Filíocht Nua: New Poetry

Abstract

Filíocht Nua: New Poetry Pat Boran The Island for Bob Quinn Remote, solitary, its back to its neighbours, facing the broad Atlantic and the dream of a bright New World, that unkempt heap of sand set down in our back yard by a builder in the early 1970s became, the afternoon he failed to show, our own small island: bays and mountains, the major rivers, greys instead of forty shades of green. Immune to damp and cold, down on our knees like the migrant workers of a generation before, we laboured beyond nightfall until a door in the darkness opened and saw us lifted clear of our obsession. But who could sleep that night leaving our small-but-perfect local wonder with no one to defend it, alone there under a cloud-marbled sky? Moonlight flooding the house, I crept back down to check, and found, to my astonishment, a fleet of snails, like so many Norse or Spanish or Phoenician sails, their glistening trails criss-crossing the hostile dark. [End Page 68] Stones Two mounds of stones erected by the roadside overlook the bay, so that as you pass on this light-swept peninsular road you’d be hard-pressed to say if they be years or millennia old, or entirely new made— the first like a symbol of birth, then, just up the way, a burial mound, and between them scarcely anything, a lay- by vantage point you glimpse, as you do most things, too late, travelling at light speed the distance between megalith and ghost estate. [End Page 69] Winter Burial i.m. Liam Brady Twin jet trails crossing the sky; here’s us frozen in the lake of time and up there God goes blithely skating by. Snowman No matter that we prayed to God himself (Father, Son and Holy Ghost), as well as half a dozen saints we knew by name and some odd talent or disfigurement— the ability to raise the dead, to put out fires with their breath, to balance all night up a pole— the thaw still came. The head was first to go, the belly lost a pound or two, an eye came loose, the carrot nose slipped an inch then disappeared entirely overnight: perhaps a rat or early bird had dragged it off. Before we knew it our snowman became snow-thing, stooped and hunched, a drunk in a dirty linen suit, a gate-crasher who’d lost his way, forced to spend the night outside alone. Who could love him any more? Even the crozier that had made him seem so wise last week—our own St Patrick— lay now like a question mark at his feet. [End Page 70] Nebula After winter drew up its raft of bone and wrack and shadow along the shoreline; after the moon’s pale eye peered deeper into the garden’s breeze-block soul; after the smoke-stacks filled with grief and the stray cats gathered on the one flat roof for miles to keen their loss—chairs face-down on the table, dishes stacked on newsprint shelves, brushes in hand as the dawn came up between us we raised a nebula of dust motes, stopping to admire it, as the gods are wont to do, before setting out for home. [End Page 71] Apple “If you want to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first create the universe.” —Carl Sagan Now, at last, with the volume down and the stage-curtain of the night drawn shut, it’s time to zoom in on this one still somehow strangely bright fallen apple, since morning sat here on my table, a glistening keepsake, temptation’s fruit, for all the world a numinous thing: the stalk’s delicate, perfect serif rising from the wormhole navel; the skin’s luminous photograph in three dimensions of the whole, scarcely plausible history of time, of the universe to this moment—impossible to understand but simply expressed, the infinite eclipsed by the tangible, by the close-at-hand. [End Page 72] The Garden Back in the back garden’s light-dappled arbour where the bees were like satellites orbiting planets of fruit, the uncut grass...