Poetry

about my poetry books and life as a poet

A New Poem: “The Ancestors”

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Come out into the garden, someone says.
It’s almost seven and the table is laid.
Yes come. Evening wind is cooling the trees,
and we are here, whispering over the rim. See,

your mother staring out through the eyes of your son.
Your niece hands you a peach with her grandfather’s
hands. And the little ones chase each other, just like you
and your brother, only you two had the run of the beach

and the sea. A right pair of water babies, your own gran
used to say. Oh, those long days! And the fire by night
and the stories they told. Legends that were old when Homer
was young. Yes, well. Now, you must eat. Someone passes down cheese,
pours you some juice, wraps a rug round your knees. Glasses are raised
— Cheers! — and skins touch, each to each, as eyes meet and we
breathe,
for a moment upturning time. Then retreat, as we must, on the breeze.

Reading Two Poems At The Alliance of Independent Authors’s Indie Fringe Fest

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Another video, this time reading two poems — “Halo” & “Long Light” — at The Alliance of Independent Authors's Indie Author Fringe Fest.

See below for the text of the poems.

HALO

My brother, Conor, used them as they should be used,

the rings. Hoops of grey rubber to throw at numbered

hooks on a board and make the grownups who came to our place

 

for their daily drink call out. Well done! when one caught on.

To me, each one was a thing to

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Countdown To Christmas: Patrick Kavanagh's Christmas Childhood

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It is a poem born out of loneliness and solitude.  Kavanagh wrote it after spending another festive season alone in his bachelor flat in Dublin and the poem is infused with nostalgia for rural, farm-family life, recalled through the lens of Christmas.

The memories come dressed in christian imagery, from the story of genesis to the virgin birth.

The first section of the poem sets the scene. The adult Kavanagh recalls the “gay Garden that was childhood's”: the frosted potato-pits, the music coming from the paling-post, the heavenly light between ricks of hay and straw, the “December-glinting fruit” on an apple tree. In that Garden of Eden, the most commonplace event —  even “the tracks of cattle to a drinking-place [or] a green stone lying sideways in a ditch” — was invested with a sense of wonder and love, the “beauty that the world did not touch”.

“How wonderful!” says the poet now, longing to return to this creative consciousness that as adult, he can only rarely access now.

In the second part

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Cricklewood September 2013: A New Poem

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By Orna Ross

Nail me up, here, at dusk. Roman road crossed
with the world. Tar over mud, strata of

strangers. Horses once had to be galloped
to top this incline: Shoot Up Hill. Whips

cracked. Carriages swerved. Now, needles prick
the crook of a groin, going down.

Raise me up with all the bone-tired, the shapes
who fail to become, the unspeakable tongues,

other-coloured. Here, litter lasts, spit pools,
police can never be found when you need

them, won’t leave you alone if you don’t. Yet
song knows how to be sung. Don’t ask me how

roads cross and uncross. Centuries turn.
A dog cocks his leg. A cafe forgets

the names of the eaten, a phone-box girl
is waiting, blank as an egg. Leave me here,

away, for a while, from the bay of the faux,
the cool crystal cravers; here, with mummified

women steering children to school, with men
who stand for a day’s work. Forced from sleep,

someday they might bite the hands of those
who don’t dream. See. Compose our eyes.

Shine your moon on all glinting splinters.
Wipe the dust from the church, the tour bus,
this cup. Kiss through my mouth. Let us taste.

*

 

Ten More Poems

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I’m working hard on finishing the Go Creative! books and on target to launch in September but poems are no … Read more

Happy Holidays!

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I hope you’re enjoying a special and happy time over these days.

Here is a seasonal poem for you, based on an old Irish mid-winter blessing, that sends you all good wishes.

Thank you, as always, for reading — and wishing you and yours the very best for 2013.

Read A Poem A Day

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Christmas Poetry
Available now on Amazon.com

A poem a day is my prescription for a good life.  Everyday language is, as Flaubert once said, “a cracked kettle on which we tap crude rhythms for bears to dance to — while we long to make music that will melt the stars”.  Poetry makes of language that melting kind of music.

This is why reading a poem a day has a transforming effect on our lives.  It’s not just that artfully arranged words elevate our existence, fulfilling our neglected need for depth and beauty and grace and meaning. Just as more important is the act of making poetry a priority.

Taking the time to open the head, and heart, and soul space that needs to open if this serious pleasure is to be indulged, giving ourselves that gift.

This act, as much as the words ingested, is vital to how poetry melts, melds and moulds us.

The Christmas season provides the

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A Week In Words: "Are You?" A New Poem.

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poetry mother and child

 

 

again. Are you not mother? That

is the question that must be posed

and not just to those who

work the world with their pants

less stuffed, with their arms

held aloft when not wrapped

round the chores and the children

and, yes, round the big boys too, who sooner

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