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Uploaded October 2015 (3 poems) Click for Readings
The Bee
Encounters on a walk in the walled garden of a beautiful retreat centre near Perth.
The bee did not mean to disturb and startle me
as it brushed my face. It simply did not see me there. The bee did not mean to disturb the wasp gathering nectar on the flower. It simply did not see it there. And the wasp settled back to its task when the disturbance passed. Can I too settle back if life disturbs me? Should I want to? Or should I allow the disturbance to show me a new place a new flower a new source of nectar? |
In Evening Light
This poem is a reflection, first on external and then on internal realities.
In terms of the ideas in it, I regard it as the most important poem in this collection.
In terms of the ideas in it, I regard it as the most important poem in this collection.
As evening shades into night
the shapes in the garden in this quiet suburban cul-de-sac assume simpler boldler outlines. The towering woodland trees, young saplings fourteen years ago when my wife and I first visited, are deceptive in their stillness and the remedial night is full of the sounds I know I cannot hear. The moth and the bat the barn owl and the vole keep their tryst and to its lair the fox will return to feed its young for in the ecology of the earth the unreflective life of the woodland is so much more important than I. Four dimensions including time encompass reality as we experience it but even with another seven curled incomprehensibly small quantum physics struggles to describe all that there is as too with those dimensions within ourselves that we can never truly comprehend |
yet which give to our lives
their profoundest meaning. Thus some forty years ago in my early thirties I perforce faced the unfathomed within me when painfully perturbed by violent events then unfolding in my native province in Ireland. To relieve my feelings I wrote some poems then for the first time since my teens or rather some poems wrote me and six weeks ago I returned to writing as a poem* came unbidden to my mind after a bee had brushed my face and disturbed and startled me and I wrote - .. if life disturbs me should I allow the disturbance to show me a new place? .. I cannot know what life holds in store in these generous twilight years, but the welcome disturbance I now feel comes not from any external event but from a poetic urge within. So I said to my soul be still be still and be deceptive in your stillness. * The Bee |
Head to Tail
Of rabbits and men
A rabbit sat by a railway
Watching slow carriages go by While the express in the other direction Was obscured to his watching eye. Thinking it safe to venture He sauntered across the track Then saw the express train coming Too late to be turning back. He tried to scamper to safety And was sure he had made it alright Till his little tail behind him Suddenly vanished from sight. |
His wretched rump he regarded
And the sight of it made him sore "They will laugh at me in the burrow And the ladies will want me no more!" His tail he ran back to recover For who could blame his distress But the train that truncated his body Made even more of a mess. So I say to all of those fellows Too easily instinct led While chasing a wee bit of fluff Don't go losing your head. |