Irish/Family poems
Houseproud
​
Letters were scattered everywhere!
Torn open or left in perfect posting:
Odd shoes were left discarded
among the dishevelled clothes.
Their unmatched colours
slung over from the night before
My Cinderella frock was flung beneath the clock
With no neck to grace, my jumble-sale gem,
sparkled on the bedroom floor
and no-one to blame but me -
I let the mess be!
Friends advised me go Feng Shui -
Take the cloistered walk to let the spirit free!
But I was no mordant mendicant of minimal obscurity
and kept to my do- as- you - please
Closing on Sunday, like a village shop I sprawled
in that sumptuous solitude
but a moody gloom of mother’s voice
protested overhead at the state of my undress
and my unmade bed!
In the ghost roll of thunder
she threatened her exacting needs
on my sloven home’s happiness
but made my beanstalk escape
Reaching up. Pulling on that rumple of clothes
I climbed away from this giant’s gape
and “Fee- Fi- Fo- Fum” of her foot on the stairs…
MTD 2018
Perspective
She saw them on the ocean
swimming.
“ But there’s nothing there,” I said
as I stooped to decipher her very private code
encrypted on her smile
that playful phosphorescence
in the galaxy swirl: That movement
of her mind behind those deep violet eyes.
Unable to keep still
or even tell what only she could know
of fairies on white foam
Leaping up and down to join her frivolity
The ‘up-under’dance cut the ocean’s froth
as my inner eye now spied
a rise and fall. A plunge and crash
of dolphins in swift race
Closing in to roll the waves,
up and under. Out and in,
both child and dolphin twinned
as angel- fairies of white foam .. MtD 2016
War
Dear chum Charlie,
Have they amputated and are you in convalescence yet?
Well an ‘eavy day in an ‘eavy walk
I must report. Not in the march
or scupper under fire but the soldiers lot
to bury our dead.
News from the front is hard
that I dragged poor Ernie to a shallow bed
(made best ways we could) the clay
strangled us - crept in wait of us
like the enemy, at every turn.
Couldn’t even polish me boots
(a waste in any case). A lost respect
for these ‘ere dead. Trading their lives
for joy from pain as a fatal shrapnel
closes in
Ernie’s spirit would have joked
he’d held his mettle to the last!
I’ve saved his half-smoked Nelson,
‘ere in me breast pocket - so if I snuff it
it’s for you, though it might save a bullet or two!
Now Charlie I know it’s in bad form
but, like the spit from tongue,
I nearly choked at that Officer’s joke
about Ernie’s ‘good death.’ You see
in the short life of this front-line
the dead and wounded are just
a climbing number ! All we’re worth
in this pungent thing called war
that has no respect for anything -
Not lost friend or brother nor foe..
And no joyful gain to its greatest shame
the exhausted trench soldier’s giving in!
So I’ll say farewell, dear chum as I watch
the cruel weight of Flanders field
pull poor Ernie down
as we hurl ourselves into battlefields
the mud and blunder takes
all and sunder. Calls a ‘welcome home’
to the climbing numbers. MtD 2018