NEO-PLAGIARISMS
Comerford’s Armada
Galway, August 1588
After William Camden
…other news there is none
but great fear in these parts:
princes rising from the sea
with bags of sovereigns on their backs
spilling themselves over the rocks
and the locals look on helpless
till the storm quiets down, then they assemble
chains of corpses on the beach
stripping them of gold and other valuables
and any alive they slay in terror
lest they be moved to give them shelter
and end up like the foolish
O’Rourke on top of a spike.
Chateaubriand’s Vision of Motherhood
Arrived in America, 1791 (Memoires from beyond the grave, 1827)
The earth is our mother. We spring forth from her womb.
She holds us to her breasts, bountiful with milk,
lavish with cool waters, harvests, and fruits.
She gives us a place in the shade to eat, rest, and bathe.
And in the end, she opens her bosom once more,
and throws a coverlet of grass and flowers on us,
and her substance changes us into a new form.
That’s what I said to myself when I awoke
for the first time in the New World and saw the sky.
Two Birds
Chateaubriand’s
O the thrush
that promised
Francois-Rene
happiness
as a boy,
five decades later
promises only
a wrong note.
‘O joy!
what I have achieved
in life is taking
the enchantment
out of birdsong.
The trill was not
possessed,
only lent’.
Brecht’s
When in the white room of the white ward
I wake up in the early morning,
and hear the blackbird, I’m in accord
with the tidings each day his songs bring.
It tells me why I’m thoroughly bored
with timor mortis. Once you are nothing
there’s nothing to fear. I can afford
to lie back, and enjoy the bird song,
knowing it’s the repetition forward
of all the blackbirds I won’t be hearing.
Sleeping Rough
After Rimbaud
It’s time to let myself surf on a wave that doesn’t know
whether it’s coming in or out. I must stop reading the papers,
and wrap them around a bottle. I could do with a drink
for the inland road to the mountain which will shelter me.
I can walk on air when the going gets rough, and arrive
nowhere in particular, to lay my head under the stars
on a bed of green and silver as moonlight falls like sleep.
I pick up the smell of watercress once I clear my nose
in this valley of tears. Whether of joy or pain, who cares?
I hear the grass grow in the stream that runs under me.
It clouded like absinthe in my dream, and now bubbles
over with light as the day comes up. My eyes open
to a world I have almost forgotten, and I see
the mist rising on a state of mind that is at peace.
The Bulbul of Abdul
My friend the white-haired Arab five flights up
has moved his smile and bird to the basement.
The day begins with subterranean song.
We meet in the street, and talk with our hands
of the change in the call which doesn’t lose
its plangent plaint by being more muted.
I mime it for him with a finger kiss.
Being deaf, he’s ‘attuned to infinity’
(Hugo) and dumb to my wavelength. But I
see in his eyes a far cry from the past,
a flash of blue and yellow from Tunis.
Evenings, the ivory of his teeth glows
in the darkness below. The bird is fed
flies, and the air trembles with flapping wings.
Three Sastrugi’s I.M. Oscar Niemeyer, 1907–2012
Cont
1. In 1956 Oscar Niemeyer was chosen to create a new capital for Brazil. Its designated location was the populous Goiania, but due to bad weather President Kubitschek’s plane was diverted to Anapolis, five hundred miles from the nearest paved road. Kubitschek was in a hurry (Fifty Years Progress in Five Years’) and stuck with it. That is, nowhere in particular in the desert.
Niemeyer picked a team of ‘experts to raise his spirits’. The goalkeeper of the Flamingo football team whose career had just ended in injury, a physician who could not cure himself, a barrister in trouble with the law and a journalist who fell afoul of the press barons. Each evening over dinner his friends, down on their luck, cheered one another up. Oscar Niemeyer rode the bumps and built Brasilia, a modern Valhalla, with underground gardens.
His favourite engineer was S. Cardoza. But he would not join the team because of despair. A bridge he constructed collapsed when the riverbed dried up. Fifty-six people died. He told Oscar Niemeyer, ‘I have nothing left to do but drown myself’.
‘How, Senhor Cardoza?’
‘I’ll throw myself off what’s left of the bridge.’
‘But Senhor, there’s no water.’
‘There is’, said Cardoza. ‘Dig deep and you will find it.’
2
I know this because I asked him. We talked briefly about Guinness (which he rhymed with Venus), and Irish architecture. ‘Mainly ruins’, I remarked and he said, ‘We’ll, that’s a start’. I mentioned my maternal grandfather was an architect in straw, a thatcher, who got no work when tiles came in. He ended up a farm-labourer. Oscar spoke of the proletarianization of architects in Brazil. ‘Too many of them. But there are worse fates than designing mud-huts’.
3. I wrote this poem on Oscar Niemayer twenty years before he died, one day short of his 105 birthdays.
At ninety Oscar’s afternoons
are spent redesigning the dunes
by way of Mies van der Rohe’s
‘Almost nothing’. So now, who knows,
he’s building castles in the air
on Barlavento strand. That is where
the sea is on the horizon
and the sand is white with the sun’.
And he’s back again on the beach
where everything is within reach.
He traces with the staff of life
the fishing boats that are so light
their masts uphold the Vara, fate.
The sails are a figure of eight.
Shells made from the boles of cashews.
Oscar has taken off his shoes
to wade. The architecture of strands
isn’t a constant. As the tide expands
over dry land, drawn by currents,
he swims again and youth returns.
The Given
A response to Coleridge’s ‘Work Without Hope’
I saw a flower this morning
I thought of picking for you.
But it wouldn’t last long in
water. A forget-me-not
defying the snow, a blue
promise of what is to come.
I tease a seed from its cup,
and sow in a sheltered spot
and watch the plant springing up.
As soon as frost becomes dew,
a tender ear-let breaks through
the earth and hears itself grow.
The work of the rising sap
isn’t Hope’s ‘Parasite of Woe’,
but the source of what nourishes
the stream with the nectar flow
sieved by how it is, to tap
the richness so it flourishes.
The germ of Hope’s Woe leaves downcast
the poet alone with his gift.
He cut flowers for the sick soul.
They wilt like flags at half-mast.
Instead, go with the given, the drift
of nature’s unbusy goal.
The Gift of Bees
After Osip Mandelstam
I see the moon with the whites of my eyes.
Night’s way of falling takes one unawares.
Sleep comes before you hear the creak of the world’s axis.
I offer you a rosary of bumble bees
that flitted from flower to flower in the forest,
turning honey into sunshine. Kiss, and you’re stung forever.
Zombie Philosophers (2020)
Now Derek Mahon you’re safely dead
I can tell the truth you left unsaid.
‘’Everything is’’ not ‘’going to be alright’’.
For soon the day will be the same as night.
We’re blindly entering the twilight zone.
Or the hour of the wolf as it’s best known.
Between the dark, the friend of criminality,
and sleepwalking into what nobody can see.
The rule of thumb is we are all gas-masked,
and looking the same. Our thoughts aren’t asked.
Democritus, the laughing philosopher,
is having the last laugh. ‘The truth, no sir,
is only the whim of power and good for nothing’.
So, Heraclitus runs amok in a quagmire
of his own making, a cesspool of ire
in which his ego sucks up all that’s pure
and decent and spits it out as sewer.
Break his grip and there’s always the button
before he switches. We’ll all go up with him.
Who would have thought that Donal Trump would get in?
Da Todi’s Prayer to the Lord of Pathology
duplicate
Updated from the thirteenth century Italian
Dear Lord, I thank you for sending me
cancer cells in Your abundance,
and secondaries in all my glands:
and grant malfunctions every chance
to manifest infirmity.
But save me from myself.
Hepatitis, types E to A,
lymph adenitises, tinnitus:
hiccups that will not go away:
grand mal wouldn’t be an onus:
throw in the pox as a bonus.
But save me from myself.
Grant me perpetual migraine,
and gallstones without pity,
gout, trench-mouth, and the rat’s bane,
rodent ulcers, feeling shitty,
chronic quinsy, paludal ague.
But save me from myself.
Piles, pinworms and the scurvy
be my companions in pain:
botulism and beriberi,
general paralysis of the insane,
croup and dhobis’ itch console me.
But save me from myself.
Lord, suffer me with something slow:
fatty degeneration of the veins,
ingrown toenails, impetigo,
obstruction of the intestines.
Make my home a hospice so
intensive care can live with me.
But save me from myself.
Investigate me for all these:
smear, biopsy, colonoscopy,
lumber punctures, and some deep freeze
electro-encephalectomy.
Diagnosis is my worst disease
next to multiple therapy.
But save me from myself.
Till You switch off the life-support
keep me in traction for my sins,
and insult me with every sort
of surgical intervention,
back-up drugs, and resus teams:
and please bless my dying screams.
But save me from myself.
Pavane for a Defunct Infant
After Ravel’s
Many years ago
in a land of summer dresses
where mothers were no
different from princesses,
a sickly child shut
up in his room - outside sunshine,
nothing to do but
pretend that he is dying,
embalmed in sea breeze,
shrouded in the heavy curtains,
shadowed by a frieze
of rodents in the skirting,
the wardrobe ready
to take him in when death occurs,
inside a heady
atmosphere of powdered furs,
never taken out,
those hanging suits and wedding clothes,
old uniforms, stout
corsages, and furbelows.
All the forgotten
Livery of a time long dead
to wrap the rotten
remains. A boy stuck in bed
wants the open air -
and not suffocate inside.
Dreams some headland where
a swallow-dive at high tide
takes the breath away.
The sky reflected in the sea
calls to him, don’t let
the body go so freely.
There will be the screech
of siren sisters finding him
washed up on the beach
(the phone downstairs begins to ring),
and the shrimplike form,
transparent too and cowrie-curled,
like something unborn,
or something out of this world.
Empty house, seashell,
the echo, echo, inside you
is enough to tell
who is trying to get through.
Eiderdown on ears
can’t stop the breaking of the waves.
All that ends in tears.
All the sympathy he craves.
Rimbaud’s Lost Poems
These are the lines he liked to quote
on route marches into the unknown.
‘I claimed others’ work as my own.
I am and never was a poet.’
The poems were dictated to me
by the order of the angels,
fallen ones, and it’s just as well.
I couldn’t sing for the heavenly.
I have no time for higher things.
Only for those who fall to earth
with flowing gowns, but without wings,
and raise dust when they hit the dirt.
I hear their words from night to morn.
Sometimes tracing their unholy writ
in the sand where there’s no bullshit.
They’re erased by a desert-storm.