Over the Boundaries (5 page)

He came and went alone.

My faith’s been shattered, life on the rocks,

Swimmer of confident stroke or love,

Most beautiful of all,

Take me to the deep end of the pool.

A journalist fell down the stairs and died.

Or so the story goes. A politician

Fell off a ladder and passed on.

And a mother drove off a pier, her two unsuspecting

daughters

In the back seat, drowning all three —

All this in the course of the last twenty-four hours.

Floods leave a million homeless in Mozambique,

Carry hundreds to a watery grave,

The living sit among the rotting dead

When the floodwaters recede.

Don’t tell me everything’s alright in your world, babe,

Though to look at you, I believe it is —

All you need is love and love is what you’ve got

Right here, right there, everywhere you look,

A force to counter the dark side in us,

Set to rights the wrongs committed, the hurt caused;

Suffering is but for an instant

In the eternal scheme of things,

Death but a part of life, as

We are born anew again each day, forever.

Your hand reached out

In dancer’s measured motion,

Fingers held mine

In the vertex of the arch

For rivers and floods

That silently flowed

For things done and left undone,

For words spoken and more

For whar was left unsaid.

Though I looked for pity,

I found none.

I fell, fell

On daggers spread

Thick as grass —

Their hearts were cold

As his body was,

Cold as stone.

To the memory of Brian Murphy

I grieved, was angry,

I ranted and railed.

Then stopped, prayed,

Wept slow, silent tears

For the youth I feared

Murdered in cold blood.

His open, wide-embracing smile,

His beautiful, intelligent head

Beaten, kicked to a pulp,

His blood now on their hands

On the night he sang,

‘Hail, milk provider….’

You custodians of youth,

Warm blood beating in your veins,

Look right, look left, look back

And back again from whence you came.

“Oh, your teeth,” they cry, fingers pointing,

“You will lose them if you don’t do something.”

And I think to myself: Yeah, and much more

Will be lost besides when a flood of trouble subsides.

They are my sisters, younger than I,

They tell me how I should walk,

Not seeing the infinite journey stretched out behind

I walked to find you,

The one I am travelling still,

Nor the painful steps I take each day

To reach them where they are,

Lives buried in the outside tracks.

They are my sisters, older than I;

They silence me when I speak,

Not caring to know what lies ahead, either good or bad.

Lost to the home I loved,

The steps by the backdoor cried out to me in sleep:

“Come back, come back to us.”

Like Ossian returning from Tir na nOg,

I stood dumbfounded on the spot,

The stream flowed down before me unloved,

The trees leaned over weeping

For all that passed beside, between them now

Was destined for the reaper’s hook,

The knife that would know no pleading

And I could not stop the stones in their grieving

And I could not console the trees in their weeping.

I will keep the back door open —

You may choose one day to come that way.

The front door is closed forever,

I have flung the key far and wide

Into the measureless depths of his love,

Love whereinsoever I would have

That you had bathed… And I am free,

Free as the great white clouds

That roll over and under

The still amorphous form

Of the victim’s face.

As the plop of a stone

In a dark pool,

My name rang out –

Tone deep, crystal clear.

It sounded as a name

I never heard before

And sounded yet

As it did always.

I rose in an instant,

Crying, ‘Yes, yes,’

Opened the curtains wide,

Letting the morning light through -

I looked outside for the distant figure

Or neighbour near

Who had called my name thus:

It floats still on the desert air.

You’re just a ship, Maud,

And the bow thereof at that,

A vehicle of change

While we men are the instigators

Of great and infamous acts —

We bore Helen away and won her back.

High and mighty and impossible as you are,

You cannot change that —

Womb-man, born to receive,

Why don’t you go home

And stop turning men’s heads,

Let the poor remain poor, the ignorant unfree

And let the status quo be?

Argo Navis

Standing in the poop of Argo’s generous line,

Riding the heaven’s bewildering light years in time;

Castaways, you know the world we leave behind,

Stowaways, our only bundle, this faith

In a light and power we cannot explain,

This hope in a love as deep as a million skies.

Ship of ships, ark of arks,

Suffer us to ride as far out as we can

In the arms of your breaking tide.

All On a Winter’s Morn

Doors slam shut, the sound of a jeep humming to life

And she was gone with her saddle and bridle and buckets

of feed.

I struggled to pull on my socks and jeans, groggy with

sleep,

The sun just about to rise over the southern horizon.

Family members wandering about or breakfasting - we

exchange

Half-finished sentences of greeting, eyes adjusting to the

light.

The dogs launch into loud yodelling as I gather up the

leads and

Head for the hill. The road now clear of early morning

traffic,

I tune in blissfully to the birds’ broken song.

Jack, the German Sheperd, takes off after a neighbour’s

pointer,

Heedless of my cries and screams. Soon back and called

to heel,

We set ourselves for the steep climb. Turning for a

breather,

Half-way up, I saw the wide vale below covered in dense

fog

As though it were the sea with tree-lines like sandbanks

breaking through

And, on our way down the other side, houses with little

patches of green,

Like islands, had begun to appear. Not having abandoned

post

For so long and living inland all the while, the sea, it

seemed,

And mysteries deep, had finally come to me.

I showed my card,

You played your hand against it.

I threw the ace down,

You followed it with yours

And so we played until

One day you found me crying

And you took my empty hands,

Held them firmly in yours,

Just like I had done

One sunny Sunday in the crowd

Years and moons before.

Want to type a poem for you,

Paint the wall white again

And write my new logo on it —

Words of truth, of life,

Pick up my old bike, black machine,

And see you ride.

The moon is a curved line

Above the hill on the horizon

Where you sleep or dream to-night

And I am come alive in the flame of love, of fire,

Brother has for sister, and, new testament tried,

Mother has for child.

Your love is light;

My thoughts like rocks

Fall down, imprisoning.

Your love is deep

As the ocean turning upon itself

Washing my soul.

Your love is love:

The boy-child opens his little fist

Of two or more crushed blackberries

To his older sister’s face.

The sun sets in the west casting

Rays of gold on a full lapping tide,

Illuminating all in its path,

O lustrous sea, seaweed -

I stand, infinitesimal, a mere dot

At the river’s edge.

Touch this land, this heart of ours, Lord.

Transform us in your love,

Your radiant light.

As surely as the sun withdraws,

Leaving a cold green sea behind,

There is only darkness without you.