The wind that blows these words to you
bangs nightly off the black-and-blue
Atlantic, hammering in its haste
dark doors of the declining west
whose rock-built houses year by year
collapse, whose children disappear
(no homespun cottage industries’
embroidered cloths will patch up these

lost townlands on the crumbling shores
of Europe); shivers the dim stars
in rainwater, and spins a single
garage sign behind the shingle.
Fresh from Long Island or Cape Cod
night music finds the lightning rod
of young girls coming from a dance
(you thumbs a lift and takes your chance)

and shakes the radio sets that play
from Carraroe to Dublin Bay
where, bored to tears by Telefís,
vox populi vox Dei, we reach
with twinkling importunity
for good news on the BBC,
our heliotropic Birnam Wood
reflecting an old gratitude.

What can the elders say to this?
The young must kiss and then must kiss
and so by this declension fall
to write the writing on the wall.
A little learning in a parked
Volkswagen torches down the dark
and soon disperses tired belief
with an empiric joie de vtvre .

The pros outweigh the cons that glow
from Beckett’s bleak reductio -
and who would trade self-knowledge for
a prelapsarian metaphor,
love-play of the ironic conscience
for a prescriptive innocence?
‘Lewde libertie’, whose midnight work
disturbed the peace of Co. Cork

and fired Kilcolman’s windows when
the flower of Ireland looked to Spain,
come and inspire us once again!
But take a form that sheds for love
that prim conventual disdain
the world beyond knows nothing of;
and flash, an aisling, through the dawn
where Yeats’s hill-men still break stone.

The writing on the wall, we know,
elsewhere was written long ago.
We fumble with the matches while
the hebona behind the smile
of grammar gets its brisk forensic
smack in the realpolitik
and the old fiery instincts dim
in the cool courts of academe -

leaving us, Jeremy, to flick
blank pages of an empty book
where exponential futures lie
wide to the runways and the sky;
to spin celestial globes of words
over a foaming pint in Ward’s,
victims of our own linear thought
(though ‘booze is bourgeois, pot is not’)

rehearsing for the fin de siècle
gruff Jeremiads to redirect
lost youth into the knacker’s yard
of humanistic self-regard;
to praise what will be taken from us,
the memory of Dylan Thomas,
and sign off with a pompous pen
from Seaford or from Cushendun.

I woke this morning (March) to hear
church bells of Monkstown through the roar
of waves round the Martello tower
and thought of the lost swans of Lir
when Kemoc rang the Christian bell
to crack a fourth-dimensional
world picture, never known again,
and changed them back to girls and men.

It calls as oddly through the wild
eviscerations of the troubled
waters between us and North Wales
where Lycid’s ghost for ever sails
(unbosomings of seaweed, wrack,
industrial bile, a boot from Blackpool,
contraceptives deftly tied
with best regards from Merseyside)

and tinkles with as blithe a sense
of man’s cosmic significance
who wrote his world from broken stone,
installed his word-God on the throne
and placed, in Co. Clare, a sign:
‘Stop here and see the sun go down’.
Meanwhile, for a word’s sake,
the plastic bombs go off around Belfast;

from the unquiet Cyclades
a Greek poet consults the skies
where Sleepless, cold, computed stars
in random sequence light the bars;
and everywhere the ground is
thick with the dead sparrows rhetoric
demands as fictive sacrifice
to prove its substance in our eyes.

Roaring, its ten-lane highways pitch
their naked bodies in the ditch
where once Molloy, uncycled, heard
thin cries of a surviving bird;
and Washington, its grisly aim
to render the whole earth the same,
sends the B-52’s to make it safe
for Chase and the stock market.

Spring lights the country; from a thousand
dusty corners, house by house,
from under beds and vacuum cleaners,
empty Calor Gas containers,
bread bins, car seats, crates of stout,
the first flies cry to be let out,
to cruise a kitchen, find a door
and die clean in the open air

whose smokeless clarity distils
a chisel’s echo in the hills
as if some Noah, weather-wise,
could read a deluge in clear skies.
But nothing ruffles the wind’s breath -
this peace is the great peace of death
or l’outre-tombe ; make no noise,
the foxes have quit Clonmacnoise.

I too, uncycled, might exchange,
since ‘we are changed by what we change’,
my forkful of the general mess
for hazelnuts and watercress
like one of those old hermits who,
less virtuous than some, withdrew
from the world-circles lovers make
to a small island in a lake.

Chomei at Toyama, his blanket
hemp, his character a rank
not-to-be-trusted river mist,
events in Kyoto all grist
to the mill of a harsh irony,
since we are seen by what we see;
Thoreau like ice among the trees
and Spenser, ‘farre from enemies’,

might serve as models for a while
but to return in greater style.
Centripetal, the hot world draws
its children in with loving paws
from rock and heather, rain and sleet
with only Calor Gas for heat
and spins them at the centre where
they have no time to know despair

but, without final purpose, must
‘accept the universe’ on trust
and offer to a phantom future
blood and bones in forfeiture -
each one, his poor loaf on the sea,
monstrous before posterity,
our afterlives a coming true
of perfect worlds we never knew.

The light that left you streaks the walls
of Georgian houses, pubs, cathedrals,
coasters moored below Butt Bridge
and old men at the water’s edge
where Anna Livia, breathing free,
weeps silently into the sea,
her tiny sorrows mingling with
the wandering waters of the earth.

And here I close; for look, across
dark waves where bell-buoys dimly toss
the Baily winks beyond Howth Head
and sleep calls from the silent bed;
while the moon drags her kindred stones
among the rocks and the strict bones
of the drowned, and I put out the light
on shadows of the encroaching night.