The only secrets here
pay entry at the gate,

Beech roots trip
us over-thinkers,

These rings of stony candour
keep nothing to themselves.

[Photo – Monumental by Ailsa Naumann]

Mallards root
‘Neath Prometheus,

Detritus collects
On Grecian urns,

An angel,
With a missing wing, leaps
Into the void.

No pity for the mayfly,
Or envy for the evergreen,

No moon tonight,
Just drizzle in the street lamps,

Tea lights drift in the window,
And the crows have settled down.

The city is holding its breath,
Fingers drift over silk,

In the time between
The lightening and the thunder,

We conduct our secret affair.

Small graves, poor graves,
Lilies and the Virgin,

Poetry slips
From sagging limestone,

Willow seeds in the May breeze,
Glint, like lingering souls.

Despite a thousand disguises,
As it grows dark she’s revealed,
Humming in a mode only rivers know,

While the trees turn to spilled ink,
And the horses roll in the mead,
Like a heart murmur.

Night doesn’t fall,
but rises from the water,
Drowning the meadow in sound.

What the tide left behind;
barnacles and whale songs,
and a few of the best parts
of my father.

Dún Laoghaire is a stone
lifeboat that rises and falls,
but it’s a long town
for little legs,

so we made a giant
(you only get lighter)
and we made a slow-witted bear,
and we ran in the spray
as the shore gently sank.

Dún Laoghaire is a sand
castle, but the sea
doesn’t scare you.
As it washes away at your feet,
lighter and lighter you become.

As five swans, together, lift their weight,
With no little effort, toward the sky,
My eye, yet falls, admiring, nearer ground,
Where, on a branch that overhangs the lake,
Not starting at the egret’s cry,
She, unlocking not a sound,
Who hunting over-long would drown,
Reaches out her drenchèd wings to dry.

A grebe, unseen, submerged, passes near-by,
And on the shore mill pheasants, sheep and rabbits,
But clothed in nature’s charcoal-aged habit,
She busies not herself, but sits to dry.

And so a long in-breath becomes a sigh,
Cutting through all wandering, worried thoughts,
Just to watch her perch upon the over-hanging stalk,
And reach out her drenchèd wings, to dry.

Image: Cormorant by Sonja Molina, Instagram @sonlune

It was always cloudy
in the mornings
burning off by home time,
a play-ground of a town
gentle and wholesome
yellowing grass,
ride-on mowers in the parks
and palm trees.

A world of wall crayon
and wooden floors
under two-story glass facing west
into the garden, toward the sun
and the sea.

Shore lappings at the dog beach
or by the pier
volleyball beauties and
leather skin
held up with small bikinis

Experimenting with gravity
splinters, hot tubs and
bear-feet tears

Finger nails, freshly cut
Sunday’s cloth and
listening
to rows about politics,
dressed up as
work schedules,
kitchenware,
home economics,
while they carried, nestled in their hearts,
love’s arrow
launched from a fifties cartoon.

Oil rigs on the water,
and Catalina beyond
on a good day,
if the air was clear.
Smog inland
and tarmac almost melting
which Mexicans looking for work
seemed not to feel or notice
guarding a territorial line,
or threatening it
but anyway, mostly ignored.

Chattering echoes and
light rakes the oratory,

Everywhere blossom and soft warmth,
pebbles, litterfall.

A gift of small blisters,
rhythms on the common.

Tenement magnolias
singing in thought, and silently –

Lift up your hearts,
lift up your hearts.

The hills roll like eggs
with calcium texture

latticed in spiky monoculture
on cabbage-moth time

terracotta nests,
and territories, more
than we know.

Two stroke chopper drone,
bird-strike and rhythm and blues,

lichen-crusty hawthorn
and flat, crawling conifers,
ever-green and bloomless.

Library thoughts –
chattering reflections –

settling now
like brown sugar in porridge