The Tiger’s Roar

She came from a town near the border,
Once jungle, now scrub,
Once peaceful, now disputed.
At dusk, as a young girl,
Lying on her raffia bed,
She would hear the lion roar
Its homage to the day, now kissed goodnight.
She would think it was roaring for her,
Afraid that it would poke its strong head
Through the mud walls
And she would feel its warm breath,
Catch the gleam of its sharp teeth
Before it carried her off like a rag doll
Into the cushioned undergrowth.

Now she lives in two rooms
High above the snarling street,
A spear’s throw from the spot
Where Pearse issued his proclamation
Cherishing all citizens.
The vans growl
And the buses shriek
And titanic tussles rise
From the nearby watering-hole,
Cacophanising the coarse air.
Sullen tribesmen stare out from the stairwell,
Decorated, menacing.

She flicks the chipped switch
And straightens the kettle’s frayed cable,
Casting a careless eye
At the dark patch melting down the wall.
A month’s grime curtains the sash window.
Flakes of white paint lie stricken on the sill.

They tell her the tiger is still roaring
And she lies awake at night
Straining to hear it.

Three Trees Leaning

In the grounds of Strokestown House,
Where, every year,
Newborn free verse poetry
Totters out of the open French windows
And gambols with the lambs
On spindly, uncertain legs,
There stand three trees leaning.
Leaning like broken teeth,
Each points not heavenward,
But slightly to the left of it,
As if heaven were a cliché to be shunned.
What caused this angular deviation from the norm?
One could be a maverick.
Two might be coincidence,
But three suggests a revolutionary movement,
Breaking from tradition with an impudent flourish.
The three trees of the apocalypse?
Where should the poet aim? At heaven?
Or slightly to the left of it?
Words flying staccato-like
Through the stratosphere and ionosphere,
Each chiselled like a personal bullet.

Three pillars to the inexact science
Striving obliquely toward literary perfection.
Silvered bark, straight and sleek,
Roots buried deep in the earth
On which druids recited to deafening applause.
Did their words fly to their target
As from three cannons pointed at the invading army?
Did their words find their range,
Or did the lyrical bombs drop harmlessly short
Unheard and ignored
Amid a cacophany of alarm bells?

The villagers of Kap Dan

“This tribe” said our guide,
As we crunched through frosted snow
In our patent Italian shoes,
“Was only discovered in 1884,
When they plucked some shipwrecked Danish whalers
From the treacherous East Greenland currents.”
Unaware that they were not alone,
These primitive beings
Still inhabited an ice-age world
Of flint-topped spears
And sealskinned umiaks,
Invoking forgotten gods
As they battled the harshest conditions on earth
On a daily basis.
In return,
The Danes gave them religion,
Education,
Realisation,
Social security,
Whiskey
And deep-chasmed despair.

Wizened and deadened faces bore no animosity
As they shuffled around in a makeshift dance,
Complete with vague chants,
In a demonstration of Inuit culture.
A little girl in a pink anorak with synthetic fur
Thrust a carved walrus tusk into my hand
And held out a grubby hand in silence.

And if perchance we are visited
By higher beings from behind the iceberg clouds,
Will we not all just shrug our shoulders,
Twist the cap from the bottle
And wonder what’s the point?

Young man old man

As a young man,
He thought he’d killed an Austrian in a fight,
Pounded him to death with bearlike hands.
His father, helpless to his awful plight,
Packed him off to strange far-distant lands.
To Tunis and beyond he made his way.
With Nubian women three years he did dwell
Until his father wrote to him to say
“He lives, come home, the world is looking well.”

As an old man
‘Tis now disease, but then the loon was just
A mad old Swiss man, querulous and frail.
A strong mind crumbled into yellow dust
Behind those eyes expressionless and pale.
And though he knew not daughters nor his wife,
He spoke about those women dark and warm
Who cradled him for three years of his life
And drew their veils across the howling storm.

Silence

The hum from the distant dual carriageway
Has settled in my ears
Like a thin film of wax.
It paints crude pictures in my dreams
And greases down my hair.
A plane bound for New York or Athens
Buzzes behind a cloud.
A lawnmower somewhere hammers out
Its rheumy rhythm
As birds chatter excitedly.

Where would I find true silence?
In the desert? On the ice-cap?
Maybe only in death.
Would I even hear it if it bellowed down my ear
Through a foghorn?

No miracle needed

Like a yellow blanket,
The size of a small nation,
The wheat field gleams in the sunlight,
Waiting for the crowning hum of harvest
With purring pleasure.
Thick and strong, the ripe ears
Breathe the soil in the triumph.
The farmer stands on a gatepost
And, shading his eyes against the reflected glare,
Smiles.

From Newfoundland to Norway,
Squat trawlers winch in groaning nets,
Setting down their struggling catch,
A writhing mass that slithers and slides
Before the hold is battened down.
The skipper taps his pipe and re-lights.

Five million loaves and two million fish
And still the people at the back go hungry.

James Shaw, Cooldramun

James Shaw, Cooldramun,
It must be great fun
To lie in the earth
Many years from your birth
With a poet next door
Underneath the brown floor.
Are you now best mates
With W.B Yeats?