ChristmasA bright punctuation O winters inexorable Fall into the dark and cold You come and bring the  Stories young and old

In deep night, I ping to crystal life
Windows, layered and luminous.
Flick, flick, flick, flick … flick
Toward a tabled trove of weather,
A legacy of love and longing:
London (daughter’s daughter cries),
Wuhan (son reading Lao Tzu sighs),
Belfast (mother lives and later dies)…

The Fat Cats at the water board have not got a clue
Of all the clever things, that this liquid stuff can do
Its very changability is half what makes it nice…

It was like any other calendar,
Free from Jenson’s Auto Parts,
Arriving in a cardboard sleeve,
Sporting a dozen bronzed,
Airbrushed, beauties, curves
Immaculate if a little unlikely,
Their smiles, on the beach or
The Ferrari, a dazzling
Mix of desperation and disdain…

It comes, as heavy as a stone,
Seasoned reminder of a Mother’s love,
Of old aromas, when the oven drove
Slow-fired fruit into a loam…

My world was drumlins and the flat
Lough lapping in the mists
My world the curlew’s haunting call
Where flax and grasses twist…

In dolorous months we await the word
To let the nagging riddle of our pain,
That holds the moth of life in chain,
To this vertiginous intelligence be fed…

Silent as a fish it waits, now rises,
Her thought, carried down unseen,
Not by demand, but in a letting go,
Nourished in the dark archaic stream…

those first fresh encounters,
eager in innocence,
stories from the dark side
passed me on the fence…

When that certain day comes
And there is no more to do
But surrender the senses
Sadly glady one follows one
So all that is left is sound
To leaven the last cognitions
And flute the tumbling chambers
Of a fast dissolving mind
Would you sit and sing me
Down the shining river?

The pines, etched on Aegean blue,
Flail their fine batons as if to conduct
The faint moaning of the shrouds
As sail is sliced up into the flow
And whips like a greyhound,
Frantic before the lead is slipped…

Two farm-dogs yapped throughout,
Scuffling at a splintered gate.
We loaded the boot from the cellar,
Sweat blind, cursing the summer heat.
He primed the device, and we left
And wove between the low
Hills, not saying much, on duty…

Their sky was also blasted
By bleak winds, whipping
From the ocean to the sparse land,
Its solitary trees, its unfeatured
Tracts of dripping bog…

With force not seen outwith the ring
I grapple with this little thing
and undiscouraged by his howling
try to bind him up in toweling…

It takes courage to die,
To step like a foal
Into unknowing,
Stumbling to your feet
In the vastness,
Completely surprised…

KiteFlapping fabric, wind released,Made something by unseenessYou expand ecstaticallyGay in your gradual ascent.Unwinding into enormity. You tug, puppy impetuousYearning cloud freedomBarracking the wind, arguing with airShouting yourself into...

From her carapace the black blood spills,
Carbon cataract, capacitor of ancient sun,
Blood to nourish, Gaian blood which kills.

She shines when she speaks of you,
As if cooling at a mountain stream,
Counting her blessings like diamonds,
Or rousing from a lover’s dream
Where banns of love are read…

Half the night is gone
When I stumble to the bathroom,
By tradition kept lit,
As guiding beacon for children
Adrift on the sea of sleep.
By her room I stop and,
Half-remembering some teenage promise
Of return to this inessential harbour,
Clink through the glass curtain…

Locking on at Rubha nan Clach The pod skews in from starboard, Raiding our attention in arcs, In sinuous tandemed leaps…

Pressure’s good round here.
Twin cataracts charge the tub
With churned water into which
I immerse with sufficient pain
To sometimes feel strangely cold…

In the attic is a box,
The cardboard cold and dusted
Like something olden…