacha, lev,
Dinar, patacca and yeti-sum-
*
And one, one, the hands of one,
And all will be, all will be,
Above the land and above the sea
When night is fallen, day is done,
All will be and all will be,
All bé in the hands of one.

PARADISE LOST AGAIN

The ready firmament has stayed its bond.
Pole and plough abide the night’s command.
The willing, willing planet, ever faithful,
Turn and turn their inward, outward faces.
But our blue orb! Our paradise bequeathed,
This Eden of proud, proud inheritance
Now stares from desert, turmoil, flame and flood.
We have let the rot take root,
We have closed the senses, pulled the blinds
On the daily, nightly warnings,
The season’s pleas, the wind’s despair,
The intimate touch of tidal presence
Under the stare of the lunar mother.
*
No aurora of second coming
Ascended into its noon, nor cycle
Ripen the blossom of a millennium,
But the old toxic wrath in full flow-
The possession again, the possession.
Maybe there is a prophesy somewhere,
Written, spoken –times of dark upheaval,
Of earth unified into desolation,
Of the full equality of despair.
I think of Eden again. I think of an ice age,
A rush of fresh growth to follow the melt
In old April custom. But the dark arouses.
Dreams awake as night now shackles day,
The hoar frost un-freeze, the frost encrusted
Thorn tooth drip poison in the thaw.

BANNOCKBURN
Because the Lisbon hour was taken
Parkhead is changed forever.
By day, by dark, by morning star
The deed that raised the peerless crown

Spreads its light along the way.
Their names are there, the names are read
They who sailed on fortune's tide,
They who made return in glory-

Gemmell and McNeill and Johnstone,
Craig and Murdoch, Wallace, Auld and Stein,
Fallon Sean and Fallon John and Simpson,
Lennox, Clark and Chambers, all in line.

And who can compare with them
That leader and his home made men,
Who can overcome their fame?
Great as deeds at Bannockburn,

Great as any Scotland sent,
Recall again their do and dare,
Recall the wave on wave defiant,
The surge of that relentless hour.

And time can never take the day,
And time can never take the dawn,
As one by one they fall away,
And one by one they rise again.

I HAVE LIVED THROUGHOUT THIS SURGING TIME
I have lived throughout this surging time
From the horse and plough to Broadband.
I have smelled the burn of hoof on shod,
On wings of web I soared, I sped
Within this sixty year-long drone,
And thought no age made such a span,
None sat so proudly on their throne
Of all the ages known to man.
And the ancients gather on Navan Fort,
And temple pyre, and pounding heart.

I have travelled on this turning land
To hear an old one make their thought
That what I seek can not be found,
Or found, is not what’s sought.
And told again as a passing breath
Tales that came in chorus and verse
As ancient Achilles tortoise path-
The more and more of less and less.
*

I have lived to watch the young grow old,
The dawn brighten and the evening fade.
I have lived to hear new stories told
That rhyme with the old, rhyme their bond,
And lived to know that flowings made
Still leave untouched the deeper flow,
That full of age I still move behind
Stamping horses pulling the plough.
*

So I’ve fled the fields of reason
For the far hills of wild song.
I have said farewell, farewell again
And joined the singing, piping throng,
Man on the spoons and the bodhran girl,
And watched the dancers drum their reel,
Fiddler, harper in full abandon
Far into the night, far into the moon,
As the ancients gather on Navan Fort.
And temple pyre. And pounding heart.

IF THERE BE NO NEW REVELATION
For authentic identity as a nation, Ireland requires to be a center of intellect and art in the image of the monastic age.
i
If there be no new revelation
In vain do the builders build.
If after all that early stand
Of scribe and scholar, chant and gong
A rising shimmer not appear
And out of there, and stepping clear
By lough shore, by random mountain
Figures move across the land
To write down the unwritten,
To sing the great unsung-
In vain has Ireland lived her time
In vain have the voices called,
In vain the dreamer, vain the dream
In vain did the builders build.

ii
The craving is in full spate.
More than at any other hour
The oldest hunger is crying out,
The oldest hunger shaped in stone
Along the bending of the Boyne.
Let our fathers appear again, gather
As twilight slowly sheds its hold,
As twilight dies in the wrath of dawn,
Moving as their soft murmur rises,
Old words there break clear-
‘Bring out the mould, and pour the melt,
And sing alive the waiting land,
And sing of our eternal bond
With the house that the builders built.’

iii
If the world does not sense us,
If the world does not raise an ear
And fin vibrato, wing strum,
Clamor up upon our shore
To whisper pointing out toward us,
Whisper under brightening eyes-
‘These are the ones. Enter here.
These are of oldest wisdom,
These are the new wise-’
In vain and vain the ages’ stir,
Whatever named, whatever willed,
In vain the ice, in vain the fire,
In vain are all the centuries.
In vain did the builders build.

REQUIEM FOR THE ANCIENTS.
The dynamic that led to the creation of Newgrange and all neolithic structures is not understandable outside the authentic resolution of the Being of beings. (The term Being is given a capital letter to distinguish it from a being, from beings, and does not refer to such as a Supreme Being which is a different phenomenon.) Those early moves of the ancients were accordingly not an arbitrary alignment of cycles into a dramatic conjunction projecting immortality or any of the conventional interpretations. They came from the ultimate base of all human drive and action, that is, the factor of the possession of Being which naturally activates the creation of what is termed ‘a mould of access’ to an experience of Being. (See introduction.) This is the underlying factor of all creativity and knowing, the natural mystical experience, the early pure experience of revelation uncontaminated by formal philosophy and presented in the poem as ‘the primitive profundity.’
Such is the base of the rituals, religious beliefs, actions, art, mythology, customs and so on of the ancients and of all ages, that these factors are a manifestation of the deeper phenomenon of the possession of Being as mentioned, and which commands the total reality of human knowing. The notion of the ‘Requiem’ factor refers to the loss of this primitive profundity to the later invasion of western philosophy that eliminated the early knowing reality of the Being of beings. In the poem, projections such as the male oak and female running water are only of this wider dynamic of experience. In a word, all creative human endeavour, all human knowing is a form of a creation of access to Being, the response to the possession of Being, and the mid-winter dawn phenomenon at Newgrange is an ultimate, primordial affirmation of human knowing.
*
And step by step they mounted the shore
As fresh land greeted the briny limbs.
Full of their stare and moving inward
Scanned the unnamed hills and mountains,
The ready lakes and the river water
To settle along a flowing bend,
Settle under a spread of oak.
And soon, in fresh arousals of the new land
As the features called out their names
From the born-again rounded purging,
When old night surgings came in the new sky,
When inherited cycles asserted again,
They now, in their primitive profundity,
In their free-born unblemished knowing
Stirred to a union of heaven and earth
In one great flaring ecstasy.
*
But no mere soar of rapture
At the dawn’s bonding embrace,
No eruption of intellect
At the bliss of this alignment,
Nor spasm of vision
Forming a resurrection from the dead,
But from the earlly pure revelation,
From the direct root of the mind’s deep
Shaped a mould of access
To the passion of what possessed,
That there along a bend of the Boyne
Before the east winds of Greece arrived,
Before the great confusion landed
Raised their monument of human knowing,
The temple to where all thought returns.

I HAVE NOTHING FOR YOUR GRIEF BUT MY SONG
I have nothing for your grief but my song.
I have nothing for your tears
But the towel of my verse,
An old weaving tender born,
An old weave solemn made
Of wanderings, of journey ways.
I spun the drone of the four winds,
I spun yarn from the land’s refrain
In flares of lava, molten run,
And the melt of ice, the drumlin birth,
And gathered, and carried these
And brought all to my loom,
And my song come at the day’s leave,
My song appear, my weave arrive
* .
And verse by verse will follow you.
Whereever you may be will find you
And bring its calming, spread the balm.
And even if it be a parting way,
If one must go, must heed that call,
My song be in their spirit’s travel,
Will watch and guard their grave.
On layers of earth, of fallen leaf
I’ll spread a layer of verse,
And my song come, my song be there,
My song come and cover all.

BEETHOVEN ON HIS DEAFNESS. 1. PARADISE LOST.
As he works on the opening movement of his string quartet opus 131,Beethoven is healed of his deafness by a group of visiting aural experts.

And thank you, thank you for the miracle,
This joyous, joyous sound so kiss, caress-
No more the hammered keys sulk their mute soul
But answer, answer as the early bliss.

And how that darkest night entered my noon!
I, the chosen one of music’s mission,
The new prophet of form and tone struck down
By the givers of the gift, struck, broken.

Did not my pen tremble in that lament!
Now locked into the dungeon of despair
Tear by tear wrote the bitter testament-
Deaf! Deaf! To hear no more. To hear no more.

And now, and now. Thank you again. All praise
To these same heavens in these blesséd days.

BEETHOVEN ON HIS DEAFNESS. 2 PARADISE REGAINED.

But when I made return to my quartet,
My one-three-one, no sought for tones appear,
Like a ship becalmed on its static spot
The music now deaf to the composer.

I had set sound to the hermits’ silence,
Had lit darkness with my new hearing torch,
Had raised chords of the levitation trance,
Found memories beyond the senses reach,

And now belong no more to early ways.
Belong no longer to the old regime,
But that death of mine shaped its fresh contours,
The dying raised the deadness into bloom.

Let me return to there, my one- three- one.
Let me be there. Let me be deaf again.

DAYS OF THE FLAX
They stood and scanned the field before them,
The full ripe waving expanse,
And in a line along the low ditch
Steadied their feet, steadying breath,
Tore into the field with their bare hands.
*
The once blue- blossomed fields
Now offered their ripened bounty,
And full into the pulling, rush bands
Binding the beets, settled into stooks
In ordered lines as a stone arrangement,
*
And the carrying to the flax-hole drowning
Held down with sod and stone, and stench
Of rot fill the land day and night
Until, waist deep in thick dark water,
The throwing out, beet after heavy beet
*
Bourn away across the acres
As fallen bodies on a battlefield,
Lying in their abandonment
Under the drying sun, as the scutch-mill
Waits, ready for the final journey,
*
And the great water-driven wheel
Turn its noisy eager cogs and laths
As out of the mist of the shough dust,
Out of the targing of the tough
A risen linen apparition.
*
The flax pullers stood to attention
And the full ripe waving expanse
Ready in a line along the bottom ditch,
And steady of breath, firm of feet,
Tore into the field with their bare hands.

ON THE HORIZON OF THE CENTURY
On the horizon of the century
The head of Yeats comes. Near his rising stride
Jung’s face turns to Joyce. That’s Picasso,
Poincaré and Einstein side by side,
Planck there, Freud there, Bell there and Bohr, -
Pankhurst, Hodkins, Parks all marching,
Curie there stepping it, Eliot and Tolstoy,
Russell there and Wittgenstein, Woolf, James,
Heidegger and Sartre, Plath, Barth,
Marching it out across the Breague
And onward, onward, mile there after mile,
Left!......................Left! .......................Left!

I stopped them on the Brackley Road.
I waved them down and stood and said-
‘Why have you turned to face the east
When you passed this way to west?
Were you not moving to a journey’s end
To march into a place of triumph,
And why on the hill of Mullyard
Did you make that sudden circling move,
Return your steps to the place of dawn?’
They drew a breath, and a long breath,
And spoke loud as a single voice-

‘We don’t know. We don’t know.
The wild geese, the starling cloud,
And followed there, we followed there,
Nor slowing step, nor sense of loss,
We turned our feet and followed away,
The starling dance and the wild geese.’

‘But before you go’- I said again-
‘Was there not some early marching song
That fired the feet, and did it die
Voice after voice and the steps alone
Begin to louden, steps alone drum away
That all the buds you made for bloom
Had found their blossom wilting there,
A sudden autumn wither the leaf.
So tell it now and tell it plain,
Why did you not keep marching on,
Why the turning, why the turn?

‘We don’t know and we don’t know.
We turned around as straight ahead
And the wild geese, the clouds of starling,
Following flight, and following trance,
Nor slowing step, nor change of beat,
The rhythm of wing and the starling dance.’

And they moved off in their steps again
And marched back across Drumbunion
Up the sloping of Armaghbreague
Steady of feet, steady of feet
In and out of the mist of evening.
Slow twilight was gathering there.
Faint and fainter the marching step.
But on and on, and line by line
They moved across the rim of the hill,
Lower and lower, and all away
Into to the place from where they came,
Left! ...................Left!....................Left!

DE SENECTUTE. (Concerning old age)
Despite early philosophising on the creative meaning of death in the process of nature, the sudden arrival of old age finds the presence of fresh memories activated by age itself. The last line is partly a projection by WB Yeats.

Suddenly I am old. Of a sudden
Things are slowing. Things fail. Do not respond.
Thoughts stir and wander in their new domain
As the slowing limbs shape the speeding mind.

And lines that came with my philosophy-
'The living bond of death in all process'
See all this now absorbed, all drawn away,
Memories awoke by age from their abyss.

Quietly buds of hope, the buds of doubt
Blossom beyond their sap, quiet from this
The wandring stream finds its river, its route
To the tidal call, to the sea's abyss,

Making its way to word and ready theme-
All is the longing, longing for the tomb.

SOMETIMES I LONG TO BE.
Sometimes I long to be
In some Precambrian valley
Under the moon's early face.
Somewhere there look down
And watch her shadow trace
Along the eager dust and stone,
She, moving on the display
Of forming Plough and Milky Way.

Somewhere there, somewhere then
In the barren moonlit valley
Hear fiddlers and piping men,
Hear their reel and slow air
Ever loudening, ever rising free,
This one’s cran, that one's slur,
All the familiar styles
Along the moon filled miles.

And that fresh lunar stare.
The unblemished countenance,
Her full glow across the trance
Of night, hour after hour,
Now moving low, now descend
To touch the sleeping land.
And I break into a prayer.
And I long to be there.

Sometimes I long to be
Among the long departed.
Sometimes, so close, so far,
Draw lowered eye and head
Toward the abyss of galaxy,
To the plough, to the pole star.
And pipes and fiddle rise again,
And dancers in the rising moon.

ODE TO KEATS
Even though there is a philosophical identification of the actual realities of Truth and Beauty and the distinction between them, art provides for a specific union of these as a single phenomenon in that they are not merely the base of each other’s existence, but that the act of truth is the act of beauty and the presence of beauty is an act of truth. It was a forerunner perhaps to ‘Among School Children’ by W B Yeats in the closing line ‘How can we know the dancer from the dance?’ This all actually stems from the reality of truth as the structure of existence in a factor of access to Being, and beauty as the living out of this existence, notably in the rising out of death to create evolutionary process. So the famous lines of Keats in his Ode to a Grecian Urn are accordingly not a mere escapist phrase or convenient position. Poetry, as distinct from philosophy, represents a different mode of direct human knowing to the memory of revelation in the unconscious. It belongs to instinct and intuition in what is sometimes termed ‘the primitive profundity.’ As in Yeats in the same poetic affirmation, the dancer and the dance are one (Dancer-beauty, dance- truth.) He puts it in a question because he is perhaps philosophically unsure of the identities involved. But Keats makes an immense and full blooded, defiant poetic assertion.

And the low drone comes again
Arriving slow below the melody,
At times a chant of no known tongue
This sentry of all speech, all script
That finally spilt its flow of writ
And rhymed it in a moment’s fire-
‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty.’
That’s all we need to know on earth.

*
But truth may stir, truth appear
In a flare of apparition, truth come
Too bright to glance at, yet full voice
In a clear, in a solemn tone-
‘I am the power of all process,
The mode of access to all that lives,
I am the presence of the triple law
Of impasse, adaption and access,
Long set before the Hegel, the Darwin
Entered with their moieties,
Who are but ivy on my walls
Who do not chant to my refrain.
I am the power of all process,
And I am I. And I again.’
*
Beauty will follow. Beauty will rise
Out of its trance, and eyes widen
And a stare follow for full attention
As lips slowly move out of their trance
And breathing swelling to fill a voice-
‘I am the bond of the living truth,
I am the living of the truth
From the source into the ocean mouth,
I, the features on the face of truth,
I the aura, the giver and watcher,
I am the dancer raising the dance,
And I am I. And I am I.

*
But then again the rhyme again,
To tell aloud the consummation
From a deeper reach of art’s embrace
As eye to eye arouse the bliss,
Verses rising to their command
And line by line carried on the wind.
Then let this flaring speed and soar
Across the strictures of philosophy,
And let that marriage greet its altar,
And let that consummation be.

THE PIPER OF FAIR HEAD
(The young piper thought his wife was appearing
to him after her death in response to the plea of
his piping, but it was the lunar dawn.)
And he stood on the prow of Fair Head
As evening twilight gathered the night,
And into the void of star and sea
And a heart stricken beyond healing
Sounded alive the drones and chanter,
Piped into the long lament
That her spirit hear its pleading tones,
That she make appearance to the call.

Sometime after midnight, a faint glow
In the low sky began to brighten
As tears misted his following stare,
As the lunar dawn spread its sheen
Across the sea, ever brighter
Into the haze of his flooded eyes,
And the gasp of desperate piping breath,
And trembling limb, and dance of light
As the tune flared to a sudden stop,
And he sank there, and breathed no more.
And all around him where he lay
Arms embracing the fallen pipes
A bloom of moonlit pipers gathered
From all across the Antrim hills
And circled there, took up the tune,
And piping joined from the Mull and Rathlin
As the great lament filled up the night,
Filled the early shades of daybreak.
And they raised him there, bore him away
Piping into their solemn hour,
Píping ín the fírst of éast,
Píping óut the mórning stár.


VALLELY
This poem commemorates the outstanding contribution of the Armagh Pipers Club to Irish culture over the past half century and is presented here as the third great Armagh affirmation following the monastic School of Armagh (6th-9th century) and the creative age of Archbishop Richard Robinson (1708-1794).
Founded in 1966 by Brian and Eithne Vallely along with Dara and the late Niall, the Armagh Pipers Club has developed over six decades into a centre of excellence for the promotion of Irish traditional music, notably the uilleann pipes, and attended by children and adults from Armagh and seven neighbouring counties.
In the poem, this music now emanating from Armagh re-lives the most early call of the ancients to Eamhain Macha, re-lives the learning drones of the Great School and the Irish monks on the dangerous sea- ward journey to Europe (known as the White Martyrdom.)The music also relates to Robinson’s Observatory and the distant galaxies above Armagh. In general the poem asserts that the uilleann pipes are a specific musical creation to reach the deeps of Irish memory and aspiration.

And then the uilleann pipes sounded.
Out of the long dormant presence
Of the great School of Armagh,
After the solemn age of Robinson,
The drones and chanter flared alive.
Here, at the core of this early place,
From the call that called the ancients
Into their abode at Eamhain Macha,
Out of the echoes of that calling
The reed, the wood, the brass arose.
And now, those melodies come again
Holding the deeps of the land’s soul
From age to age, are come to here,
Are drawn awake again to here,
And that double-reed soar its octave
To the distant skies above Armagh,
Now again,the drone of Greek and Latin
That sounded long in ages gone
Sound again, and the piping rise
As the wild seas, and the parting land
Crest and trough the white martyrdom.
*
Then let us solemnly strap up
That once again we raise again
The purest tones of all our sorrow,
The purest soul of a people’s journey,
P iping as one in this hallowed place
The deepest longings of aspiration.
And the oxter lungs rhyme our pulse,
And jig and reel set the feet on fire,
And the regulators fan the melody,
Piper calling piper in full piping flow,
In full piping surge and swell,
Armagh’s third great affirmation,
Most modern, most ancient of all.

I WANDERED LONELY AS A CLOUD
I wondered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high across the firmament,
When all at once I saw a crowd
A host of untreated excrement,
Into the rivers, into the seas,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle high above Lough Neagh
They stretched in never ending line
Along the sea front of the bay,
Ten thousand saw I at a glance
Tossing their heads in arrogance.

The waves beside them danced but they outdid
The sparkling waves with glee,
A poet could not but be sad
At such a vast effrontery,
I gazed and gazed but little thought
What dreams to me this plight had brought,

For oft when on my couch I doze
In vacant or in pensive mood
They flash upon that inward nose
Which is the lift of rectitude,
And then my heart is filled with thanks,
To dream all night of septic tanks.


----------------------------------------------

Part two
NINETY NINE VARIATIONS ON THE NEW MYSTCIAL THEME

CELTIC TIGER
They have raised their banner
On the mountain,
They have driven out
All that slowed their step,
And now in these new days
Full of fortune, full of pealing bell,
Speak the Elysian Fields,
Speak long of bloom and blossom.
Still and all, as jig and reel
Raise the daily fling
Old solemn heads, motionless,
Watch all eye their script,
Watch us scan the plot-
'Ponder well this early scroll,
The point of ripeness
Is the point of rot'.
April 2003

THE WAVES OF DREAM.
Midnight is close.
The waters of the lough
Calm since the day went down
Sigh in a sigh of breeze.
From east, the lunar dawn
Spreads its silver sheen
And silver waves
Move in the breeze's moan,
The waves of dream,
The waves of dream
Cresting in the risen moon.

AND SO, THEY SAY.
And so, they say,
all math
returns to myth,
all logic
to the mystical.

THE SPACE MEN
And when their engine failed to stop
At the lunar burn back to earth
The mission sped its new way
Through planet path, through asteroid,
And thirty years later, passing Pluto
On the edge of the solar homeland
They moved out into the abyss,
They faced the bound of galaxy
Still upright in their space ship,
Three dead men at the helm.

THE RETURN.
And so I return to Thomas Moore.
Even bereft of the wings of melody,
Even now on the bare roost of verse
A flow of the ages is gathered there,
A flow of the ages is settled there
As a long distil in an oaken vat,
Settled into the dream of the grain,
Settled into the deep of the bone.

APPLE
And then that other mystery-
Did Eve make Adam fall
With an apple only half as sweet
As the apples from Loughgall?

ENGLISHMAN.
I watch from here
That many layered person.
In their speech and movement
Could reach no inner sanctum
So polished with polite demeanor,
Such guarded firmness of the face
As if in hiding from themselves-
Until one moment when tears appeared,
When tears finally broke their banks
At the memory of a fallen comrade.

FINAL YEARS
And even though so old now,
So slow and stiff of limb,
Still, in the lock of their held hands,
In the grip of arthritic knuckle,
In the meeting of their sunken eyes
A full surge of youthful longing,
A full flowing as first love
Arose into their agéd presence,
Breaking out of the shell,
Breaking into a final poise.

THE SLANT
In the slant of a low morning sun
The worn down lettering on the slab
Began to clarify. Clearer and clearer
The revelation followed, line on line
Into names, addresses and dates,
And copied carefully onto a page
Before clarity vanished into noon.

TO AN OLD BARD
And a final thanksgiving.
In your very latter days
You trembled those old thoughts
Out of the last drain of the head,
And slow and careful there
Hour after hour
Shaped their final presence
Into the flesh and bone
Of the word.

TOO BRIGHT TOO SOON
Too bright, too soon
Your star appeared,
Too west the fanning wind,
Too early all the conquering,
Too old before the ageing.
Your dusk is come in broad daylight
Dusk is come to noon.

WHISPERS
And then again remember this-
In ways of bonding or of bonds,
In ways of threat or ways of promise,
Whispers are the loudest sounds.

METAMORPHOSIS
And out of the caterpillar
of philosophy
The moth of verse
flutters its damp wings.

MORNING RUSH.
Then that river of people
Pouring from Connolly Station,
Their faces, their steps full
Of early morning intent,
And there in the deep of all
The factor uniting all features,
The great firm common bond-
Possession. All possessed.

A THOUGHT.
Philosophy
is of the veins.
Poetry
the arteries.

THE GRIEF
And even after forty years, he said,
Even out of long settled times
And her memory far away,
Now and again a wind of grief
Rises around him, as real, as full
As the day they parted,
They day they said farewell.

THREE PHOTOS I YEARN FOR
Three photos I yearn for
Year on year
In black and white or colour,
These three above all,
Plato, Jesus
And Aristotle.

BETWEEN WHISPERS
Between whispers
This is what I heard-
Hate dies, like love,
Unless it’s spooned and stirred.

THE GHOST
And then he finally said-
‘The ghost of Stalin
Somewhere abides
In every ruler’s head.’

THE CALLING
I heard her call his name
Over and over in racing tears,
Begged him not to die on her,
Begged and pleaded him to stay.
But another voice was calling,
A voice she could not hear,
And he slowly turned his head,
Slowly turned his face away
Facing into the other call,
And followed death instead.

THE JOURNEY
O swan upon our gentle water
Where will yóu be in the morning,
Where will yóu be when we rise
Winding through the polar air
Far, far above the ocean,
You who ate our crumb, our morsel,
You who sailed beneath our eyes?
And what is stirring in that head
To make those wings unsettle
Stretching out their fullest span,
And your white shape soar away
And blacken into the dawn?

TO BE OR NOT TO BE ME.
To be or not be me-
Had it been a moment before,
Had it been a moment after,
I who was born would not be born,
Would not even be a void
And someone other, sister, brother
Move forever in my place.

SANDWITCH
And there, like a great rock sandwich
Layers of metamorphic variation,
Igneous and sedimentary
Jutted out into the ocean’s appetite.

YOUR WORDS ARE MILK
Your words are milk
On a boiling gut.
Your words have spilt a balm
Unto this long, long dark,
Have spread a healing flow
Throughout the tormented soul,
They have drawn away that demon,
Driven out that invader-
Away like the snow in the rain,
Away like the moon in the dawn.

THE PRAYER
That was his final prayer
As he sat before the hearth,
Lungs scraping for air
Come of a rattle breath-
‘It was in your distance
I found your closeness.
In your un-answering
I heard your morning song’
And he slumped forward,
And his lips fell apart
As if he died of what he said,
As if he choked on thought.

THE FELLING
Like slow and pained breathing
The cross-cut sawed its way
Through the trunk base,
A great ash tree full of April
As they inched their way
Draw by draw into the living sap.
A hatchet attack slanted the cut
As the weight shifted of a sudden
With a great ripping sound
Splintering the bark and joint
And began a long earthward fall,
Convulsed and trembled a while
And settled. And as they circled it
Up close to where early buds appeared
One of the cutters said-
‘I warned and warned again-
Wait until the tree is winter dead.
But now the memory of June
Will call the greening way in vain.
I warned about the days to come.
I warned against this martyrdom.’

THE DEED.
As a sudden opening of eyes
In the camouflage
Of the ocean bed
A thought appeared to me
And whispered-
‘The word alone has no abode.
The word without the deed is dead.’

ICE AGE
As Donard's head
crowned out
in the breaking ice,

a knife of ocean
cut off Ireland
at the joint of Howth.

LAST SOUND
And what’ll be the last sound
To enter the parting head?
Maybe an old familiar song,
Or piping tune, maybe a prayer,
A door opening, a turning lock,
Maybe a visitor’s gentle voice,
Maybe only a silence broken
By the ticking of a clock.

GHOST
I see a new heavenly light
Appear in the evening east,
The soul of a dead star
A million years after
Its bloated body
Had given up the ghost.

THE MIGRATION.
Then that mystery of migration
Of the wild geese and the caribou,
The starling and the swallow,
The eel and the salmon too.
But nothing of this flow compares
Through nature’s solemn way
As the Irish flight to America
For Saint Patrick’s day.

PRAYER TO THE MOON
(As the source of the origin of life on earth)
O virgin mother of the night
You that stare past the day’s advance,
You that pile up the oceans
And wash the shores of the world,
We watch your pale countenance
Stare in profile at the night’s abyss,
And turn earthward in your full face
As the mother turning to her child.
We all are under your grief.
You know us all, you know us all,
The barren, fertile moon,
The dead moon of life.

DECISION
And what can be done? To turn
And follow down the foe
And vent wrath on their assault
Or hold the rage in place
And tell time to slow and sober
Following an older wisdom
To let things lower their crave,
Following that older way,
Following the line between
The blinded and the brave.

DEATH MASK
I watched her face in death
A look not ever seen
In all the years I'd known her,
I watched throughout an evening
And thought as I looked on
That must have been her stare,
Must have been her countenance
The hour before she was born.

FARMER BACHELOR
He spoke little in verb and noun
In the lonely days around the farm,
Spoke rook, spoke hawk and jackdaw,
And turkey gobble, goose hiss,
Rooster yodel and lamb staccato,
Spoke tuba sow and sucker piccolo,
Flute of owl and mule melodian,
Returning the cattle siren, the hen’s cackle
Murmuring the drum roll of the sheep.
But one morning at the feeding hour
He was not there. The old answering
Did not sound. And as the hearse
Moved its slow, solemn journey
On the third day, no chorus sounded,
But a lone rooster yodel, on and on
Like a church bell, on and on,
Until the hearse was out of sight.

THE WARNING
By a droop of oak at Dooskey
Near an old Clontibret road
I heard it said loud to O’Neill-
“This is no family feud with Bagenal!
These are days of survival!
You need to sound a trumpet call
And ready things for the final kill.
Never mind Bagenal’s daughter!
The final drive! The final slaughter!

ANTI-CLIMAX.
And there we strayed, and there we sat
Where the stream danced its jig and reel,
And summer step and winter step
Followed its rhythm, rhyme and spill.
But she is gone, and far away,
And thank Christ she’ll not be back.
So raise the flute and the pipes and fiddle
And rattle the bodhran with the bone,
And the mornings full of snoring bliss,
And all the evenings wild with craic.

THE QUARTET
Of all the depths ever mined
Into the deepest bore of art,
Into the utter core of the memory-
Of all the mystic affirmations
Ever to reach a page and pen
One solemn entry stands alone,
The dawn of the opening movement
Of opus one three one.

PRAYER OF WORDSWORTH
Lord, thank you for this great fault.
Thank you for this mistake-
The twenty three point five degree tilt
Of the axis of the earth.
Thank you, thank you for this.
And all my art is born of there
Out of the cycles of the seasons,
All my verse is weaned of there,
Ways of death and resurrection,
Migrating wing and hoof and fin,
Ways of landing, ways of rising
The ways of the changing winds,
The ways of the lengthening nights
Ways of the lengthening days,
Lord, without this aberration
No lines above Tintern Abbey,
No thoughts come of a Prelude
Nor planning simmer of a Recluse,
No pantheistic spasm of bliss
In the flare of the early daffodil,
No! All a Godless, myth-less place,
All a prayer-less void,
All an artless, barren way,
All a vast monotony.
Thank you Lord for this mighty fault.
Thank you for the solemn mistake.
Thank you for the blesséd tilt.

THERE IS A DARK
There is a dark
Where the dark
Can be no darker,

That is the hour
The newborn flower
Leaves the bulb.

THE INHERITANCE
For maybe a hundred years
Maybe more, that line of trees
Slanted south in the north wind.
Once, a sapling from there was taken
And planted in a far off hollow
Isolated from its homeland.
It grew into the new surroundings,
It settled into its early youth,
But one April in that windless place,
One morning in that April
Began to bend south.

POMPEII
Those voices locked in the ash-fall,
a hardened shell
of two thousand years
Until the random strike
of an excavator's pick
released their final roars.

THE BLOOM OF HOPE.
Farewell then, and again farewell,
And let these final moments gather.
We spoke of this day after day
Through season following season,
Spoke of time, spoke eternity.
But let the parting moment come
And go your way, and go your way
As I breath deep, and hold the breath,
And touch your cheek, touch your brow,
Close the light upon your face-
But I will meet you in the bloom of hope,
And you be there, and you be there,
And the green buds gathering
Spread their blossom in the dawn embrace.

OMAGH ‘98
It was a time of hymn and psalm,
After the peace was signed and read.
Hope had spread out its balm
And our heavy hearts were lifted.

Who could now doubt that the Lord
Had reached and touched his people,
That heaven had kept its solemn word,
Heaven at last had heard our call,

And the chorus raise its new song-
Farewell to the ways of the bomb.
But we were all wrong.
The worst atrocity was still to come.

THE TENORS.
And then I thought
After a lifetime listening-
Mc Cormack the violin,
Bjorling the viola,
Gigli the French horn,
Pavarotti the trumpet,
Domingo the high cello.
Caruso. The full orchestra.

THE PHILOSOPHER.
By twenty we have worked it out,
By thirty all confirmed.
Forty tells us of a mist
Rising into fifties' fog,
By sixty, map and compass fail,
Seventy we bow our head
Drifting into wind and tide.
At eighty we are back to ten,
Full of fairytale. Amen

I LONG FOR AN IONA
I long for an Iona
In the swells of thought.
I long for a calm un-furrowed place
That the subterranean flow
Seep into lull of the soul.
I long for a coming morning
And all I sought
Waiting like a cold spring well
In the drought,
Stare up at me,
Dripping at the rim.

THE TWO THIEVES
Do not forget us,
We, Dismas and Gesmas,
We too died
That day
On Calvary.
We too were crucified

THE SOLDIER.
I thought of that eighteen year old
Full of fright and innocence
Struck down by a bullet
An hour before the armistice.
I thought of the open wound
As he lasted through that day,
Lasting all through the night,
And moan of prayer and moan of pain,
Hour by slow hour until
A last breath in the breaking light,
And died into the dawn.

THE WAKE
The corpse's face, a half moon
In the candle light
Made its dim reflection
Across the sallow room.
Hour and hour went by
Steady in the night's care
Until the call came
To close the coffin,
And all gathered in a ring
To pray their final prayer
As murmur followed murmur,
And made a soft amen,
And the moon that kept that night alive
Began to lower, to wane,
And the moon that set behind that hill
Will never rise again.

THE FARMER
In the middle of tying corn
At the far end of the field
He suddenly stopped,
He raised his head and shouted-
‘There is no authentic eurika moment
In a scientific discovery,
No point of final explanation,
That all conclusions fall away
Into the chasm of their Being’.

THE RAINBOW
Thoughts
refract,
disperse
as language
out of the prism
of meaning.

PSALM 94.
Recited by so many
Down the prayerful ages
I thought the ninety fourth psalm
Like the iron foot of Peter
Underneath the dome
Thinned away by pilgrim's touch
Had worn down to the single thought
The psalmist spread into verse.

TRANSFIGURATION
Then away on the upper slopes
Falling mist revealed
Contours unseen in normal vision.
I watched a focused hour
At the revelation,
At shapes not known before,
A presence staring firmly out
Until the mist began to fade,
And the vision ended,
And the old clarity returned.
And only the old mountain again.

OFFSPRING.
Drink maddened, the sheets
Torn and torn dress
As he vent his wrath
On her unwillingness.

Years after and the offspring
Growing, I watch, I see
Its timid smile,
The frightened look in its eye.

THE ROSARY
And into her last moments
The fingers nibbled around the beads,
The only motion in her still body.
It was at the third bead
Of the third decade
Of the third mystery
The fingers locked.
All through that wake
She held tight her grip,
All through the final prayers
Past the closing lid,
And took it into the grave.

SECOND MARRIAGE.
I watched them
As they moved as one
On their Ibiza honeymoon
Step by step along the strand,
And in the glow of evening
Sat to face the Med
Hand holding onto hand,
Head touching head.
But then from close by
A rasping scream arose,
A wild female figure entered,
Writhing, raging away
Half dance, half frenzy,
All around their place of bliss,
Tearing her clothes and hair
Throwing things in the air.
A minute of the fury raged.
Then she slowed and slumped away,
Moaning, chanting her grief.
She stared around before she went.
The face of his deceased wife.

MICK O’ CONNELL
The high catch reach of gaelic football,
Supreme, sublime in this Irish affirmation
As the voice of Mc Cormack
Rising into the highest note,
As the octave soar of the uilleann piper.

WATERFALL.
And the unmoving flow of teenage times
Enters a slow twenties drift.
A gentle ripple along the banks
Moves the thirties into forty
And there, a drone from far away
Tunes into the rising melody.
Fifties now a freer flow
To ever deepening nearer drone,
Speeding sixties, speeding seventies
Flare a roar as the racing eighties
Thunder into the night and day,
Thunder into the abyss.

SELF IMAGE
The declared self-image
Of a nation, a people,
Will always be
The exact opposite
To the reality.

THE LAST TUNE.
She asked for the fiddle
One last time, propped up
On her layers of pillow.
She fumbled a grip on the bow
And drew the fiddle tight beside her
Finger after trembling finger
Seeking its place on the neck.
A slow, slow old air awoke
Full of vibrato, full of tone
And eyes shut tight as deep prayer
On and on the tune’s journey.
But as it rose to its highest note
She slumped dead. The falling
Away of the bow arm drew the bow
Down, down slow across the low string
In a long deep note
On and on and fell away.
The fiddle loosened from her grip
And followed after it.

DEEPEST THOUGHT
On returning from the sea and land
in tattered clothes, bare feet,
at the end of my travels found

The deepest thoughts that greet
do not come at thought's command,
but after thought's defeat.

LIBERATION
And into the new liberation,
Into the wild jig and celebration
The new dictator moves, watching
The joyous crowd dance
Into their fresh enslavement.

A STRUGGLE
And will this struggle ever end,
Will this plight be ever over?
Age is gathered now. Age is here,
And still the inner quarrel goes on.
Maybe soon I’ll settle down,
Settle into abandonment,
And tired of battle, tired of the war,
Tired with all the weariness
Will fight that fight no more.

REFORMATION
What trembling hand
Shaped that mould,
What fire
Brought on the melt,
Pouring anger
Into wrath,
Pouring Calvin
Into Celt?

THE DARK, THE LIGHT
The darkest night
Most brightens morning glow.
The brightest light
Throws the darkest shadow.

QUARTET
Unless the seeker
is in a melt
and longs to set
they can not enter
into the mould
of the C sharp minor
string quartet.

A PARTING
I thought before hands held
He sang her a final song,
A song she maybe heard of old
At some fair or christening,
And verse after long verse,
A song without a chorus.
It would be maybe evening
When the last note was done,
And when she turned her face
To him, he would be gone.

I thought she followed hill and star
And the song full in her head
Into a springtime later
We stood at the parting bed,
Watching death in love with her,
Her white face, her whiter hair,
And thought a tune began to seep,
Watching the eye's far spill,
Watched the eyelids rise and fall
As they fell on her first sleep.

I ROARED OUT YOUR NAME
I roared out your name
With the lungs' full savagery,
A long un-echoed roar
Into the blur of May.
All stopped.
None turned a head
Animal or singing bird
As still as struck with frost
Until one after another
Murmurings and motion came,
And as sound refilled the day
I apologized for the disturbance,
And turned, and moved away.

THE REVELATION
It was the autumn equinox,
And the first faint seep of yellow
Touch the leaves of the rowan tree.
Day by day, beside the constancy
Of the close-by evergreen
I watched the ever deepening shade
Flare into a sudden apparition-
The tri-colour. Clear and close,
The tri-colour fill the full window
Waving in the October breeze.
But the ever deepening golden hew
Darken more, darken into death
As the flute of bare November
Pined its lingering lament until
A fall of snow whiten the scene,
Through the days, through the full moon
Into the bright midwinter dawn,
And there, at the end of the slow thaw
The lonesome dark-green conifer.

THE RETURN
I knew, the feeble old mother said,
I knew I'd see you again,
Forty years since we parted
And wondered where you'd gone.

But I knew before this day was out
In this world or the other,
Knew we'd meet before tonight,
Said the old and feeble mother.

THE WOUND.
And then the sore no longer bled.
For weeks, months I lay and stood
To sew and stitch that gaping hurt.

But an old song re-opened it.
A wound healed in the head
Had broken out in the heart.

O GREAT SUN
O great sun, rising with blinding glare,
When old age swells your girth
And you droop into a lightless glow,
The dying embers there
Will have wrought immortal shades on earth
When you last sink below.

THE POULTICE.
But that memory would not budge,
The tormenting thought not depart,
Year on year no melt, no loosening
As if locked into an inner deep.
I thought of a poultice
Poured hot unto a linen cloth
And set firm on the place of the pain,
Draw and draw at the stubborn grip,
And beel it out of the bone.

BELONGING.
I could see no belonging
In her face,
In laugh or frown
Or sleep or wakening,
Saw no trace
Of kin I'd known,
Of parents, uncle, aunt
Or any relative,
And then began imagining
She must be born
In some far land
And left here an infant,
Until one moment
When tragic news came,
Her mother's features
Flashed across her pain.

LATE NIGHT THOUGHT
All pain
divides.
All suffering
unites.

DECONSTRUCTION.
And in their quarrel with the verbal
To hunt out meaning from its hiding
Word by word, line by line
Found in their quest no secret cove,
Found nothing to answer the call
But husk and bark, pod and shell.

RINGS OF GROWTH
I though at the post mortem
Rings as trunk growth were found
And one thicker line discovered

Told the state pathologist
That must have been the year
Her beloved parted.

ROBERT BURNS.
What a brain
Mapped that heart.

What a heart
Fed that brain.

AND THEN I HEARD.
And then I heard,
Translated from a wordless thought-
‘There are no revelations
In the noon of things.
These only break
Into the moments
Of the dawn and the dusk.

SIGHT.
I watch a blind man's fingers move
Around the contours of his lover's face,
The fingers of a man born blind
From cheek to chin in stroke and trace,
And touch the forehead with the palms
On eyelids open, eyelids tight,
And knew as I watched his empty eyes
He saw her face in broad daylight.

THE JIG
Ireland
Still steps the jig
That Strongbow danced
To Ferrycarrig.
Israel
Still plays upon
The harps that hang
By the Babylon.

THE NINTH
I thought Beethoven's Ninth
Had crashed, and in the gloom
Of dawn, crochets and minims found

Strewn all along the ground,
And workers sifting through the length
Of Tochter aus Elysium.

DO THE DEAD DREAM?
Do the dead dream?
Stirrings as in sleep appear
But never awake from the dreaming
As vague images and faces
Harden and clarify more and more
And I move around
As if in broad daylight?

MYSTICS’ CHORUS
So sum all up I asked -
If they sang with a single voice
What is the mystics’ chorus?
He spoke at once and this he said-
‘Here is the full refrain,
Our pains are not
Of death, of dying,
But the pains of being born.’

THE SMILE.
As we bade our last farewell
To her, candle above the coffin
And the pale wax drops

Hardening, felt a tear
Might dampen her face,
And then I thought a smile began,

A slow smile appear
At the dim light's tremble
On her solemn lips.

GOLDEN GATE
And where the ocean breath
Clears in the sun’s lifting,
The Golden Gate slips naked
From her fog robes.

INHERITANCE
I think of Colmcille,
Our Paul of Tarsus,
A prisoner of his banishment
After the Damascus battle.
I think of humble Iona
Flowering its spread of scholar
And his early speech, early wrath
Bloom an evangelical age.
I think again of pens and scrolls
Word by word, line by line
From the early copy of a text
Blossom into the Book of Kells.

SUMMER SCHOOL
The descendants have returned,
The offspring of those
Who in your days of hunger
Would not touch a reaching hand,

Walked past your begging lines,
Now stalk school and resting place
To scavenge on your carcass,
To vulture on your bones.

THE FINAL SONG
And this is the final line
Of the final verse
Of the final song they sing-
Closure
Does not belong,
Does not belong
To the living.

THE BLIND HARPER'S PRAYER
Then blest bé the nightfall,
And blest bé the dawn,
And blest bé the dusk again
That calls the evening down,
And blest bé its calling
On hollow and on height,
And blest bé the blésséd dark,
And blest be the light.

I pray the lonely moon
As she wakens in the east
To cast her eyeful gently down
On every sleeping beast,
And every beast that stands awake
To follow shadows' flight.
And blest bé the blésséd dark,
And blest bé the light.

I pray the solar lover
To find the moon's pale lips
And both clasp in an embrace
Into full eclipse.
And let the full corona there
Dance around its night.
And blest bé the blésséd dark.
And blest bé the light.

THE LONG WAIT.
Dedicated to the memory of Paddy Connolly Glasslough. Co Monaghan. 1930 -2022.
And three days after giving him birth
She lost her fight for life.
Now, ninety two years later
And the sound of his dying breath,
A half whisper, a half prayer
Moving from his slow lips-
‘It won’t be long now,
Not long now until we meet,
She who guided all my days,
She who mothered every moment.
The long wait. The long wait.
The long wait will soon be done.’

ON THE DAY I WROTE NO VERSE
On the day I wrote no verse
As the clock moved to midnight
I thought of a couple come
To make their home. Hour on hour
Under noon and evening they waited
Until into the fading light,
Into the brightening moon
Bade each other a weeping farewell,
And turned, nor met again.

THE SUPER SUPERFICIAL
More pedestal than statue,
More halo than head,
More package than parcel,
More water than blood.
This is indeed the age,
This is indeed the call,
This is indeed the age
Of the super superficial.

HOW DID THE LAST DODO DIE?
How did the last Dodo die,
How did it live its final day,
Where did the final bones lie
Before they vanished in the clay?

And did that male or female pine
For a lost lover, torn apart,
And make a long and pitiful moan,
And die of a broken heart?

A TALE OF THE GRAVE
And the closed eyes open again
In the socket stare past skin,
And wild grimace of joy
Break out of the lost mouth.

ET EXPECTO
I met that stone figure at his solemn place,
A warrior youth in the sculptor’s chisel
But wind and rain had saddened the face,
Narrowed cheek and brow until
A gaunt shape braved his days. And as I stood
I sensed a stir, a motion of his agéd head
That eyes began to move, and thought agai
As the wind arose around the rain
Thought his stone lips trembled open
And a croak from the rock throat come-
Ex expecto, et expecto,
Et expecto resurrectionem mortuorum.

INDIFFERENCE.
And despite all prayer and plea
All cries into the core of the heavens,
The indifferent drive of nature rules,
Stone deaf, stone dumb.

THE BOND
And from that first vague youthful glance
Into the full union of eyes,
And hands held, and rings given,
Grew old together year on year,
And after age, bonded in the grave
Into the bond of the last bone,
And then the dust, and all gone.
And that first youthful glance again.

LAND OF MY FATHERS
I entered down a telescope
Into the bound of galaxy,
Millions motionless in spiral,
Chasm of shade, unmoving flare,
Millions over the clearest night
So vast, so silent there.
But thought I heard a faint hum
That the silence seemed to brew,
I thought I heard singing come
From the distant deep of stars
Fading, rising, filling up
Into surging choir sounding
Land of my Fathers,
And then the vast crescendo
In that stupendous glow
Tapered suddenly away until
The ear could find no more,
Faintest tremble, murmur gone.
I waited hour after hour.
It never made return.’

THE NEW DARK AGES
I speak of those old lands
In once renaissance Europe,
Once an intelletual fortress,
Once a tower of mighty art
Now worn bone dry with absence,
Now as fifteen centuries ago
And the deep of a dark age
Far, far from all enlightenment,
Awaiting the revolution.
Awaiting the revelation.
Awaiting the resolution
Of the Being of beings.

END

NOTES ON POEMS

THE MUSICIANS
Recalling youthful listening to the visitors playing their traditional music in our house in their mystical event as I lay awake upstairs.

THE JOTTER
I once wrote a poem about a young couple, and some years afterwards decided to give it a fresh edit, changing words and lines and so on. But I was so used to the original version that when I went to recite the new material, the old kept intruding and would not go away. I then likened this experience to actual real life, that the couple had grown together into each other’s ways, into an ever deepening relationship and became inseparable with age, reacting aggressively to the attempt to separate them.

THE PIPER OF FAIR HEAD
The young piper is so distraught following the death of his wife that he moves off to the rim of Fair Head with his bagpipes in the late evening to play a lament that might call out her spirit to come and comfort him. He repeats the tune far into the night away across to the Mull and Rathlin until a faint light appears gathering in the low east. Because he is blinded by his tears at what he thinks is her appearance, he doesn’t realize it is the lunar dawn and becomes totally overwhelmed and collapses with his arms around the pipes and dies. At this, pipers from all over the land gather around him continuing the lament, and they solemnly raise him and carry him away into the breaking dawn.

TITANIC
A prophesy of the World Wars to come in the formal rejection of the female principle by the great male construction. The opening verse depicts her birth in the Arctic from where she sought to form a bond of completion. But her approaches were rejected in the surge of male invincibility, and she forced its destruction.

YEATS IN PURGATORY
This poem projects echoes of Dante’s journey in the Divine Comedy regarding the presence of Maud Gonne as a figure of destiny in the poetry of Yeats, an image of Beatrice.
The opening verse sets the scene in 1948 following the funeral procession by land and sea from France to Drumcliff and the ceremony of re-interment where Yeats’ memory is honored by leaders and the people. But things suddenly shift as his spirit is confronted by voices telling him that his poetic affirmations, the victorious consummation of his life, are now the substance of his purgatory on the journey to paradise.
This involves the ritual burning of his verse as an act of oblation in the manner of the sacrificial immolation of the Navan Fort temple by the ancients at the point of its completion. Yeats is told that the cycles of his system exist only of the wider dynamic of their being in a different order of existence. Verses four and five refer to the actual order of his art in this respect, and that the authentic mystical experience will come only when she appears to him out of the embers of the purging.
Yeats’ remains were actually re interred in September 1948 but the poem sets the event in November for effect as the month of All- Souls.

I WILL SET FIRE TO THE ETERNAL HILLS.
This villannell refers to the effects of the work ‘The Possession of Being’ in transforming approaches to the understanding of human destiny in a newly identified order of the Being of beings. The term ‘eternal hills,’ often ‘everlasting hills’ is taken from a phrase in the litany of the rosary and other litanies which go back to lines from Genesis (49.26) and Habukkuk (3.6) It is sometimes a reference to the wisdom of the prophets and patriarchs, or to the notion of unsurpassed earthly duration –that of the hills- projecting a greater divine duration.

COT DEATH
A friend bereaved by an infant death many years ago told me how he tried to cope with the tragedy and asked if I might commemorate his thoughts in verse.

ON THE HORIZON OF THE CENTURY
Outstanding creative figures of the twentieth century begin their march from east to west in celebration of sublime works of art, of great revelations uncovered in science, great positions in philosophy, moving in procession to enter an arch of triumph in the west. But they suddenly make a u-turn when they reach mid-Armagh on the hill of Mullyard, and march back eastward from where they came. A flight of migratory geese moving in the opposite direction and a flare of starling suddenly confront them and they have a Pentecostal moment that their understanding of absolutes and ultimate truths disintegrates in the wider order of being,the wider domain of the mystical.
DEATH OF EDEN
An early variation of this prophetic poem was first published twenty years ago in 2002 in my collection ‘The Point of Ripeness,’ Appletree Press, Belfast, foretelling the disasters of global warming that are now ongoing world headlines. The central theme is the billion year-long development of the world’s creatures in their evolutionary journey, but this journey is not of the traditional scientific/biological interpretation. It is of the underlying spiritual dynamic of process involving a death and rising in each advance through nature. The mystics and the prophets and their spiritual/poetic works are of this same inheritance. This process of life also contains the authentic identification of the elusive notions of Beauty, Truth and Meaning. Yet we exterminate this immensity without a thought, usurping the very integrity and privilege of life itself.

THE FAREWELL
A requiem poem written in memory of an uncle, Tommy Makem, and recited as the final farewell at his funeral, August 2007, Dover NH.

THE HEALING
This relates to the universal trauma of grief, the experience of loss, living loss or the loss of one in death. It depicts the sufferer initially facing west into sunset following after what is gone. But sometime later, there is an acceptance that they must turn and face the opposite direction and travel into the night, that what will not return from the west might be found in some new manner in the east. In keeping with this, the poem works to put such experiences into the perspective that the acceptance of the loss in all its realities uncovers and raises fresh enlightenment in the human dynamic. This is presented as an image of the eye of the owl, of hearing beyond the normal mode, of experiences of strange peace, a sense of oblation perhaps, a fresh calling to create comfort and belonging that while the grieving person seems to be no longer the person they once were, they are the exact same person in a different more profound mode of experience.

SELLAFIELD
The danger of Sellafield for the east coast areas of Ireland is presented as the specter of a Strongbow or Cromwell come again. Just when things are moving into new times, another invader is landing on our shores.

FAREWELL AUL’ HEART
Written in the local Derrynoose accent back in 1969 in response to an elderly neighbour who remarked how strange it is that we never see or thank the inside workings of our bodies that keep us alive for so long.

IRELAND OF THE LIGHT
A central theme of this poem is that nationhood in today’s world is strongly shaped by the facility to give the world something distinctive and enriching in intellect, culture and art. Accordingly, modern Ireland requires a new sense of such destiny in keeping with what are presented as the Four Ages of the Ireland of the Light. These are-
1.The Neolithic age stone arrangements from 3000 BC such as Newgrange. These affirmations were not an arbitrary mapping of the cycles and seasons but the creation of moulds of access to the overwhelming experience of being. Their knowing faculty and memory were close to the intuitions of nature, expressed in the poem as ‘the primitive profundity.’
2. The monastic age, 6th - 9th century, at home and abroad involving the great schools such as at Bangor, Armagh and Clonmacnoise, the missionary journeys to Europe and the founding of institutions of learning there. This was a period when Ireland was an authentic world center of intellect and art. The age also includes the supreme artistic creativity of such as the Book of Kells.
3. The Restoration. This relates to the last third of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth regarding the re-establishment of Irish culture and involving such as the Gaelic League, the formation of the GAA, the collections of Irish traditional music and song leading to the later formation of Comhaltas Ceolteori Eireann, the formal gatherings of the mythology of Ireland, the assertions of literature and the intensity toward the creation of the National Theatre. This was preceded by the much earlier Belfast harp festival of 1792 and other northern affirmations of traditional music and song.
4. Imperium Hibernium. The ‘Irish Empire’ deals with the immense Irish contribution from all traditions here to world civilization over the recent centuries through general emigration and formal missionary endeavor.
A base of a projected Fifth Age relates to the new identification of the hitherto unresolved problem of the Being of beings- as presented in a parallel work. This relates to a transformation of the notion of what exists and the knowing of that existence.
The refrain in the poem represents a calling on the Fifth Age to enlighten the true meaning of the preceding Four and so create a new era of the Ireland of the Light. The ‘two Greek chieftains’ mentioned are Plato and Aristotle.

CANTICLE OF BIRTH
From memories of watching the heifer in the field giving birth to the calf. The notion of a ‘passing over’ represents an advancing from one state to another.

WHO SPEAKS THE MYSTIC RATH

WHO SPEAKS THE MYSTIC RATH
This poem, from which the title of the collection is taken, identifies the dominant human drive as the ‘possession of Being,’ the base of all human aspiration, the source of the projections of both good and evil and why what is termed ‘the rational’ can rarely prevent conflict.
It asserts this is not because of base human instincts or a reign of evil or a will to power or of such as economic and territorial ambition or any of the conventional interpretations of the psychoanalysts or philosophers. The actual dynamic is a mystical phenomenon, that the highest human aspirations are of the possession of Being as above, and where notions of gain and loss are totally transformed. In this sense, what is termed evil and good are of the same mystical origin in a hitherto unidentified layer of human existence. Conflict is identified as ritual.
The term rational used here refers to the factor that failed for example in modern times to prevent two world wars, to prevent the Troubles, the Iraq war, the Ukraine war and so on, and why history is so crammed with conflict.
The refrain ‘But we were not sober then’ refers to a reaction in the lull and settling down after the intensity of conflict

This poem, from which the title of the collection is taken, identifies the dominant human drive as the ‘possession of Being,’ the base of all human aspiration, the source of the projections of both good and evil and why what is termed ‘the rational’ can rarely prevent conflict.
It asserts this is not because of base human instincts or a reign of evil or a will to power or of such as economic and territorial ambition or any of the conventional interpretations of the psychoanalysts or philosophers. The actual dynamic is a mystical phenomenon, that the highest human aspirations are of the possession of Being as above, and where notions of gain and loss are totally transformed. In this sense, what is termed evil and good are of the same mystical origin in a hitherto unidentified layer of human existence. Conflict is identified as ritual.
The term rational used here refers to the factor that failed for example in modern times to prevent two world wars, to prevent the Troubles, the Iraq war, the Ukraine war and so on, and why history is so crammed with conflict.
The refrain ‘But we were not sober then’ refers to a reaction in the lull and settling down after the intensity of conflict.

I MET WITH COLLINS IN HIS OLD DAYS.
The poem tells of Michael Collins as an old man being paid a visit by a stranger. As Collins rests in his armchair staring out the window he is reminded of the far off deeds when he was in his prime. But the vagaries of age, of lengthy years and loneliness after drab day to day politicsand bitternesses have long since drained away the youthful certainties, the early sense of purpose and the bonds of brotherhood. He is reminded of how often he wished he had died at the youthful zenith of his achievement in bringing the war of independence into the Truce and so joining the hero comrades of the preceding years.
Maybe human age is an unnatural thing, he has thought, an aberration of existence with no purpose but age for the sake of age, that it is anti heroic. He is reminded that his qualities of leadership could not have been made for such a drift, such a disintegration of great ideals. Surely, as in the affirmations of the myths and legends of the ages- to which the stranger tells him he intimately belongs- there must be an earlier authentic dynamic of existence that naturally bred heroes and heroines where all was worked out in the intensity of people in their youthful prime, that death is a natural consequence of such supreme deeds, and entry into an afterlife natural to that destiny.
The stranger confirms to Collins how more and more he longs to be with those comrades who were of that order of things, that he was born only for the heroic. The stranger reflects a special position he might have held in an afterlife- that of transforming into heroes all those youth who had died in wars and conflicts not of their making. In his old age now, Collins falls asleep at night with all these thoughts, and they daily awaken him in the early morning.

NEOLITHIC
The Neolithic monuments of Ireland such as at Bru Na Boine involving such as Newgrange, Knowth and Dowth and the various stone arrangements represent perhaps the earliest known affirmations of the ancient Irish people in their confrontation with existence. The case is made that the mode of early conscious knowing was the purest of all human knowing and intimate with the inherited instincts and memories of nature from the pure possession of Being.The sonnet begins with the return of the full plumage of nature following the retreat of the last ice age and the arrival of humans and the establishment of human ritual and creativity. But this creativity is not a mere mechanical trapping of the cycles of the seasons for an arbitrary spiritual experience or empirical experiment, but a fulfillement of the dominant and fundamental human drive, the creation of a mould of acess to an experiene of Being. This is also the dominant human memory. All the interpetations of Newgrange stem from that factor. The dynamic of such creativity is presented in the concluding couplet.

KAVANAGH FANTASIA
Patrick Kavanagh longs to be released from the prison of his art, that the relentless inner demand to be faithful to his calling is not rewarded with the expected uplift of acknowledgement, that there is an unnatural imbalance between the lofty calling and the empty pockets.
He decides to take himself to the mid- winter dawn at Newgrange that its great flaring consume his old grief of neglect, raise him into the mystical experience, and he move in bliss among the ancients.

I HAVE NOTHING FOR YOUR GRIEF BUT MY SONG
Back in the late fifties, a neighbour man visited my grandparents at their home in Keady to tell them that a former girlfriend of his who had emigrated to America some months previous had been killed in an accident, that he had never got over her emigration and was now more distraught than ever. My grandmother, Sarah Makem, a traditional singer, said nothing as the neighbour spoke, but presently, began to sing an old ballad ‘Our ship is ready.’ He afterwards sat and chatted and later went home seemingly quite soothed and composed. I imagined the singer as a spinner and weaver of the ways of history who through their journeys felt the sufferings of the landscape in the ice ages and earlier trials by fire, felt the joys of life returning, and spun threads from these traumas and uplifts of history. At the end of their travellings, they wove their findings into song with its natural healing powers. The poem is the essence of what she told him in her singing.

The Armagh Pipers Club.
Founded in 1966 by Brian and Eithne Vallely along with Dara and the late Niall, the Armagh Pipers Club has developed over six decades into a centre of excellence for the promotion of Irish traditional music, notably the uilleann pipes, and attended by children and adults from Armagh and seven neighbouring counties. Over recent decades, thousands of young musicians have started their musical journey in the Armagh Pipers Club. Many still play today, some have pursued stellar musical careers as performers, teachers and academics. Most of the current teachers began their musical education in the Club and now share a wealth of experience and expertise to new generations. The Club has produced 15 tutor books, which are used in the classes and anywhere in the world where Irish music is taught, along with other books and a number of CDs and DVDs. The club teaches accordion, banjo, concertina, fiddle, flute, harp, session playing, singing, tin whistle and of course the uilleann pipes.
The annual international William Kennedy Piping Festival, launched by the club in 1994, has attracted enthusiasts of pipe-based music from all over the world. In the poem, the overall dynamic of Armagh Piper’s Club represents a third outstanding Armagh cultural affirmation after the great early medieval School of Armagh and the creative age of Archbishop Richard Robinson (1708-1794). The poem asserts that the uilleann pipes are a specific musical creation to reach the deep of Irish memory and aspiration.