Paddy Doyle

For my grandmother

Your love was as natural as the hawthorn
that blessed us with blossoms year after year,
as faithful as the blue tits who return
each spring, to build their nest in Noonan’s pier.
Friday nights when the adults had gone out
your stories opened doors to hidden worlds -
our minds were like swallows flying south,
along the ancient songline of your words.

With you we could always be children,
creeping through hedges to fields full of rhyme.
And we gathered the hazelnuts of your wisdom
as we wandered the old folkways of your mind -
where your memory and our fantasy
merged on the same magical frequency.

You knew why flash lamps failed in fairy rings.
Once you brought a calf back from the dead.
When you spoke to the world behind all things
they seemed to answer every prayer you said.
From signs left behind by things unseen
you deciphered all we needed to know -
’the Clomantagh dogs are barking, Paudín’,
meant an east wind was bringing frost or snow.

Running barefoot through the dew wet grass,
we picked mushrooms in the cobwebbed dawn.
On Easter Sunday morning, after early Mass
you blessed the crops, as Christ was being reborn -
as we drank three sups of holy water apiece
the sun danced three times for joy in the East.

Birthday Poem

In the corner of my garden
the black cat stalks a robin,
while on the rooftop above my room
two jackdaws squabble it out
- the prize- a chimney pot,
I presume.

The sea is an unremarkable
grey blue and the wind
is neither warm nor cold,
although the yellow tulips
are slow to open this morning,
which weatherwise,
I suppose, could be taken
as some sort of warning,

A crow lands on the unleafed
branches of a sycamore tree
and leaves again, abruptly,
having suddenly remembered
an important appointment
with some other season.

These are the gifts laid out
before me on the morning
of my thirty-first birthday.
Nothing terribly mythic or
memorable, just another mandala
of apparently insignificant moments,
arranged lovingly, with the loose,
humorous, perfect articulation
of a master artist.

So thank you, thank you, thank you
for blessing me with such presence
again and again.
And thank you, thank you
for creating a world
of such extra
ordinary
beauty.

Mushrooms (1)

Moments, now, when memory opens again, the wound
of being severed from the land from which I grew,
stirs the longing to return and to walk once more
through the fields of my emerging story;
those soft September mornings of my childhood
and I out gathering mushrooms by the bucketful
in Doolin’s, the Castle Park, or down in the Wood,
when no human hand had touched the dew before me.

Fog hung low over Doherty’s Hollow.
A curlew cried in the prayer pregnant dawn.
Across the brightening sky, wild ducks flew
among the fading stars, from Noonan’s Pond
to Philomena’s Moor and on out over the Spa,
while all about the sleep stilled field
clusters of moon white mushrooms shone
like constellations against the dark green grass.

Precious moments when innocence
exposed us the miraculous
and the strange new promise growing
in the mist blessed corners of familiar fields.
O the child delight of being awake to a world still dreaming
and the first whispered verses of these poems
that emerge like mushrooms now,
from the silence of my sleeping years.

Hawk Song

Give me wings
that I may rise above these woods
to where that hawk stands
majestic in the sky

hover there
with effortless artistry,
wings caressing the wind
with perfect articulation.

Not the slightest
flicker of thought
to separate my instinct
from my action.

With the ease of impulse
I would rise

make daring twists
and turns of phrase

soar swoop glide

free fall
through the
spinning air

down
down

into the woods

below

snatch
my startled self

and rise again

triumphant

through the trembling air

In the sky
I would find the certainty
that these woods hide from me.

Down here
my thoughts get tangled
like the brambles
twisting through the undergrowth
as I thrash blindly about
without reason or rhyme

dead leaves
swallowing the thud
of my earthbound feet,
words threading heavily
across my tongue,
as I trudge on
through tired confusion

stopping only
now and then
to catch my breath

sit and rest
on the ground
between my thoughts

rest
and rise
above the trees
to where that hawk stands
majestic in the sky

soar swoop glide

behold the world

through

hawk heightened awareness

and for an
all too fleeting moment

spread my wings

across the
immeasurable freedom

of being human.

Holy

Sitting in the car
with my wife
and young son
about to set out
on some ordinary
everyday trip

I suddenly feel,
an overwhelming
sense of
holiness.

Not full of holes
as I used to feel

but whole
in the sense
that I am coming
fully into myself

that I am here, now,
at the centre
of my own life

here, now,
with my son
and beautiful wife.

Wild Imagining

Something is stirring in me now.
Some age old understanding
has awoken deep down inside me,
as I come to know again the deep
intimacy of belonging to this place
with every cell of my being.

Here on this heather covered hillside
I am a wild imagining.
My body is the entire valley
stretched out sleeping in the sun,
from Clomantagh in the north
to Kilcooley in the south.

Wild swans swim
in the still ponds of my eyes.
A hare bounds across my bosom.
When a hawks shadow darkens my skin
snipe screech a warning,
scattering in every direction.

My shirt is a summer meadow
dew washed and perfumed with wild flowers.
A pheasant is nesting in the pocket.
In the circular enclosure of my collar
a blackbird is singing on a whitethorn bough
and I have never felt so beautiful.

Such music has never pulsed through my veins.
Such words; ecstatic vibrations
in the lap-lap-lapping of my streams.
Such visions; my eyes are stars
gazing out across the immaculate
imagination of a moonlit sky.

No tongue has known such parables of stone
as my wild hilltops speak
in the broad-voweled dialect
of their rugged boulders.
The wind etches hieroglyphs
on the manuscript of my skin.

These woods are my dreams.
These rivers are my veins.
Through myself I wander,
barefoot, praying for visions,
turning the pages of my own
green gospel in time to the seasons.
All around is a living mythology,
A shrine preserving my people’s soul,
layer upon layer of monument and memory
woven together with soil and with song
till the landscape itself is a language,
mo Gaia-teanga, my native tongue.

Here I kneel on the proud ground of my people
and realise the true wealth of my inheritance.
Here my roots reach deep and remember,
my voice wells up full of ancestral song
and my eyes weep rivers of eloquence
for I am a landscape dreaming.

Come, my love.

Come to me, my sea bright blue eyed love,
my hands are trembling with desire, to trace
the fine honed features of your precious face,
your breasts, the soft sweet curve above
your thighs. Come, my love, we must die
to all that is human, come to know again
the peace of river, rock, meadow, mountain,
the heart-breaking beauty of a curlew’s cry.

Come caress my heather scented hair,
lay your body down on my soft green grass.
My poems to you are rock rippled streams,
thrushes wings singing in the evening air.
And though all these things will come to pass
we’ll be the ever-living substance of all dreams.