Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

After Wislawa Szvmborska

In my dream Philip Larkin comes to life in a wax museum, pronouncing me among the less deceived.

I speak fluent Greek with shepherd-poets on green Sicilian hillsides.

I drive a car with Seamus Heaney to a country of the mind.

I am gifted as Bishop or Roethke at soothing a painful past into sestinas, villanelles.

I hear voices of long dead poets and they hear mine.

My piano performances respond to the syncopations of Hughes’s jazzed-up dream poems.

I fly the way prescribed, like the soul in “The Seafarer,” over the ocean’s paths.

Falling off a roof I swoop safely to shelter landing on leaves of grass.

Breathing under water I swim like a stippled fish to shore on Innisfree’s purple-heathered Isle.

I’m not complaining: I know the Beautiful Changes as the forest is changed.

It’s a pleasure always, however, to distill divinest sense, to write the poem that changes the world.

Immediately war starts, but when my poem is read above the thunder peace appears like sudden sunlight through scant clouds.

I exist, but don’t have to be fastened to a dying animal, my hungry heart howling, biting at air.

Some years ago I was gathered into the artifice of eternity, somewhere well out, beyond, and saw the Happy Isles.

And the day before yesterday, a penguin, Neruda’s magellanic priest of the cold beside Stevens’s snowman, glittering in the sun.

Burren

Sheets of stone for miles until I learn to look in crevices for wild thyme, gentians, rock roses. Lying down I inhale a crush of herbs, swallow heat from sunned rocks, touch hidden, silken petals.

Further on, a throng of ferns, a dark pool I want to wade into, knowing well I will never return to dry land—

butterfly weed, purple coneflowers, bright, unambiguous zinnias.

Cigar Box

When my dad was a boy some old uncle gave him a cigar box full of pocket knives, and he buried it in the backyard. Every time I go to my hometown and drive by the place where the house used to be, I think of the box full of knives and wonder if I could still uncover any sharpness, if I could find the right place to dig and could force through the crazed earth to the clay below, could I recover the boy with the impulse to bury everything he loved, who cocooned himself under the piano and fell asleep when fights broke between his parents about letters from women that came while his dad was at war.

Pansies

I dream I’m surrounded by family who suddenly vanish except for my great uncle Virgil, long dead. He takes me for a ride in the semi he’d driven in life, except we go skyward, along a track through a narrow tunnel, with creaking fits and starts like a Zurich funicular. We step into a Technicolor Teletubby land, with hills as green and gradual as Ireland, no walls to mark out houses and rooms— only carpets of flowers—pansies colored Lemon and grape and tangerine. As soon as I say It must never freeze here, I wake from what must have been my death dream, my died-and-gone to heaven dream. Pansy from pensée, French for thought— a penny for your thoughts, for your pansies— and I think of Virgil, my guide, who aged into forgetfulness of everything save the woman he’d loved and lost. He coaxed squirrels into his house with sunflower seeds, and left them to climb curtains while he wandered streets looking for her, who lived on only in his mind. In my next dream I form pansies into a bouquet for a love now lost. Their feathered edges flutter in the freezing wind as I hand them over.

Bothar Na Miasa (The Road of the Dishes)

for Moya Cannon

As we pick our way across limestone plates to reach St. Colman’s well she tells how his servant, weak with hunger near the end of Lent, complained...