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Poems for Speech Therapy online magazine
[ The Ravager ] [ Out of my depth ] [ The Big Issue ] [ Stone Walls ]
Autumn was setting yellow fire to the trees,
Incinerating Summer’s serendipity,
Stripping earth naked,
As I walked today along a country road
Where just a year ago I picked blackberries,
Tasting their soft, sharp sweetness as I wandered home.
A tasteless mess stretched round the metal sign,
Part of the process of improvement
(Road widening, apparently)
Where lumps of mud smothered the sighing grass,
Panting beneath the weight of violent
Diggers, choking to death.
Cowering beneath the friendly hedges, small
Frail purple petalled vetch retreated with the clover,
And hid beside the brambles, thickly powdered
With sterile dust, their fruit inedible.
Later, I watched the moon high overhead
Shining in purity. Stripped clean of vegetation, she has no air.
What on earth will we do, how will we breathe,
Having no oxygen, when we in turn
Choking to death, have all our plants ripped off?
The cold Atlantic kicks my shins.
I wade the waters.
Underfoot the soft sand yields,
Sinking in deeper hollows. The hard waves
Beat at my knees with baseball bats.
If I press on now past knee, past thigh,
Pushing into the power,
Will I reach the New World on the other side,
Discover shining skies of beauty?
Or, overwhelmed, sink battered to the floor?
St. Columba, they say, used to wade
Into this powerful ocean,
Whether for penance or to grasp
Time on his own with God.
He was a holy man.
He never thought, I’m sure,
Of wading out into the deep
Until the sand beneath him sank
And left him helpless,
Floating belly-up.
I wade on now, this winter day.
The cold Atlantic kicks my shins.
He sits there in the dust, scratching his boils.
A Job-like figure, apart from the smell.
But maybe Job smelt, too.
I give him two pounds
And pass on quickly.
How did he come to this?
A victim of Care in the Community?
Or booze?
Or a seeker after freedom,
Breaking out from the rat-race,
To live in a rats’ nest under the floorboards?
The walls of the well are well up now,
And the walls at the back are quite well on
As well as the walls for the flowers at the front
At Listooder.
I sit in the temporary garden chair, and feel quiet dropping from the escalonia,
Each flower complete with a fat, round, thick-striped bee replete with honey,
And the sweet smelling honeysuckle behind me drips clean drops of rain from the recent downpour.
I am watching white sheep on the low green hills,
Round hills with fat round balls of wool stuck on against the felty grass.
The soft, beige-coloured collared dove lands awkwardly in the nest in the elder tree.
"Awk, awk, awk, flap, flap.
Look out, below, IÕm coming in to land!"
Then, "Coo," as he settles in his own place.
We looked for our place for a long time, for years;
And now find it here in the heart,
The geographical centre, of County Down,
(Right in the middle of the map.)
I watch my husband building stone on stone, working hard.
He is building up the boundary walls.
The walls of the well are well up now,
And the walls at the back are quite well on
As well as the walls for the flowers at the front
At Listooder.
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