by Dónall Dempsey

for D.B.

The blackbird
leaves me a note

pinned
to the sky

that blue
beyond blue

the tide
of the moment

turning turning.

Time like apple blossom
falling through my mind

the little boy
unable to believe

that this day
is not

made of forever
and only now

I walk back
through my self

to unpin the note
the blackbird wrote

with his voice
still pinned

to that
self same sky.

The blue so still
beyond even its self.

I, at last, able
to read the birds words

its language a secret
no longer to me

“I sing . . . ” it says “ . . . I sing!”

“Because all this
must die!”

“I sing the moment’s tide
its turning always turning!”

It’s throat
full of song

glorying in being

alive
for this

one eternal
moment.

by Kevin Higgins

“At 50, everyone has the face he deserves.”
                                          George Orwell

My hair is the grass
on the local five–a–side pitch
at the end of the worst winter
since nineteen forty seven.

My eyebrows, more
than my personal groomer —
the cat — can handle right now.

My eyes are light blue jellyfish
floating in increasingly
opaque sea–water.

The fuzz up my nose,
and in my ears, that patch
of grass the university groundsman
keeps forgetting to cut.

My ears, two elderly uncles
successfully avoiding each other
at opposite ends of a wedding.

My skin, the well–thumbed book
you picked up in a charity shop,
and never got around to finishing.

In their last exam, my lungs
got fifty three per cent,
so won’t be going to university
unless I give them to medical science.

My belly is one of those small insults
you get away with
because you’ve had Champagne,
but should generally keep
itself to itself.

My penis is a vintage car
one only takes out
every so often.

My knees and ankles are machinery
made almost obsolete
by recent developments.

The crack down the gable wall
has moved and is now within me.

KEVIN HIGGINS aged 48 ¾

by Kevin Higgins

My words are smoother than the essential oils
the Taoiseach last week
had his parliamentary assistant rub
into his badly traumatised buttocks.
My psychotherapist insists
half the people who’ve taken
shotguns to their own heads,
during this recession, would’ve reconsidered,
if only they’d heard me talk for an hour
each week about the dangers of Sinn Fein,
or how I live in the hope of a woman Pope.

I’m all for the good people of middle Ireland
making their point in a dignified manner
with china cups of nothing stronger than tea in their hands.
But when thugs from the far parts start burning vans
and generally acting as if they owned the place;
and gurriers from the depths begin picking up bricks
and tossing words so terrible,
they’re not even in the dictionary,
at the Minister for Poverty’s hair–style.
(How would you like your wife,
sister, great grandmother,
kidnapped in her car
for two and a half hours?)

The world will not be changed by fools
banging on the bonnet of a BMW.
But by the likes of me talking
against social exclusion in TV studios.
And fundraising concerts organised
by former pop–stars.
And the well–meaning priest
with whom I regularly have dinner;
between the two of us we’ve enough
concern for the poor to construct a second
Fergal Keane of the BBC,
as a back–up in case
the existing one breaks.

Trust is us. Pay no heed
to the sweary–mouthed crowd,
who if they’re not put back where they belong
will soon be eating pot noodle from scooped out skulls
confiscated from their betters
in defiance of international law.
By the likes of them,
the world must not be changed.

by Macdara Woods

2.
It is all translation:
tears to music
certainty to fear
speech to silence
and energy to age

Not even a rocky
outcrop
to distract us
in our returning down
into the plain

Hot sunlight
making shapes
of dust or haze
of sleepy breasts
and slopes

As we begin to die
inside   the day
we recognize
that we no longer
truly hope

For afternoons
of stony pathways left
to stumble down
δε δοχμια  in code again
and Spanish boots