POETRY

“This collection is a journey that asks to be taken” – John W Sexton

Drowning in the Desert can be ordered from the publisher here

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BOLIVIA

The rim of the valley that shelters La Paz
hides hovels of El Alto where displaced hunters
sharpen arrowheads and roam high streets
seeking long dead empires.

Fathers sit on rows of empty gas cylinders
outside mud-wattle cantinas supping cerveza,
talking and muttering of Evo Morales
and tin mines of Huanuni.

In the city down below, Inca teardrops gather
in gutters and refuse to evaporate.
Young women behind lace curtains file their nails:
mothers in pollera skirts wrinkle up

their noses at illusory oil-and-gas money of
light-skinned suitors from eastern lowlands.
In downtown stalls old Indians sell axe-heads
as trinkets to American Express tourists.

returning from 4X4 tours of the salt flats
and wondering where to next
– Macchu Picchu, perhaps?
Is that in Brazil?

Simón Bolivar has a lot to answer for,
cobbling together a country diverse as a continent,
precious as pendant ice on the Altiplano,
fragile as coca leaves in the side of the mouth.

Hope clings like a swirl of paja brava
bending on howling plateaux, warm and soft
as the wool of a bounding vicuña hunted almost
to extinction, making a comeback now.

This poem features in the collection ‘Drowning in the Desert’ Revival Press (2020)
It was also published in Poetry Ireland Review #128 (2019)
and was a prizewinner at Red Line Book Festival (2018)

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One of the poems from ‘Drowning in the Desert’ was chosen as a poster-poem

for the Fingal Poetry Festival 2022 (and also included in their anthology). Here it is:

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The following poems are not in ‘Drowning in the Desert’ – they have appeared elsewhere:

GHOST

A man offers you a lift, a welcome gift of a wet night.
His black-shirted forearm slithers over;
a hand fidgets in the glove compartment for a CD.
That voice still twangs in your ears
from his earlier country ballad at the wedding.

Embrace the voice in the speakers – diversion
from enforced car-bound companionship –
and wonder out loud who lurks beneath the skin
of the disc – a dead Stetson-wearer?
‘No, that’s me,’ he blurts; a tiny smile burns his lips.

Two voices – one real, one recorded –
ignite a flare in your head. You hunt
for your tongue without finding it, and must fight
the urge to make a sideways lunge for freedom
through the metal barricade of his car.

You sit and endure, trying to believe
both his voices are as warm and melodious
as the worn-out insides of old violins. Five miles later
you wave from the flagstones and watch the departure
of a man alone with the ghost of his own voice.

In darkness something grasps the edges of your eye.
Catch your breath: a shooting star rips across the sky.
Above you, his long dead wife listens to his recording
of her favourite song, but you only have ears
for the silent music of the galaxies.

Published in Southward Magazine #43 (Nov 2022)

IMMACULATE CONCEPTION TATTOO

The coin I hold in the palm of my hand
is my monthly welfare allowance
for being blinded in one eye
by a Christian Brother in religion class years ago.

‘Where do you get those ideas from, Murphy!’
he shrieked, hurtling the blackboard duster
across the room at more than the speed of sound,
shattering the orbis of my religious beliefs.

That coin is precious because I’m saving up
for a trip to Rome where I will howl at the Pope
and seek out the Holy Ghost and ask him to explain,
with diagrams, his exact role in the immaculate conception.

When he has drawn me a picture of a virgin conceiving
I will visit a tattoo parlour on the Via Urbana
and emerge days later with an image imprinted
on my arm and I will bare it to the world.

Published in Martello Magazine #1 (Summer 2021)

MIDNIGHT EXPOSURE

Lenses of your eyes looked hurt
when I declined your gift of a group photo
taken on our last business trip.

‘Why don’t you want it?’ Your brow
flexed in attractive close-up.
My mind went out of focus.

I couldn’t prevent the filter
falling from my mouth.
‘Because you’re not in it’.

That black-and-white statement
revealed feelings hidden until
my words flared between us;

a foolish flashbulb
lighting up my longing,
exploding before you in

an impact of Jovian proportions:
you were my galaxy, my nebula,
and I was the great big mouth.

Photoshop or some other software
could have put you in that print.
Not all the IT in NASA could

prevent you fading from my world
like an image vanishing from a film
in an old-fashioned developing tray

when the photographer forgets himself,
gets his timing wrong,
and shines a light at the wrong moment.

Published in The Galway Review (Feb 21 2016)

WIDE-EYED TO THE WORLD

A farmhouse floats, an island in a sea of yellow rape.
Gaze down from a car labouring on high roads:
a boreen snaking through this amarilla ocean.
The Van Gogh scene brings to mind recent holidays to Spain.
From on high, study this vision of rustic Carlow.
Beneath stalking seeds crawlies slither and sting.

Earthworms excavate zigzags that loosen foundations
faster and more efficiently than wartime tunnels.
Above ground, flaps of dried muck on flattened soil:
brown straps to lift the lid off earth’s luggage.
There, by the farm’s gable end, cracks appear
under nettles hiding bits of broken glass.

Glass to rip the feet off the unwary, the innocent.
Ghosts are on the prowl this day.
They are on the hunt for the susceptible. The man that prowls
hovers like a dust-devil. He rises up to strike.
The house so pretty from up here, now treacherous;
childhood laughter lost in wind-shifting fields of garish yellow.

A girl plays games, chasing shadows, running for the swing.
She stops in childish tracks as if what is about
to occur can never happen; unsure at first
whether to giggle or cry, yet knowing
this to be no laughing matter. The sun, staring down,
is her only witness, but suns cannot speak.

And who would believe a sun if it did? Suns tell lies.
The world tightens on a soft, delicate arm; twisting it side to side.
Our car crests the high road to the south;
the yellow world disappears. You turn
in the passenger seat, and sigh with satisfaction.
‘This place is so tranquil,’ you whisper, ‘and oh so beautiful.’

Published in Litbreak Magazine (Aug 9 2016)

GONE WEST ALONG THE ROAD

That clip from thirty years ago
turned out to be a time machine –
a singing, dancing, digital resurrection:
feet tapping, eyes glinting.

Then, banished to where
dead fiddlers languish in vaults.
I had seen the dead come to life before:
pop and film stars immortalised in video
– this was flesh and blood.

Not long after the recording
his skin turned leathery grey.
Sinews frayed like rotten fiddle-strings.
Tendons snapped and broke in
the deep grave we buried him in.

Decades fell from my eyes, a bead each year.
Whole rosaries; my Wellsian moment:
a virtual uncle crossing over
from the other side, playing polkas
as though the man had never died.

Published in The Stony Thursday Book #12 (Oct 2013)

WILLOW PATTERN

According to a Chinese proverb, every ocean wave
tells a story splashed in blue and white.
A shard washed ashore on Dublin’s coast
tells another story, also blue and white.

A hundred thousand tides ago, the Tayleur‘s
compasses betrayed her on Lambay’s rocks.
Her foundering hull met a jagged seabed;
a cargo of blue and white crockery spilled out.

Each platelet glazed with the legend of lovers
put to death by a merciless mandarin.
The Gods, moved by their plight, turned them
to doves eternal, at home in the sky.

In the Tayleur‘s onboard panic two lovers jumped.
One caught by a towering wave and dashed
to death on a rock; her man, grasped
in her arms, dragged under and drowned.

Beneath their storm-strewn bodies
the plates on the seabed break into shards
that drift apart in solidarity with lovers
separated by Lambay’s strong and cruel flow.

One of those shards appears at my feet
as I stroll the shore of Rogerstown estuary.
Size of a thumbnail, edges smoothened,
the glaze still holds, and glints.

I examine closely what could be a blue wing
on a white background – but something distracts:
a pair of birds fly east as if bound for Lambay.
They hold my gaze in the watery glare.

I watch them dive, entwined in mystical union
lost in the blue and white glaze of the sea.

Broadcast on Lyric FM, The Poetry Files (Nov 11 2021)