Acair Fearann

The fleeting day and life cries

Turn back, turn back!

And ever onward turns the wheel.

The sinking sun will not, this day,

Rise again

And the words you should not have spoken echo.

Regret shades the night,

And heavy silence lies beneath the singing.

Do you keep it still in your grief

In hopes that tears will turn time around?

I say,

Look to the wild stars of the field.

They are the last

And they will not come again.

You missed the loveliness of the lilies;

But these sharp joyed moments

Are not yet lost.

Would you miss these too?

A fire of promise,

A fire of shame,

Chose on your turn.

Comments Off on Looking towards the fall

Summer draws towards the last, rising crescendo

A fanfare of white stars:

The wood aster in its multitude beneath the dark trees

The flame pink phlox is a great bounty that arises from the garden

There is the scent of fire in the dawn air

When the hot days of August, the summer days

Foretell at their birth, the coming fall.

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In this place there lies

A spark not yet crystalline

And shall it rise as living fire

Or hold fast as frozen stone?

None shall last past memory

And there will be no eternal place

But within the creating mind.

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When the flowers rise

And the towers lie hidden

All is silver, green, and gold

What has been built will fall into time

And time passes into mystery

Somewhere the lilac speaks of it

The ancient peony blazes

A brief memory

That lives when stone has fallen

And the swords of the iris

Victorious

Where once was man.

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When the wind came down

The trees walked the woods

Before the break of day

And barred the way of spring

With gates of shattered oak

Held to the earth by twisted elm

Their locks of blasted pine.

Sharp as the hunting spear

The sun’s blade splintered

A thousand shards of ice

Spinning across the snow

(a fragment…)

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Persephone
With dead gold
You gilded my tomb.
But I,
I escaped to the heedless earth
Where the spears
Of Spring’s eternal wealth
Pierce my breast
Embracing the soft flesh
Of my body’s flower
 

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My kinship lies

Not with the shining valleys nor yet the mountain ranges

Where man, heroic, stands alone

The world before him in glory

Mine are the beaten hills

Rough as the boxer’s crown.

Take away your gleaming cities of neon

Stainless steel in the sun;

For mine are the cities

Fallen from their strength

Children of iron, black as coal on the snow

In my cities, living still,

Are the descendants of

That fighting Irish Italian breed

Crossed with the Yankee farmer.

Murphy’s Bar, Vinnie’s Pizza

Haunted by Ethan Frome

Who on his good days turns into Robert Frost

But no apologies.

Mine the farms where the fields have vanished

Ghosts of a dream betrayed by the dreamer

The white church on the hill

The weathered farm, ox and ass

The red mill by the river

And all fallen to the ruin

But enduring still.

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