North East In Eden

At the border where North meets West and East,
Hillsides slide into northern flatlands,
Exhaling ravishment.
Seduced with levity,
I forget darker scenes;
Ulster’s hillsides,
Sucking life to premature death...
Black despair
Tearing reason’s staff,
From solid ground.

My  twisted mind,
Tortured by deaths...
Hate’s rhetoric,
The stench of corrupting goodness
Rising from rivers of unworthy termination...
Now seeks the meandering streams of memory;
Sticklebacks skimming in idle becks,
Pond Skaters on quiet pools,
Swallows darting -
Chirruping cheerful summers,
Curlews crying a plaintiff strain...Stay;
Larks raising me to past joys,
Butterflies drawing me down their fluttering path,
Damselfly’s hovering
Over my safe earth
Tranquil lake.
Reed Mace whisperering strength.


Opened by desiccating sun,
Crazed earth
Echoes my shattered mind,
Cracked by hate, bigotry, intolerance
The ranting of the right...
Hostility rings round half-forgotten Ulster hills.
Now, surrounded by the scented air
And ripening Barley fumes,
Hogwort raises her mature head,
Acknowledging the fertile sun
Setting on her bed of hungry children
In eternal rays,
Rising poppies wave at me
Without addictive platitudes
That promise vapid dreams of paradise
And forever.

Northward, dark woodland
Whispers serenity...
Her dark, garlic-scented sweetness
Drawing death’s bitter cud...
Purging it.
I had left for hillocks of the dead...
Where those who breathed tomorrow
Lie in unquiet rest...
Exterminated innocence.
From landscapes of mourning,
She called me home.

Cypress - tall and motionless,
Breathe the perfumed exhalations,
Moon rising behind
Streaks the Barley heads with mellow glow.
Joy here...peace...stability,
Green fields without the staining of lost life;
Pure rivers...not red
Like raging torrents of the dead.
Mind flees to boyhood earth...
Where eternal orbs illuminate the
Cooling Towers at Selby...
I am returned to Eden,
Inhaling her tomorrows.