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