Mourne is not broken

Kilkeel, Kingdom of Mourne

has a brook that chuckles

over the stones,

confident of its power.

When it swelled into

a torrent that uprooted trees

and flooded the ground floor 

of these Green Cottages.

A curious term to me

these rooms that seem

more liike suites

in a shared building.

Art or magic.

Like the kitchen

and dining hall

called the Barn.

We are charmed.

We willingly follow Jenny

down the garden path

without any deception

to meet the trees and goats,

the two cats, black Hamilton

and striped tabby Walmsley

have already introduced themselves.

Now Jenny tells us

about the hawthorne tree

the magical fairy tree

with leaves shaped like wee hands.

And I smile at Keenan

with whom I share a home

 because we live

on Hawthorne Avenue.

This green place has begun

to lure me into its

wild erotic embrace,

it embodies the word, bower.

The seductive power

for a forest and tree lover

like me. I didn’t know that

Ireland had such forests.

In my sense of the place

it was more pasture and hedge,

stone walls and farm cottages.

Well, it’s lovely to meet you, dear.

May I call you Erin?

I want kiss your sweet branches

and the fork of your trunk,

breathe the spicy scent of your leaves.

You have sylvan sister back home,

who I call Molly Madrone.

Because her limbs are supple

and smooth as sun warmed skin

And they are green silk

when the paper thin orange

peels off. Now I have learned,

that your robes once cloaked

far more of the island,

until the Empire cut you,

stripped you, and ploughed you

to make their plantations.

A familiar story everywhere

isn’t it? I’m sorry.

When you drink

from the river, do the rocks

chuckle and wish you Sláinte?

Does the breeze whisper it softly?

When the wind and the river get jealous

and tear at your clothes?

Forgive them, forgive me,

I love you.

Dublin

Four days late for Bloomsday,

but we made it to Dublin before

summer’s longest day, shortest night.

I didn’t bring my bowler hat

anyway and I don’t have

a waistcoat. But we walked

through St Stephen’s Green where

Irish Citizens Army volunteers

were pinned down during the

Easter Rising by a British Army

machine gun on the 4th floor

of the Shelbourne Hotel

 

and paired with another one

at the United Services Club

and snipers in many windows.

We sat on a bench behind

the Park Superintendent’s

cottage. A sign said that there

was a ceasefire for an hour

each morning of the siege

so that he could feed the ducks.

Today young couples reclined on the

warm afternoon grass, and today’s

children fed bread to the ducks. 

A young man walked by where

we sat. He balanced two shallow

white boxes with the word Doom

printed in heavy black letters

along on the side. Slices of Doom

Detroit style rectangular pizza,

claimed as the best in Dublin,

a far cry from cockles and mussels

alive, alive-o sold from a cart

by the legendary Molly Malone

affectionately known by the locals

as “the tart with the cart”.

William Faulkner wrote in

Requiem for a Nun, “The past

is never dead, it’s not even past”.

The past in Dublin is aswirl

and awash in a flood of bronze

figures and monuments to its dead.

The emaciated figures of the Famine

victims and a starving dog stand and

sprawl before rough granite pillars.

A bust of Countess Markievicz, who

led volunteers in the Easter Rising

depicts her in a military uniform.

Probably the one she designed

for the Irish Citizens Army. She was

sentenced to death but was spared

for her tender gender, and two years

later she became the first woman

to be elected to the Parliament,

a position she refused to accept.

Nearby, just off the Grafton Street

shopping area, a shining figure

holding an electric bass guitar

stands between Boodles and

Bruxelles, Phil Lynott of Thin Lizzy.

Oscar Wilde lounges languorously

on a boulder across the street from

his childhood home in Merrion Square.

The Book of Kells, the 800-year-old

manuscript of the four gospels dwells

at a special Book of Kells Experience

at Trinity College. Hundreds of visitors

meander through kiosk-sized enlargements

of the exquisitely detailed postage stamp-sized

finials of the book. It resides in a glass cube

in a darkened room, where the crowds

are thin. The book is so small, so modest

in dimension and protected from harsh light.

Signs prohibit photographs, the light from

cameras and phones would be harmful.

And yet, a guard has to warn over and over

as someone ignores the prohibition,

Sir, no photos!, no photos! It’s the best

thing in the whole exhibition, the actual

real Experience, unmediated by

technology or academic exposition.

What I want to see, at the Museum

of Irish Literature, besides the multitude

of covers of Joyce’s Ulysses, or

peans to Yeats or Wilde, or Seamus Heany,

God love them all, is Samuel Beckett’s

telephone from his Paris apartment.

If I’d had that number back in 1972,

when  I was a conscientious objector

separating edible from inedible garbage

at a nuclear missile base in southern Germany,

I would have called him to thank him for his

novels, they carried me through a difficult time.

Because often it is only the absurd,

irreducible moment stripped to its core

that makes sense in an insane world.

Keenan bought me a gray tweed wool flat cap,

I know that I’ve been blessed; by God's grace,

Keenan's love, and Sam Beckett's books.

Al rededor

The little pile of turds

on the path that crowns

the mountain isn’t tended

by any flies.

Has Beelzebub called

them all to worship

at his golden toilet in

West Palm Beach?

I step carefully around it,

al rededor, “around”

a word I just learned

in my Spanish class.

Two women walking

swiftly pass me by

on the narrow trail.

They do not speak or

even seem to see me.

… poor Karen was in

the kitchen half the day

cooking for book club…

As warm as it now is,

I’ve yet to see any snakes.

Maybe they’re as wise

as Jesus said or perhaps

as peaceful as doves.

Although I hear them cry.

And crows rattling

their beaks like castanets,

the staccato tapping

of acorn woodpeckers 

like a two-finger typist

on an ancient Olivetti.

Down in the shadowed

canyon another couple

of hikers passes me by.

One says to the other:

“…she wants Stephen

cut out of every family

photo, can you believe it?

The other one says

Yes, I can because

he…well, you know

we all could see it

coming but still…wow”

A phrase I read floats up

from the silt that settles

in the bottom of the

pond that is my mind:

“I have slain them by

the words of my mouth:

and your judgments are

as the light that goes forth.”