(July 1, 2014)
From Antrim to Wexford, the sun steals
over the shore’s grey hem. It is July,
and people wake to their worlds
in old Viking towns, on estuaries,
in the bright estates that curve like
spines on the edges of towns.
Here is the pace of a summer morning:
a lone walker with dogs on a beach,
new light pouring into the hollows of shells,
along the slow glint of dunes where grasses
dip sculptural and silver. What I want is to know
that this can continue, that other mornings
I remember as folds and bolts
of light, the shouting and crosshatch
of bird annunciations, the rustle
of small animals as they move back
for another day in a burrow’s darkness,
will stay safe. Is it a question of time?
The atmosphere is thinner, earth threadbare
from a steady weave of hands and neurons
as we make space for millions, while icecaps
melt and deserts spread like spilled ochre.
This morning, those yellows fall moistly
on the shorelines, light has pushed
across hills, through the tillage-acred fields
of Kildare, flashing the duns and greys of horses
riding out at the Curragh’s long acres,
on, on to the bog’s wild cottons,
stirring larks, a lone heron holding taut
in a meditation of water, a flash of young trout.
Finally, the Shannon is lit, cataracts and bubbles
brighten through the West and its days
of shifting emigrants, students, hopes
of dolphins drawing them home as if to healing.
From Antrim to Wexford, sun has spilt
across the sleeping island, till Galway, Limerick
steady themselves into full colour, as I once
steadied myself when I was ten and watched
an orchard brightening, seized my day.
And now. Another July.
We are waking and working to our worlds,
what is known and unknown,
the world still mine.
Manoli says the farmers are not sentimental.
The chained fawn dog guards the house, watches
what moves within the mists, his ears like pinnacles.
If the sun flares on a wet stone, he barks.
If the farmer’s granddaughter exclaims at new lambs,
his ears swallow her voice, he barks thrice, then stops.
She speaks to her grandfather in the mother tongue.
Manoli says that once they go to school,
they lose the words. The fawn dog watches cyclists,
children, sheep, caped men bound for Finisterre,
frustrated by those with permission to walk.
Around him, the world gulps some words, vomits others.
He knows his place. He knows he has no say
Poet, novelist, short-story writer, translator, Mary O’Donnell’s fiction includes the best-selling literary novel The Light-Makers, Virgin and the Boy and The Elysium Testament. Her fourth novel Where They Lie was published in 2014. Her seventh poetry collection Those April Fevers was recently published by Arc UK. She is a member of the Irish arts organisation Aosdana, and her website - www.maryodonnell.com - may be visited here