The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram
When I came in, and I was embarrassed
By old men standing up to shake my hand

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

In the porch I met my father crying—
He had always taken funerals in his stride—
And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

Into your virtual city I’ll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost

Into your virtual city I’ll have passed
Unregistered by scans, screens, hidden eyes,
Lapping myself in time, an absorbed face
Coming and going, neither god nor ghost,
Not at odds or at one, but simply lost

So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.

On you go now! Run, son, like the devil
And tell your mother to try
To find me a bubble for the spirit level
And a new knot for this tie’

…Putting it up to him
With a smile that trumped his smile and his fool’s errand,
Waiting for the next move in the game.

A four foot box, a foot for every year.

At their inauguration, public leaders
must swear to uphold unwritten law and weep to atone for their presumption to hold office.

It’s you, blackbird, I love…

The automatic lock
Clunks shut, the blackbird’s panic
Is shortlived, for a second
I’ve a bird’s eye view of myself,
A shadow on raked gravel
 
In front of my house of life
 
On the grass when I arrive,
In the ivy when I leave.

RIP Charlie

Masons, when they start upon a building,
Are careful to test out the scaffolding;

So if, my dear, there sometimes seem to be
Old bridges breaking between you and me
Never fear. We may let the scaffolds fall
Confident that we have built our wall.

Vowels ploughed into other: opened ground.
The mildest February for twenty years
Is mist bands over furrows, a deep no sound
Vulnerable to distant gargling tractors.
Our road is steaming, the turned-up acres breathe.

In the wet gap of the year,
Daubed with fresh lake mud,
I faltered near his power —
January God.

As if he had been poured
in tar, he lies
on a pillow of turf
and seems to weep
the black river of himself.

The grain of his wrists
is like bog oak,
the ball of his heel
like a basalt egg.

His instep has shrunk
cold as a swan’s foot
or a wet swamp root.

Clearances that suddenly stood open.
High cries were felled
and a pure change happened.

A light appeared and the place brightened
the way the sky does when heaven’s candle
is shinning clearly

On Christmas Eve my father would tell us,

“He’s on his way now, coming round Slieve Gallon, if you listen hard maybe you’ll hear the sleigh bells.”

I remember climbing the beech tree at the end of our lane, listening through the frosty air.

Ireland said goodbye to an Irish poet & balladeer today.

I could have been someone
Well so could anyone
You took my dreams from me
When I first found you
I kept them with me babe
I put them with my own
Can't make it all alone
I've built my dreams around you

Shane MacGowan RIP

Hope is not optimism, which expects things to turn out well, but something rooted in the conviction that there is good worth working for.