Grand Canal Dock, Dublin That hour of the night when sick people fall forever from the high ledges of their lives and the city is deep in a dream it will not share. The moon clasps its head in cloudy blue hands, reflected in the canal but shivering among the cold, uncaring ripples. The echoes… Continue reading Their Share of the Dark

GUILT Three times today I’ve gone to the window to see what’s happening outside. I know I’m to blame but I hope there might be someone else who’ll look out at the same time, searching for another who accepts their share of the fault. No one’s there and I feel like an astronomer hunting a… Continue reading Three Poems

FAMINE VILLAGE While the rain turns the ground to spotted mud, I spy a flat stone and jump, balancing, a sodden flamingo in dark plumage, teetering in the middle of the mess when I see a face next to my foot; not etched or carved, but grown into it: a man with lines of pain… Continue reading Five Poems

Grand Canal Dock, Dublin This gasworks chimney is a survivor, the last standing stone of its circle; the others have eroded over time but they once used to cover this landscape. That must have been a world of primary shades lacking the luxury of colour, a collage clipped from old newspapers, when those pipes of… Continue reading The Luxury of Colour

At eight in the morning the city exhales its gritty breath laced with the odour of standing rubbish and lagered dew dripping down walls. Outside my front door, I become aware while walking the semiotic streets of so many needs I didn’t know I had last night. They call from billboards and shout from the… Continue reading NEEDS

A town, complete in indifference, where noon falls heavy as a concrete slab and the days are long, bright and vast, far too large for their meagre content, waiting for the promised arrival of something. There should be vultures on those branches watching the efforts of the humans to give a semblance of meaning to… Continue reading Empty Trees

It was raining indoors when I woke todayto the heavy drops spattering my pillow.While I drank my first coffee at elevena rainbow hung between the stove and fridgeand the dark clouds retreated to the corners.The voice began to speak about midday,saying this was another phase of life,that everyone is a work of artbut originality is… Continue reading PROGRESS REPORT

BETWEEN MEATH AND KILDARE I wander, a solitary foragerlike Australia’s formidable Bull Ant,but my mind keeps going back and forth,asking if life is just a random lineon a map without scale or direction,as the Royal Canal I’m followingpasses from Meath to Kildare and back again.Maybe these kinds of thoughts were useful once,when contemplation could find… Continue reading Two Irish Poems

SALT LAKE Sometimes the future’s flight is straight and smoothlike shining summer runwaysbut then it brings you way out herewhere the ground is endless crustthat snaps underneath your feetto free the thick black sludge that lurks belowand where the trees are pale dry prisonersthrust deep in permanent winter,their bony arms stretched wide in pleadingto whoever… Continue reading Two Australian Poems

Leeuwin Lighthouse, Western Australia The Indian and Southern oceans touch and then follow separate destinies. Humpback whales roll in the water, slapping their fins to send out spray and messages. Seabirds carry nest materials, dropping little pieces on the way as signposts. A magpie lands close by and sings; maybe to my red jumper, maybe… Continue reading Hope