Irish Sketches

1.

Coming up through Connemara …
the weather turning lyrical;
gusts of rain and slants of sun.
Too secular for miracles,

we note the Twelve Pins clipped by mist,
brief rainbows over windy lakes,
cloudy traces over stone.
Each windscreen wipe’s a second take.

2.

Padraic Pearse’s summer cottage …
its lyrical ambivalence …
Thirty-six he was when shot;
a man who found his eloquence

required at last a coarser edge.
His “red wine of the battlefields”
still had some poetry about it—
even as the blood congealed.

3.

What is it with the west of Ireland?
The estuary, the sheep, the weather?
The mountains with their line of mist?
The way all these combine together?

The greys, the greens, the short sharp showers?
The angles of its long, low light?
The way it weighs a stretch of water
as much with sadness as delight?
 

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