Now it’s high watermark and floodtide in the heartand time to go.The sea-nymphs in the spraywill be the chorus now.What’s left to say?Suspect too much sweet-talkbut never close your mind.It was a fort...
More than loud acclaim, I loveBooks, silence, thought, my alcove.
He sits, strong and blunt as a Celtic cross, Clearly used to silence and an armchair:
People so staunch and true, they're fixated,Shining with self-regard like polished stones.And their whole life spent admiring themselves For their own long-suffering.Licking their woundsAnd flashing t...
But that citizen's perception was also at one with the truth in recognizing that the very brutality of the means by which the IRA were pursuing change was destructive of the trust upon which new possi...
A public expectation, it has to be said, not of poetry as such but of political positions variously approvable by mutually disapproving groups.
I shall gain glory or die.
Be advised my passport's green.
A landscape fossilized,It's stone-wall patterningsRepeated before our eyesIn the stone walls of Mayo.Before I turned to goHe talked about persistence,A congruence of lives,How, stubbed and cleared of...
Sink every impulse like a bolt. Secure The bastion of sensation. Do not waver Into language. Do not waver in it.
Poetry is always slightly mysterious, and you wonder what is your relationship to it.
Human beings suffer.They torture one anotherThey get hurt and they get hard.No poem or play or songCan fully right a wrongInflicted and endured.History says, Don't hopeOn this side of the grave,But th...
Between my finger and my thumb The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Is there life before death? That’s chalked upIn Ballymurphy. Competence with pain,Coherent miseries, a bite and a sup,We hug our little destiny again.
History says, Don’t hopeOn this side of the grave,But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal wave
Even if the hopes you started out with are dashed, hope has to be maintained.
It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough. . . As Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for...
I rhymeTo see myself, to set the darkness echoing.
For every one of us, living in this worldmeans waiting for our end.
In a war situation or where violence and injustice are prevalent, poetry is called upon to be something more than a thing of beauty.