A Dragon's Egg Read online

  FLOW SO SLOW

  Let’s go with that flow,

  Slow.

  Drift and find your magic.

  Take it easy, make it easy,

  Flow with your soul.

  Let it take you,

  Lift you, carry you.

  Go slow,

  Flow, go with your heart.

  Grow.

  Find your true meaning,

  Meander at ease, go with the breeze.

  Blow. Catch your own drift

  And soar to the shore

  Of your dreams.

  GATHERING BLACKBERRIES AT GRANGE

  Tip-toe over fairy steps,

  clint and gryke ritual,

  once performed, transforms parched rock,

  on altar’s solemn limestone,

  a rich communion of black bounty

  hoist heavenwards on barbed arcs.

  Unreachable, round and heavy,

  Clots fat as my maiden thumb.

  Acid sweetness rains, dribbles down

  From upturned corners of my childish mouth.

  Stigmata, summer wounds appear

  purple on soft hands that risk a piercing.

  Those welts, glistening berries along a razor line,

  stretch far for a crown of thorns,

  until wasp stings remind

  the Devil spits come Michaelmas.

  TRAVELLER ON A FLAT EARTH

  I am a traveller in this world,

  I am from places past.

  Your language breaks as waves,

  a welling of the sea within my ear,

  tides that wash across

  the distant faces that I see

  but do not know.

  I drown in its depths.

  I doubt the truth of those who speak for me,

  tired, as nonsense slips unnoticed from their lips,

  slick pebbles washed up on an empty beach.

  I walk along once familiar shores

  made strange by my lack of care.

  Here in this foreign place,

  a disconnected time of pain and angst.

  I am nothing!

  Dumbness strikes.

  I have no voice to shout that

  ‘I am here!’

  I look in vain for signposts back

  to my promised life.

  THE MERCHANT HOTEL

  Up from the country near Donaghmore

  For afternoon tea, a birthday surprise.

  Beneath that cupola, the all-seeing eye

  Of mercantile endeavour,

  We sit enthralled by excess.

  Starched white napkins

  Hide self-made paunches,

  Buttocks spread wide,

  Comfortable on over-stuffed red velvet.

  Hands too big for dainty wee sandwiches.

  Tastes too raw for lapsang souchong.

  But the sound of champagne corks popping

  Has fingers entwined with pride

  Below white double-damask

  From Ferguson’s Mill in Banbridge.

  OLD DRUID

  They turned off your machines this morning.

  Mid-summer’s day and I woke early to see the solstice dawn.

  Plastic tubes breathed for you.

  Instruments took the measure of your hours,

  Working to a rhythm that was not yours.

  You passed the gift of time to me.

  Showed that it is indeed relative.

  Stretched, elastic thoughts of time without you,

  Snapped back short as I watched the monitor

  Slow and slow and stop.

  ‘In Privacy Mode’ blinked from its blind eye.

  You took those last few breaths yourself.

  Gasps more than breaths and then you were gone.

  The yellow waxy look of death was yours

  Before I‘d even wiped the sweat from your face,

  Had lifted your fingers to my mouth for one last kiss goodbye.

  And then I watched the sun’s strength

  Begin to wane at dusk on Alban Hefin.

  A LETTER RECEIVED IN THE POST

  I have just been reading the news

  I expect you follow it quite closely.

  It is, I suppose, happening not far from you.

  Simla was having rain and cool weather

  But they were not complaining.

  We are having a prolonged dry spell

  Which is expected to continue

  For another few months

  My travel plans are not advancing very fast

  My spirits have dampened a little

  And I wonder if I should make a plan B.

  The family patriarch is not very well.

  His condition will to a certain extent

  Dictate my summer plans.

  I bought three books today

  All about travel in far flung places

  And mystical mountains

  From an excellent shop

  Very close to the office at lunch time.

  Strangely, it did not occur to me

  Until I looked at them this evening

  That they were all so similar.

  I hope the exams went well.

  MISTAKEN FOR A UNICORN

  I am not a hunter.

  It is not who I am,

  but I witnessed the hunt.

  At home in the dusty scrub of the Nafud desert

  the white oryx moves with easy grace and ancient rhythm.

  Watchful eyes scan for hostile horizons

  and mark him separate from his kind. Aloof.

  With dipped horns he bids to purify acrid waters,

  then leads on into heat’s obscuring haze.

  Winds change and sour smoke from burning towers

  turns his beard the colour of bone-ash.

  The oryx, born for the desert,

  lives in wild places refusing to be tamed.

  Constantly moving, now pursued,

  he looks for rains to wash away the dust

  and digs a shallow pit and waits.

  I am not the hunter,

  I am distanced from the hunt.

  Still, a savage screen proxies hatred

  and reports the ardent crack of the rifle.

  A marksman finds his prey,

  with sure bullet between wide eyes,

  death-dulled, the shape of bitter almonds.

  But silenced unicorns don’t shout for jihad