Cuckoo sounds
swallows skim trees
far out at sea waves curl
Crests hanging
Addicted to restriction
in love with lockdown
I tap my arm say, later
as along the way
lambs slither into the world
and begin breathing
The colours of sheep
Wild blue sheep come
down from the commonage
for the summer. Left on rough
pasture at the coast and
easily startled they turn
red and green as
marks of ownership
are slowly added until
they are all colour and
no sheep remains.
In the heat of summer their
heavy coats are worn off the
shoulder or left to hang
on ancient trees and free
of fleece their branding
temporarily absent
the sheep in just their skin
admire themselves
in rivers and pools
or stare deep into
each other’s eyes
The song of the hen
With smart red comb and
double yolk the hen can
clear rough ground
and lay eggs, some things
come in packages, the hens
have no fear
a hen can fold her wings and
legs and flatten
as in spatchcock to bathe
in the thin dust that rises
A hen is like a
dinosaur but smarter
Sheet music
The sheet flaps
demanding entry
behind the sheet
the sky a startling blue
Life is like that the
flap of the sheet only
the beginning the
blue sky beckons
the land an
unsolved mystery
The song of the tractor
Coming and going
between holdings,
land defined by
acts of survey and
distribution, acts to
establish an exact price
The song of the landworker
Leaving behind without a
backward glance
our slow walk across
a yard or sodden field
full buckets banging
on our knees
or the weight of
a sack of feed
on our shoulders
Land is not a parcel
passed from hand to hand.
Land is not revealed
with each torn layer.
There is no final prize
on which to feast your eyes.
Land lives in fields,
different every day.
unpredictably
Land gives no guarantees
but springs eternally
clouds bubble up
rain spits, weeds
wither and die
there is nothing like
knowing a
field for ever
in its unreliability
The song of the plasterer
We should have stayed home
and honed language like a
knife blade or a chisel
or given it the weight
of a sledge, or loaded it
onto a hawk to even out
a wall gone haywire,
or spread it so thin that
every grain of sand
impeded the even stroke
where words have a
gritty resistance
between the thin metal blade
and the rough
concrete background
In the wilderness of
teaching and administration,
held back from the
precipitous edge of
thinking,
kept in security and distraction,
tools rust
No way out
The way of the world
is not the highway to the east
but the boreen
at the side of the house that
peters out in the bog
Where John Clare went crazy
Where Patrick Kavanagh cut and ran
Kittens taken too young
become natural born killers
their crazy dichromatic eyes.
like little birds that collect
along the fence,
like clouds on the horizon,
the quad cruising
the boundaries.
Language will let you down
its ponderous diction
its second-rate facility
a little pension
scraped from the sides
of permanent employment
the privileges that
steal clear speech have
taken the motor from your mouth
taken words and emulsified them
weakened your ready wit
left to pontificate to
an empty room on texts
nobody knows or cares about
The infinite hollows of an
internal life coming to nothing,
things echoing as in caverns
of the mind and body.
On land, language
must take its turn.
Song of Itself
So language is a virus so,
readily transmitted and
you is the host
and the orders of syntax
conceal the fertile chaos
of the word, planted
like an idea,
and in the headlong rush
to fill a sentence
words get forgotten
the word and what it is
Words must be
king and queen,
at the points where
farms meet and
fences transmit lambs
looking for fresh pasture
and grass as green as
words that emerge
from the mouths of
babes and weanlings.