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. 

Bog Oak & The Pool

Bog Oak

The bole of it hummocked in the turf,
The knuckles of it deep like a tangled hand
Mummified, clasping the quag.
And the burl of it drowned there
Soaked to a fare-thee-well.
Impervious, hard as a cherry stone.
Death’s implacable fixedness
In the cold bog entombed.
Rock root to the world.

The Pool

Even at night,
When I am far away
From the pool in the Nephin Begs,
Even when I am not there stooped,
Peering through sedge at its silken stillness,
Or waiting in a blind of thorns
For some sudden wonder there to appear -
For which my life is the idiot quest -
The water ever sluices in, withal.

The surface shimmers
In the weird watery glow
Of a sickle moon drifting,
A bright star hung on its horn.

Sometimes, then, the water kelpie,
Become again a glimmering girl,
Rolls languidly to the still top
And slippery, shoulders it over Into slow concentric rings
That splinter the moon into wrinkled rippling winks
And rock the grasses browing the banks.

They rock me too while away I nod
Not asleep, nor yet awake,
But floating, cradled,
Above yawning water vaults.
Gently jostled in the soft twilight,
Lullabied by her water song
Whose beauty steals my breath,
Troubled by vague huge visions
Just beyond my sleepy sight.

The floating stars then fall
And with them, I with her,
Like sugar melting in lemon water
Tracing crystal trails weirdly down,
Fractured, prismed, and bending,
Like the paths to fading memories
Darkly to repose at the bottom of the pool,
Where all the secrets in sometimes slumber dwell.

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