Blackberry Brambles & Iron Gate

Blackberry Brambles

The brambles bear fat blackberries
And the holly, berries rouge.
The cornflower blooms in the thick sedges
Among the bracken and the broom.

Sheep fleece, tatters in the thorns,
Mocks the bog cotton in the furze,
Snippet flags wispy in the turf smoke wind
That carries the squall gushing

Across Achill and the Sound
Past the Deserted Village
And its famine ghosts of the Slievemore Road,
Tramping on the hard wind up Clew Bay.

The light awash and broken, shimmering,
On the foot of Croagh Patrick
Its head torn with clouds
Hung across the cold tide.

Iron Gate

The rust in the black iron,
The pits in the tired mortar
Sloppy in the joints
Blasted by the rain, wind, and salt,
Nudged and scraped by the thistle and thorn
And the nettles, thick to the stone wall,
Thorny and nettlesome nettles stinging.

The tidy cottage
Whitewashed onto the hill
Too tight to the road,
So close it scares you,
Just there behind the iron gate,
Arust on its crumbling flanges.

From Achill Sounds, a collection of poems by Thomas J. Phalen, a friend.