New Year Poems

Happy New Year, all.

I haven’t been on line so much over the winter. Not much to make one want to be, in many ways.

Anyway, I wrote a couple of poems on New Years Day, one a little more hopeful than the other.

Hope you like them.

One of the plant pots on my balcony, with Alyssum, a small seedling of those tomato-like plants, and some other species like navelwort and Arabidopsis/ rock cress that self-seeded.

            Rewilding Little Lives 

Flowers in my window box this New Years Day

Brought smiles to see flies upon the white petals

Delightfully drawn to pollinate these late blooms

Providing provender in winter and spring seeds.

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Insight that acts of rewilding can be so easy:

Simply leave a little land for life, and equally

Life will return once we allow it land, thus we

Keep everything alive a little longer by these 

Little acts and actions, ceding some concrete 

So when our concrete recedes life can yet proceed.

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            Nothing Changes On New Year’s Day

We kiss at midnight and wish

One another the best, that 

The world will rise above our 

Worries with the coming year;

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Raise our champagne to celebrate

Our survival of the last, then we

Rest in unhurried slumber, until

The bells ring in the faithful for

.

New year’s Service, and we 

Step out to see too the debris,

Finding revellers have left their

Refuse in the most amazing places.

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Picking up a cracked plastic party

Trumpet, we ponder if we will play

These in the next decades, and stroll

Slowly to our sacred spaces, with 

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A grim smile, while the sun slants low,

Watching Earth go round just the way 

It spun yesterday, today.

A Few Seconds of Eternity

            A few Seconds of Eternity

A hubbub surrounds several idling cars:

Kids running between house and driveway

As the gang gets ready to leave on Sunday,

Carrying bags and banging shutters closed.

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Asking, “Have we left anything behind?”

“Well, here it stays till next weekend,” replied,

For we’ve baths and dinners to have this evening

If we ever get on the road home.

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Eventually, the door locked and all packed in,

Bar me, standing in the garden as the cars

Reverse out, waiting to close the gate, taking in

The scene surrounding us as every evening:

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Silence settling o’er the vale as the breeze

Slows to swing round from afternoon heat

On the southern plains beyond the hills,

Set in scarlet, under clouds tinged pink.

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The sparrows have ceased squabbling

In the hedges for roosting spots, chirping

Softly as crickets; the sky turquoise east,

Glowing golden west; the oaks go on growing

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Under Saturn and early stars starting to shine,

As they have for eons, breathing in, quietly,

As the gate squeaks shut; all is mine,

For a few seconds, immersed in an eternity.

Often ‘Tis the little moments that make this life wonderful.

The Last Cabaret

            Final Fiesta

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Dancing giants and their marching musicians, with the public in train, a caravan of prams…

Marching bands and ballerinas

Parade the street, pulling public,

Producing impromptu dances

Around pushchairs and infants

Held aloft; cheering and chants

And stampings, stampeding

Children screaming gleefully

Gobbling up potato chips, fried

Calamari, scampi and such snacks

.

Washed with beer and wine,

Vermouth and gin and an ever-

Growing list of sin, resisted

Until the wee hours under stars,

Revelling unrelenting. Renewed

As sunlight reveals debris and

Blinkered vision revolves to 

Another village, a different festival,

.

Of a reencountered countryside

Ready for recreation after a year

Of restraint and restriction. See

A need for sun burning, but

.

Another urge underneath fuels 

This seeming endless summer:

A sense of a September looming

Despite peaceful scenes.

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Heat will resist yet, bringing

Only waves of pain. Winter comes

Indeed, but carries no snow,

Nor silent ice-glazed stasis,

Only storms. The wars await,

Worse than after a former August

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And this is our last cabaret, 

Held under a hammer cocked,

A trigger primed, and all

Staggering at the tipping-point.

This guy is having a beer, using his other, smaller mouth in the throat, taking a break from bonking children on the head with that sponge.

We were finishing up the festival of San Fermin Txikito, or little San Fermin, last weekend, which was kind of the last festival of the summer – one which had the youths going to as many festivals in as many villages round Pamplona as they could get to, after the two years they missed out on because of the Covid restrictions. And I just said to myself – good luck to them. They’ll have shit shovelled out in front of them soon enough. We have had a terrible summer in terms of exacerbated “natural” disasters, but as the weather gets cooler, we can only look forward to a winter, if not of discontent, then of a realisation of how bad things are going to get (in the privileged west where it hasn’t actually started yet unlike many other places) on our current global trajectory. We just have to turn down the thermostat here, and shorten the shower times, while in other places they’re kinda sorta fucked, as it were.

After I’d written this poem, someone on twitter, commenting on the current fiasco in the UK compared it to Weimar economics, and look how that ended up – suggesting we have a final cabaret.

So it’s not just me, of course…

I have few photos to illustrate this poem for obvious reasons…. who wants their photo on the internet with a pile of beer bottles etc. round them? I wouldn’t! But no judgement if you’re enjoying yourself – a drink before the war, as Sinéad sang…

Sun Set Sun Day

Happy Summer!

Though I’m Irish, and for me Summer started in May, making this MidSummer’s Day, logically, it seems that the astronomers around me disagree. Whatever.

Here’s a short poem I thought of a couple of Sundays ago, to make you think of the joy of these short nights.

A sunset that makes you want to stay till every last ray and photo has faded away…

            Sunday Sunset

Other days we rush inside 

From the porch, to prepare

Dinner, drinks and sit upon

Sofa to see a movie or TV; or

Drive to the city for dusk, but

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Sunday is when we want to stay 

Watching sunset and slipping 

Off to bed when the bats and 

Owls calling have taken over

From twilight blackbirds and

Nightingales, the last rays of

Sun replaced by moonbeams,

The gleam of glow worms when

Cicadas are silent to let crickets

Sing, as peace settles like aspen

Cotton in the stillness between

Breezes. Then sleep suggests itself 

Until we rise again to catch the dawn.

Cathedral Leaves

            Cathedral Leaves

November sunlight shines at right angle

To catch leaves like stained window panes

On cathedral trees, lining riverbank, flanking

Dancing stream gleaming like black marble.

Drakes draw diamond wakes through dark

Water, songbirds call sonorous cries flying

Through timber, sweet as a child’s choir.

Marvelling at this flowing manifestation of

Nature’s majesty, I stand in reverence:

An experience as solemn as sacraments,

Holy as the spirit infusing these trunks

And tender tendrils dangling delicate

Leaves twisting daintily in the breeze.

And I wonder why those who kneel for

An invisible being in the sky, don’t even stop 

To breath in, appreciate this display of 

Beauty splayed out before them, inhale

Divinity in every breath of autumn 

Dampness, soaked up sounds like dewfall,

Absorbed through skin as golden photons;

On shoulders felt the gentle hand of eternity.

A hilltop in a local park with sun shining in the trees – I never actually took any photos of the scene with the river… mostly just look, and then hope the poem paints the picture better than my phone camera can….