Nine Sonnets

1 SECOND COMING

Cold winds from the north grew wilder, puckered
The face and flared hair. Loaded bush and tree
Flew comet tail and bent. For long before we
Had heard the whinge of animal and bird.
It is the ice again, it is the ice
Again. Something has provoked the long peace,
Something stirred the white rage of her passion
Swollen, risen out on the horizon.
It is the conqueror again. She tramps
To war again, she surges on taking
All in her stride, growth and rising, old ramps
And barriers of former battle, ring
And granite rampart, then piles up and slumps
To silence. That was her second coming.

2 THE THAW

For an age she stayed and all was at rest.
For an age the fallen heavens covered her,
The young and the old lands as spoils of war
Taken down, taken into her conquest.
Then one dusk grinding noise and colour came.
Then one dawn the east parted, full of flame
As the new sound deepened and went again
Returning with a powerful contraction-
A dark shape under the surface took form,
A grey head, a pointed head breaking free
From the rims of tension, and closer come,
Water dripping, water running, we see
The breaking ice, the heave and push and ram
Of the mother and her half born baby.

3 NEWCOMERS

Head by head they come the drumlin brood, wet
And smooth, crowning out into their full girth
As great sores where they darken and break out,
Shedding mother skin in birth after birth.

It is a naked place, echo empty.
Now the rains feed ready for the mouth,the sun
Dries off the dripping and warms the body
As they take the air. By day, by moon

They face west, they face east, and their shapes, full
Or gaunt are fixed forever in the cast
The sculptor dealt them. They live eternal
Separation. They mark shapes from the mist.

Shadows teach them. They know slopes in the stream.
They called out their names before we named them.

4 NEWGRANGE

All has settled down now. The hills are plush
And grown rich in their deciduous flows.
The ash and beech, the larch and the wild rush
Merge season easily. Snow kisses and goes.

But winter deep provoked our father's rest
And turned their head out to the deepest sun,
They of the rook, the gull to build their nest
Of dream and stone and stone and dream again.

And in the bloom of nightfall under star
And meteor and under moon, rhythm
Took their breathing, song to song, hour on hour
Until the twilight came and covered them.

And day surprised the night with measured work.
And night lit up the places day made dark.

5 THINGS DONE.

I have no written evidence that I
Had fathers before my great grandfather,
All my lineage represented by
An entry in the parish register.
Beyond this, I watch on a woman bent
Across her stick, and at her side a man
Buckled down, both staring outward, both gaunt
Fix their eyes on me and then slowly turn.
Things done leave things undone as a path taken
Leaves a trail. I thought there one trembling hour
Their footprints stretched away into Eden,
A dawn before had stood resplendent there.
But they were gone and never said my name.
And gone when I was wakened from my dream.

6MACHA

I thought of a great shape on Macha’s Fort
Whose eyelids strained to open at the lock
Of two millennia. I watched it’s heart pulsate,
Mouth like a sea shell move to speak,
"We are the first of Ulster, we warriors
And holy ones. We are the first of all
To raise in gold songs of wars and lovers.
Who stepped a god’s print, taking the gods’ trail,
And burn, burn and fire, fire,- dig no ring
To reach us, but wait for us, wait for us,
In voices heard before the listening,
In faces that vanish under focus,
Wait for us, wait for us, our scent, our smell
In cracked boortree, water at the dawn well.

7 KAVANAGH.

It’s nearly night.The fields of Seancoban
Tighten around their drumlin and drumlin
Rims stretching away to the drain of dusk
Are settled in their wait. The lunar mask
Will soon descend, the moon’s night gown soon fall
After the cord of day is stretched and cut
And the shreds of umbilical spiral
To the dark. When your chapel wall is lit
With first light I will go and enter there
And move bareheaded along the side aisle
And the night’s cold still alive in the bone,
I'll take to the knee at the altar rail
And bow, and bow that a great grief colour
To dusk and die in the white of the dawn.

8 MERCATOR.

My map of the world hangs in Mercator,
Stretched Siberia, vast Anctartica,
Contracted land along the equator
At Africa and South America.
Slow light in winter hardened the contour
All along the edges of the ocean,
Rising, fading, rising into my stare
In the image of a crucified man.
Those swollen polar extremities stretched
Into the open meridian drew out
At the hollow more and more as I watched
Land and ocean exchange the fading light.
But dark always came before I might see
All retract to its globularity.

9 WINGS

The gravity of age is draining out
Thinking ways that once rendered full delight
In younger times, thought then arousing thought
Before those lovers parted with their lot.
Less wise now, being a wiser man, I plant
No flag on any hill and am content
To journey as the swan. An old one now
Moving as the starling, an old one now
Full of migration and autumn moorings,
Full of the rook and gull, full of the eel,
Of things rising to go and falling things,
Full of turn and spin, long cry, long long call.
The gravity of age has drained me dry
Awaiting wings to land with, wings to fly.

In Paradiso
(The final victory of slave and servitude)

Under the world's skin,
Beneath the eyes of land and ocean
Unheeded rages pace.
Only at Etna's shout or Krafla,
Or the shaking of the door
At Agadir and San Andreas
Do heads rouse and turn before
Lapsing at lull and cooling lava.

Once they were pitied, these
Named as Death and Death,
And when their muffled voices
Clamoured stars, their breath,
Froth, shaping the world's balm,
Yes, to call and roar pity came,
They sinking under their skin
Land, sea and all that dwell therin.

But we are settled now and old
We of the sea and the land.
Our set hearts can now endure
What throbs on below our world,
And take the way of human kind
That these are born to dwell in fire
We, moving on the pedestal
Of their burning, writhing spiral.

Now, deeper in their sunken place
Roars die and die. The tremor
Of their pasage as a great throat
Swallowing shakes once and no more.
The fire, the fire has taken them
They who came from fire.
The fire has not forsaken them
They whose love was fire.

At the heart of the great furnace
Brightness as solar fusion
A shade of body, a flawless face
Lies motionless. Noon or dawn within
There opens its glassy eyes,
And raising itself from an elbow
Into its fullest rise
Moves around in the inferno.


BUT WE WERE DRUNK THEN.

Cromwell fresh from Wexford Town
And the dark set of blood.
Cromwell’s reassembled throng,
Brattle of armour, strike of shod
Return to the camp line by line
For prayers of thanksgiving,
For hymn and victory song,
And into sleep, and night's toss- Oh then?
But we were drunk then.
Somebody set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.

Only should blinding light come
Would Pizzaro lament the Inca dead
Or Titus mourn Jerusalem,
Or Herod grip his head in shame.
Only should light strike
Would Paul of Tarsus beg the dark
In skin locked at eyelid
And moan, and curse- Oh then?
But we were drunk then.
Somebody set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.

Our piper's fingers shaped the ancient
Impulse of the race, a first cry
From first born, the story went,
Departing from a lover's balm
Moved off half soul, half body,
Tossed, twisting storm as calm
And every motion the possession
Of the vanished lover.
Our singers moved around that tune.
Dancers stepped it up the floor.

And dusk is full of beginnings,
High above the west rim
Beyond the starling and the plover
Glowing warrior and lover
Soar upon the shores of day
Until their wings fall away.
Only at the still pendulum
Might lips move, whisper pass- Oh then?
But we were drunk then.
Somebody set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.

They live on Paradise, they
Moving under long oppression
Bring their flower in full blossom
Before the arc of dawn.
Rendered old, rendered young with pain
Stand attention to their dream,
And all that is not of Eden
Hated in the oppressor’s way,
All who should feed the root
Of the forbidden fruit,

And war it is. War the call.
The tidal surge won’t turn
Until its moon is spent.
Prayers floats there, supplication
On the shore bound swell
And rock and great rock shaken.
After, the seas, the shrunken, penitent
Seas far out lap remorse- Oh then?
But we were drunk then.
Somebody set us drunk.
Someone slipped drink into our glass.

THE HUNGER
(Moving among the great
impassive forces of nature.)

At the parting of forty seven
In the great shedding of skin
We moved still wet
Out of our cracked scale.
We had known this of old and thought
The tide of things re grow
Its flesh, and all scar and heal,
Now watched it crack again
Layer after layer until
By forty nine the bare bone
Bone dry of marrow
Ended our expectation.

2
We had thought until then
That they who lorded over us
Must have mercy on us.
We had thought the great plight
Might bring the great repeal
And name our names, raise us, raise us,
Christ, we prayed our eyes out
Into dream and child’s call
And call again, and dream again,
Into gull and gannet’s wail,
Into voices telling us
Nature itself was evicting us.

3
Out on the Atlantic shoreline
The tidal lungs of ocean move.
Beyond drought, beyond rain,
Beyond the river’s offering
Hollow and flow fill and leave.
We stay awhile, we stand and hear
From turn of dawn, the morning roar
Into evening’s long lament
Face past our moment,
Sound past our lingering.
And now must ride the ghostly boat
And enter blindly to it’s keep,
Enter down the ocean’s plight
The lunar craving of the deep.

4
Slow movers in the Sinai
Forge their sandy waves.
Behind, the Red Sea line
As a glow of distant land
Holds out on the horizon.
They stop. They turn. They face west
The great concourse,
A minute’s silence to their saviour
Thinning between heaven and earth.
The dusk settles to their quiet.
The moments hold the vast peace
Until a shout breaks it up
And all turn and move again,
The city on the march
In full deliverance,
On toward the kingdom,
To the milk, to the wild honey,
Old heads full of freedom.
Young heads full of victory.

TOO BRIGHT, TOO SOON.

Too bright, too soon your star appeared,
Too west the fanning wind,
And though you lie an ember now
Below your slow burning peer
Leave them be, let them burn,
Your white ash is come of fire
Old winds will fan and flare,
Older, older winds will flare.

Maybe at a sunset you have stood
Trembling as the trembling sun
Like an old age eye at sleep's refrain
Sink beneath a closing lid,
And the slow dark come its way
And you that moved in full array,
In plume and fanfare move alone
Walking the shadows of the moon.

Maybe only an aged hermit
In a wild sea-broken place
Wail his vast untroubled peace.
Maybe he, for whom no god or prophet
Broke a promise, breath the air
As deep as youth, day long or star
And endless raise of arm to bless
The visitation of his wilderness.

But the ages knew it in their bones.
The ages made it into song
They tormented by their dawns
Still and all followed dark,
And somewhere into sleep
Entered the flow of dreaming
All the sunlit night, and a breath drop,
And rise, and voice strain to speak,

A Voice after long inhale, a gravel rattle
In the sea’s departing swell
And the return of breath
At shoreline froth
And a voce from there sound clear
As one who never spoke before,
Sounding out of the suds
The slow, full deliberate words-

"Do not enter. Do not enter
Fresh from Spring to bloom
Into the summer core.
Do not feed that sweetest dream
You alighting from your loft,
Do not spread that wing to ride,
A wing no wind will lift,
An air no gull can glide-

For the gods made youth for the body,
The gods made age for the soul,
And all who break that ancient way
Will touch their anger, stir their pain
And take you to the prison cell
And as you stare out through the bars
Hear them chant their old refrain
Relentlessly around your ears-

In the absence is the creation-
In the parting is the coming, and until
We bear what can not be borne,
Unless we raise what can not be lifted,
When none can hear our last call,
Until no one knows our route or road
The waters will not divide,
The Red Sea remains in flood.

Too bright, too soon your star appeared,
Too west the fanning wind,
And though you lie an ember now
Below your slow burning peer
Leave them be, let them burn,
Your white ash is come of fire
Old winds will fan and flare,
Older, older winds will flare.