THE MYSTERY

At the end he went gentle into the night

despite Dylan and his own resilient spirit.

When I heard I wrote

‘He’s dead’ on a piece of paper

of the sort he liked.

I wrote those words at home

on a fine morning

and later re-read them in a park

by starlight filtered through old fig trees

beside my favourite harbour cove.

There is so much that remains a mystery

in those words ‘He’s dead.’

The starlight that I read by

came from ten billion stars

dead ten billion years and in his head

a hundred billion neurons

had lived in complex and luminous community

urging him to breathe, pulsing his blood

and generating love and thought.

Years on I see how his departure

freed me more fully to journey deeper

into my own heart’s country,

yet there from time to time

I hear and see messages

like light from dead stars:

a familiar voice, a stranger’s smile,

a greeting from a leprechaun,

the silent witness of a hawthorn

standing sentinel on a hill.

Or grace from a statue

of the Virgin Mary weeping

over potato famines, plagues,

endless wars and infant deaths:

or in pubs - the laughter,

smoke and ribald song -

the smell of mist and gentle rain

falling on green, green fields.

O!

O!

Just a little sound

a small wound

a trifling sting:

It’s often a simple thing

I’ve found.

O!

The bullet hit there

in his black hair

in his large head

first quick! Then dead!

He was alive, I swear!

O!

He just left home

he’ll just not come:

Instead he’ll send you, aged five,

silent little letters.

Lamb in fetters. Shearers. Dumb.

O!

Just a little pain:

It’s cancer.

My agile dancer

not for much longer

is the cellular o! dear answer.

O!

The emptying cattle train:

Man-shy. Entering eyes have not seen

emerging naked flesh, hosed o! so clean.

Forget the Zyklon chamber

but remember the rattle

and smell of death, though –

obscene.

MARIO

In life he was a friendly man,

Father Kevin said in his memoriam,

though estranged from his wife.

They found him the other morning

about eleven.  A fellow electrician

opened a fuse box, which like all else

in the hospital, was huge

and there he was.

Later his iron crucifix

caught the chaplain’s eye, he said.

His electrician mates

wore fresh white overalls to his service

for power is to be handled with respect,

surgery being not alone

in demanding cleanliness.

The hospital chapel

was sterilised of gods

that bleed and hang.

Instead macramé icons woven

from the string of human pity

damped the traffic noise

of heavy questions.

The organ wheezed

not with reeds and wind

but electricity: ‘It was a dreadful shock,’

the chaplain said,

a slip to Freud instead

of genuflect to Jesus.

Mario was leaning from his ladder

when he too slipped, and fell,

embraced his brief, bright,

terminal disease, metal lines

of spasm on his face: Amen.

There were no suggestions

of a heart attack

no suspicious circumstances

but it was an inauspicious place

for dust to settle.

A supervisor from the kitchen spoke

and tapped his warmth.

She’d thumbed a lift

to work with him that morning.

More to tell, I thought:

she read a poem at his vale.

‘Share a smile, now!’ she said.

‘No-one knows what’s coming!’

Little insulation here

against the volts –

not overalls, or paracletes,

or holy doves of string

or the thick gloves

of the administration.