Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

BALLYMORE CARAVAN PARK

The sand gravel car-park bayis empty. The wheelie-binsare out. No children play.

A ride-on at the door of a shedand a summer-shy sparrowhawkslicing air overhead.

The Atlantic is gentle on the site.But later cooler air bringssalt in the rain and wet light.

Dusk and tiny red lampshades glowin the fuchsia ditches that straddlethe creek where no fisherman goes.

NOVEMBER

The wind imp runs on the roofThe reed sips from the soakaway pit

The pheasant squats in the scutchThe nettle undresses

The seal keeps her promiseThe wave smiles back

The kittiwake, the kestrel and the kite surferThe fish box, the lobster pot and the naomhóg

The bottle bank winks a Cyclops eyeThe street light shivers in a net of rain

ONIONS

I found the onions at ten-yard intervals whenI was measuring my stride against the beach’s usual length.The tide had tossed them onto the sandand then retreated, leaving each onionat odds with the ordinary wisps of seaweed,shells and pebbles otherwise aground on the shore.

They had been polished by some turbulent forceor combination of forces involving an abrasiveand the application of a thin oily gloss.Some were bruised and leathery, with peeling skin,others had found their equilibrium in a sand-nestor were lolling to one side with root strings trailing.

I scanned the shoreline until I found onethat was most true to its condition,had the peculiar size to weight ratio I was looking for,sat easily in the palm of my hand. When I bowled itdown the beach it rolled like a severed head,landed against a clump of weed with an audible groan.

HOODED CROW

Low tide attracts them, as it does me.A long beach exposed, no two days the same.The one I meet, a regular here,is holding his ground: a strip of sandwest of the estuary and the metal bridge.

And yes, I’ve studied his pre-lift off routine—the pinprick of light in his night-black eye;how he sinks, clicks, locks his body weightonto deceptively thin, biro spring legs.

There are others of course, furtive, shifty,who likewise patrol the shore in two-tone garb.I saw one boyo take the wind escalator skywards.He came back down the same way he went up.

THE LIKES OF US

It’s late October, six o’clock and dark.The clocks went back last nightbut no one told my mother.She has been dozing in her chair,wondering if it’s morning or night.

Now she thinks I’m her brother,and she, her sister Paloma and I—the O so beautiful Palomawho knew how to talk to men—are crossing O’Connell Bridge,heading for the pubs off Grafton Street.

We’ve just stepped off the Leixlip busin our hats and scarves.There’s a Siberian windcoming off the river,a big splash of moonlighton the Westmoreland Street side.

My mother has begun her climbup the white page but hasn’t told anyone yet.Horse-mad Paloma’s ambitionis to race under Jockey Club rules.Mine is to avoid the umbrellasand sharp elbows of the after-work crowdwho, charging homewards, show no mercyto the likes of us heading the other way.

THE STAG PARTY

for Noel Berkeley

It’s unbalanced, this men-only gatheringon the bank of the river Barrow,but we’re here, at the end of a narrow stemof country lane upriver from town,standing beside a head-high trailer,preparing to embracethe opposite ends of a two-man canoe.They’re fibreglass dug-outs,heavy and round-bottomed,buoyant but skittish.It’s balance, the instructor says, as he demoshis rule of thumb position for the paddle,counts nine syllables per stroke,and kneels to show the kind of quarrellingtwo blades must do to guide a boat...