Month: May 2019

ALL THE REST IS BUT ASH, AFTER

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A crimson blaze,
a tiny tree,
truth can be fragile,
beauty can be breathless
(does not always need
to be burdened by our breath).

Branches can be barren,
nature can be hurtful
but colour conquers concrete.

Fragility can take flight,
fields can be an ocean
of fallen leaves
that time will catch
and crispen
and consider for compost.
We are all bound to the heap;
spinning circles of almost ash
burning best in comforted corners.

A crimson blaze
burning bright
in the valley of autumn.

Colour will conquer
and only truth
will hold to its root
in this fertile field,
in this land
of seasonal sparks,
in this place
Man called Earth
as if it were his to play with.

Truth will colour over
all we have covered
in concrete.

All words by Damien B. Donnelly

Photography by Liz Cowburn from Exploring Colour and you can find her original post with many other beautiful New Zealand Autumnal shades here…

https://exploringcolour.wordpress.com/2019/05/03/colours-and-cobwebs/comment-page-1/#comment-9181

A FISH CAUGHT ON THE CURVE OF THE MOON

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Love
is a red
Russian rose
on the run,
a bouquet
to brush the blues
from their burdens.

Hope
is his hand
on her head
in the night,
taking flight
as that blue bird darkens.

But
her moon
was in Pisces
and she was said
to be expunged
by her sensitive soul

but
in his hands
he still held her,
his red
Russian rose
and so
he painted a song
to perpetuate her soul.

Her moon
was in Pisces
and his heart
in the bloom of her hand.

All words by Damien B Donnelly. Painting, Le Paysage Bleu, by Marc Chagall

TRUTH OR DARE, for Poetry Day Ireland

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It’s Poetry Day Ireland so I am supporting from abroad. This year’s theme is Truth or Dare and this final new poem recalls older days when this Irishman was still a growing boy on the streets of Paris…

 

Truth or Dare

At 22 we locked the bar at 2am
and turned empty bottles around
tittering tables, wishes weaving
into comrades’ ears of who to pick
and who to kiss; the ex-pats in Paris,
running an Irish bar like it was
their open bar, even when it was closed,
eager to acquire a taste for foreign desires,
no one ever wanted to know the truth,
we were too young to be serious
and too stupid to know that it mattered,
that taste didn’t lie on the tongue,
though it later laid lies on our lips. At 22
we closed the bar and dared each other
to dive into anything other than the truth.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly, except for the one below as that’s me pulling my last pint in the Irish bar in the 13th arrondissement of Paris.

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SALMON DANCERS for Poetry Day Ireland

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It’s Poetry Day Ireland so I am supporting from abroad. This year’s theme is Truth or Dare so throughout the day I will be posting a few of my older poems on Truth and a few more on being Irish…

Salmon Dancers

And so swim the salmon, against
the rising stream, foam flushing
against fins as falcons fly overhead
in the fight for freedom, destiny
is not a dance that can long
be distracted, shiny specks of silver
dancing, darting, borne to beat back,
to wage against the rushing waters
as they make their way west. And so
swim the salmon, along the corroded
current of Connacht, that Atlantic
sojourn, that shore still swaying
in the shadow of those ancient songs
when souls set off in search of security
overseas, burdened boats battened
down with the beaten and the broken,
culled like cattle in the rain, boats
with bodhrans and fiddlers, singing
and dying through their dreams
of a new world, already mourning
the old lands, the homelands
they’d been swept from, kept from.
And so swim the salmon
as the storms rage, as they battle
onwards, salmon dancers, skating
on the waters, leaving trickles like stones
once tossed by hands now lost, tracks
to follow for others who’ll follow,
as others have followed, as others
who’ve fallen, their faces now faded.
And so swim the shining salmon,
off into the world with the sound
of home in every stroke.

  

All words and photographs of Dublin by Damien B. Donnelly

A DEER BY A DOLMAN IN DUBLIN for Poetry Day Ireland

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It’s Poetry Day Ireland so I am supporting from abroad. This years theme is Truth or Dare so throughout the day I will be posting a few of my older poems on Truth and a few more on being Irish…

A Deer by a Dolman in Dublin

Where you there, all the time, I asked myself,
for I have not discovered the powers of hindsight,
as our words wove like the wind around the whispers
the woods were once witness to?

Where you there all the time, I asked myself,
in that soft spot of spirit in the fold of our minds?

I had whispered, along the way, as feet caressed
the crumbling clay, as a heart trembled in a throat
that tried not to tumble through words,
I had wished for a grace to ground us like that curve
of concrete on the caress of the mound that grounded
what had once grown tired into the ground.

You were there, all the time, I told myself,
as I caught the river as it cast reflections
of trees rising up and roots growing down
and I realised we are not just man,
we are not just the mound we lay beneath.
We are inseparable, like these reflections
sinking into the stream, we are not one,
but the other, not beast or beauty, but both,
finding our way along the water to a bed to call comfort.

You were there, all the time, a dear Deer, by a dolman,
in Dublin, listening to our songs of the living
and the loving and the dreaming and the dying

laying our poems on paths already pressed
while the deer stood and wondered who would come next?

   

All words and photographs of Dublin by Damien B. Donnelly

PROTECTION for Poetry Day Ireland

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It’s Poetry Day Ireland so I am supporting from abroad. This year’s theme is Truth or Dare so throughout the day I will be posting a few of my older poems on Truth and a few more on being Irish…

Protection

In many rooms,
in multiple houses,
in a dozen cities
I pulled shadows
over the light
mistaking the darkness
to be a better blanket
to twist around the truth.

   

All words and photographs of Dublin by Damien B. Donnelly

DUALITY for Poetry Day Ireland

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It’s Poetry Day Ireland so I am supporting from abroad. This years theme is Truth or Dare so throughout the day I will be posting a few of my older poems on Truth and a few more on being Irish…

Duality

And here is where we battle the truth;
east or west, the sun’s heat or the moon
that spies on our rest.
And here is where our paths divide;
the war to be won or the human
we are fighting to become.
And here the Indian draws the honour;
mild man stands in the boar’s breath
with integrity in hands.
And there in the east with helmet high;
fearless fighter bares the beast and blunders
into battle as bloody blighter.
Are we then of both moon and sun;
tied tightly to burning planet and that eye
watching nightly?
Can we be honest behind the armour;
can the blood we gorged be erased
by a single flood?
Can we be both brave and beast,
can we cry for the famine and still eat
at the feast?

Are we not confusions
caught between the confines,
are we not stars burning bright like the sun
but in the falling night?

Are we born to be beasts or born to brave the beast?

Let us be wild boars;

fearless in the face of our foe,
gregarious in our greed to grow.

   

All words and photographs of Dublin by Damien B. Donnelly