Thursday, February 23, 2012

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.

Sunday, February 12, 2012

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.