IT WAS A NIGHT WHEN FLIGHT HADN'T YET BEEN INVENTED

He had a face
like a FOR SALE

sign that
had been there for ever

with the kind of moustache
that smart-aleck kids

would draw upon
a poster of the Mona Lisa.

His eyes were kind - Dalí-ish
as when the great painter

announced his
own greatness.

Behind him
a yellow half-moon

posed
perched upon his head

as if it was his
own peculiar particular pet

otherwise he was
nondescript

a no-one
that no one would notice.

An announcement announced
that the flight to Dublin

would be delayed
indefinitely.

Outside the snow was
impossible.

It was a night
when flight

hadn't yet been
invented

and only snow
took to the air.

I only noticed him
because a tear

silently and slowly
trickled down

his left cheek
and hung suspended there

for a century it seemed
before falling on the book

before him
that he wasn't reading

only holding as if
in defence against the world

and I wondered what
his grief was.

*

It was our first Christmas  without our mother and I wanted to be there for my father. But the snow was fearsome and no flights were to be had...you had to go to the airport and stand in line outside the closed terminal to have even a chance to maybe be lucky. After three hours I got lucky and made it home. An old man was sitting on his suitcase and holding a book upside down. pretending to read and crying silently to himself.I was in the same state myself and his grief was the embodiment of mine. Looking up at the darkness as giant flakes of snow fell upon us it was as if we had been transported back to a time when flight hadn't yet been invented and the heavens were inviolate and could not be touched.

IN THE HERON'S EYE

you swim
into yourself
the lake doubles you

your swimming reflection
trying to claw its way
into you

from the lake emerges
a head like a bust then a bust then
the whole delicious nakedness of you

your reflection
hides inside you
when you leave the lake

naked
being chased
by your shadow

the heron's shadow
stares through the water's skin
at the fish within

in the heron's eye
the fish already
- caught

a leaf
floats on the tree's reflection
fish swims amongst its branches

we swim amongst clouds & trees
rain taps on the top of the lake
we laugh underwater

piercing the water's skin
thin blades of sunlight
we swim we swim

COLOURING THE WORLD.

Auntie Peggy...
gave us the world.

We held it tentatively
between finger and thumb.

Hardly able to believe
what we could see.

There we were( & she )
trapped  in the first ever

colour photo we
had ever seen.

And so we saw
that grass was green

as were Uncle Michael's
corduroys.

We looked and looked
again to confirm

that the photo had got it
exactly right.

Somehow that world
was lost by us

and we can only see it
through the eyes of

Auntie Peggy's photos.
where everything remains

just so.

And redder and bluer and greener
than anyone could know

"BALLEA...BALLEA...BALLEA!"
( for Mary Forde )

"Ahhhh howya!" says the sun
looking pleased with the world
it has just constructed

I throw off sleep
& run into the light
the world blossoming into being

here was my favourite tree
that the night had swallowed
& had tried to swallow me

here was a bird
I didn't know
trying to talk to me

I admit I am not
very good
at the bird language

but I catch its drift
get the jist
"Open your eyes...open your eyes!"

the river had somehow
been put back just
in time for the morning

and although the cow
had eaten so much grass
there seemed to be so much more

"Greeeeeen!" sang the grass
at the sky's "Blueeeeeeeee!"
the sky laughs with birds

this my uncle's farm
newly minted out of morning
it sings its song

"Ballea...Ballea...Ballea!"
we chant its name
running out to play

*

Ahhh beloved of places....this is heaven to Curragh Dempseys! This is where the soul will return to if me is still me. This is it on its last legs but Granny's nasturtiums were still blooming and feral cats slunk about the place as if they owned it.

FOLLOW THE LEADER

she is the creator
of worlds
she being 3

does not know how
a world
can be

a world
is only
how she makes it

daily she
creates it
in her own image

music is a thing
that dances
in the blood.

a butterfly is a miracle
she is just as yet
unaccustomed to

a flower
is a piece
of living magic

her dolls
speak to her
( in her own voice)

ten tulips
bow to her
she bows to them

a daddy is
a somebody
who knows nothing

who has to be
taught
everything.

she knows
there is nothing
that can not be

facts are replaced
by imagination
...the art of seeing

a purple sun
shines
in a yellow yellow world

see she has
drawn it so
and so it is so

and I her disciple
follow the little leader
as she teaches me

how to be
the world that she
can see

( half invention
  half discovery )
as she leads

me back to
the land
of childhood

I believed I had
long ago
lost forever

*

She was my teacher...making me in her own image...showing me how I could live in the world without dying into adulthood. I became as a little child and she gave me the gift of the world she created.

"DÓNALL DEMPSEY INDEED!"

'LLANÓD YESPMED?"
he squinted at my driver's licence.

"It's pronounced CLANÓD!"
I said with extreme exasperation.

"Y'are not from these here parts
. . .are ya fella?"
he drawled dryly

squinting closer firstly at me then
back again to my !D.

"I'm of Welsh/Turkish extraction
but I was born on Venus!"

I explained as if to
a little kid.

"Ha ha...haha!" he snorted
a tiny trickle of snot

yo-yoing up and down
his hairy left nostril.

"Ha ha...if you were to
spell yer name backwards
it would spell:

Dónall Dempsey!"

I was not amused.

"Ya know...that crazy hairy
Irish earthling poet dude!"

"I'm not him!"
I fumed.

"Alright...alright...keep yer
antenas on...geeeez!"

He handed me back
my Id ID.

Tipped his hat.
Wiped his nose across his sleeve.

"Welcome to Mars.
You drive carefully now!"

I stepped on the rocket boosters.

Left him eating my stardust.

"****** customs!"
I yelled to myself.

"Huh...Dónall Dempsey
...indeed!"

*

To make taking the roll call more interesting I got them to write their names backwards and they loved this indea and wouldn't let go. Then I got them to write stories about this new character they had become. I of course did the same excerise as they did and I thought my backwards name sounded like a Welsh/Turkish/Venusian who was a future space trucker who was having a bad day and was being held up by a redneck customs man with disgusting nostril hygiene.


Without any intro I would tell a class to take a blank piece of paper and exactly and neatly write their name in the very middle of the page. Then I would go around to look at them and go "No...no...no!" They would look at me in great surmise. "I meant...backwards!" So painfully as if it were a hard maths question they would backward themselves and ask me how to pronounce themselves. And then with their new "selves" I would get them to invent who they "now" were. They went at this with great gusto and characters born purely form pure sound would be created right in front of me> They're "I" had changed into a hee hee hee "HE" and suddenly there were all these different people running around in their minds. They even drew these new "thems" and the playground resounded to the new sounding Nairbs and Yrams who had sloughed off their usual monikers to be born anew as an inventive character.

I would never not do what I would tell the kids to do...so I became this LLANOD YESPMED who had problems with a border guard somewhere in the 25th century.

THE MAKER OF WORLDS

"Who made the world?"
and the cane
and the chanting

did their work
"God
made the world."

the church's Catechism
teaching him
by force...by rote

he smiles now at this
the only scrap
he can remember

"Good God...
it was I
who made my world.!"

here
at the centre of
my tiny universe

my thoughts
made the world
out of nothing

that tree was my tree
that nobody else
could see

the same
as I saw it
I a creator of my self

now
that Death
comes to visit him

he talks
to himself
Death sitting silently

the pain eats him up
from the inside
gnaws at him

as if he were a bone
***** the marrow
out of him

the world fading
to a bicycle bell and
children's skip rope laughter

he hears his voice
questioning
"Who made ***** tonk angels?"

the sacred
and the profane
a mash up in his brain

Kitty Wells voice
swims back to him
cutting through seas of time

"It wasn't God who made
***** tonk angels
as you said in the words of your song

too many times
married men
think they're still single

and that's caused
many a good girl
to go wrong!"

but now
the time has come
that is no time

he has abandoned
God
he sees the world

falling
out of his hand
he walks towards the light

*

A friend of mine who suffered a heart attack but survived to tell the tale...saved just in time by his friend the milkman who always came in for a cuppa. He found him fallen underneath a dark glass table and did the necessary to keep him with us and called an ambulance. He told me that as the heart attack had laid him low he was gazing through this table like a glass darkly! He asked me if I knew any of the Cathy( what we kids called the church's question and answer indoctrination)and I said only that first question. He said me too and that then dovetailed into one of his favourite Kitty Wells song! It made a good funny story he said but by God it hurt like hell.

My poor mother would sometimes burst into this song( no ***** tonk angel she)when she was doing the mountain of ironing that having 10 kids had brought into being. So to me too it had a loving memory and would invade my mind anytime I did my ironing. We drank a drink to not being dead and sang IT WASN'T GOD WHO MADE ***** TONK ANGELS loudly and with great gusto. It is always good to cheat Mr. Death even if we knew he would come back knocking one fine day.