Falling Apples (7 page)

In snow white pairs on their eggs they rest,

Screeching in bliss from their wedding beds.

Stack of shining rock red, black and brown,

With the water dripping from its sculpted face

To circles wheeling when we both look down

Into the pool of sunlit water at its sandy base.

Between ebb and flow our life time is short.

Neptune she rinses out all her seaweed hair

In the tide when it’s high in this happy resort

And often the sea as it sighs falls asleep there.

All on a day around they lay:

Unfinished poems in pieces;

Cups of tea about, half drunk,

Forgotten and turned cold.

As cold as poems unknown

Sent of to fght for life,

Often to die for dead poets

Who haunt themselves alone.

The penny candle wick burned on still

In its shallow well of clear melted wax:

It was a prayer to seek Our Lady’s care

In our bedroom on a night vigil in bed.

In Dublin’s fair city, up in the Coombe,

Our daughter was soon to give birth.

Then all of a sudden our vigil was over

As the mobile beside me went wild

With the joyful news of a new baby girl!

Her dad’s words at dawn so pulsating,

Like a shot of hot punch for the nerves;

With all the fresh pride of being a father

He talked of the baby’s light brown hair

And the sound of her cry on being born.

Beside him her mother was feeding her,

Still tired from the labour of childbirth

But so happy to look down on the dream

That at break of day had been delivered.

Happy in our new life as grandparents

We drew the curtains to start a new day

As the light of the long burning candle

Went out just at the end of our prayers.

It was the hand of Man not the will of God

Sealed their fate on their Haitian hillsides:

When the awful earth quake came to pass

The houses that were badly built collapsed;

Condemned for their impoverished lives,

Crying of sundered families suffering loss

Reaching many a mile to hardened hearts.

We now can compensate, albeit a little late,

For wilfully in our wealth forgetting Haiti.

When black clouds in the evening all hang low,

I can see no sunset and there is no afterglow,

My mind flies far until I land in sunny Thailand;

There for a change I am a turtle on the beach

That’s snowy white beneath a canopy of blue.

Sliding down to sea and diving deep below

I swim above that rainbow coloured seabed,

Off the land of Thai: lost in the Isle of Koh Tao.

Seated at the entrance to an alley,

A music man on a shopping mall

Played his own plaintive melody

On a fine tuned Romanian fiddle

Attached to a shiny trumpet horn.

Playing to us, an elder of his race:

A conversation without speaking,

His heart and soul in his playing-

Saying what he couldn’t say at all;

His brown felt hat upon his head,

His bike leant up against the wall.

The sudden snow that fell last night

Now clothes a world struck silent

By snowflakes falling slowly

As magical as a million falling stars,

Softly settling down below on earth

A night as white as pale moonlight.

Into this Christmas card like scene

A Council friend came in the end

To grit the road with salt and sand

And twice he repelled the glassy ice

That had made my hill a skating rink.

I had to call my plumber in the thaw

Who with a spanner and a copper cap

Stopped leaking water from escaping

As easily as I would turn off a tap.

And all this while with a little smile

An optimistic exile prepared to go,

Her sights on sunrise in Vancouver;

Going from minus zero to minus zero,

In transit, our youngest hopeful hero.

The clearness of a dream

I had in bed last night

Has dimmed at dawn.

I’m awake, remembering,

Its dialogue in a deep sleep

Now almost vanished

In the wash of awakening.

In the dream, so real I swear,

She appeared:

Into my head as I slept she crept-

Always eighteen.

As lovely as I left her

At her father’s hearth

As we said our last goodbyes

To all the years of my unspoken love.

‘Love’s Labour’- I began to say,

(Speaking of the title of a play)

But there she stopped me

In my mid line

To finish it herself this time:

‘Love’s Labour- is never- Lost’

Contradicting

Both Shakespeare and myself.

That was the only thing she said

As with the dream she left my bed.