Author: deuxiemepeau

SIMPLE

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Love is a simple thing-
a jaded house waiting
to be resold, to be a home again,
you knock unexpectedly
and I utter Enter, please,
much like last time,
already setting the table for two.
Love is a simple thing

fragile and foolish and forgetful.

Love is a simple thing-
a game of tennis,
a juggle of balls back and forth,
the hunger to have the control
of love and all its advantages
before it’s match point
with a set of side-lined backhands
played below the baseline.
Love is a simple thing

blinded by the sexy shorts and those tight strings.

Love is a simple thing
like the heart-
it needs oxygen to survive,
like any organ-
it needs the right fingers
to play it perfectly

Love is a simple thing-
find your oxygen before
laying the table or crossing the court
or reaching for the note
you were never meant to play.

   

All words and sketches by Damien B. Donnelly

WHEN IT WAS THE TIME FOR GROWING OUT

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We took the train, one day,
a Sunday that a photograph
suggests was set in summer,

I remember how the wind
wound whimsically round
the wilderness of our youth
as we watched waves crash
currents upon crushed cliff

as we came closer to watch
those tides slip out further,
pulling from us the laughter
we’d not learned to control

and carrying it on to places
we didn’t know to imagine,

each of us an island uncharted
yet to pin our point on a map.

Three cousins, coming closer
to the shore of those decisions
and a mother, watching us
laughing, learning, growing,

swimming and moving. Out.

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All words and some of the photographs by Damien B Donnelly

SOME THINGS ARE NONSENSE AND FOR ALL ELSE THERE ARE DISTRACTIONS

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I was tall, when I was a small child,
but stopped later,
somewhere in between adolescence and giraffe.

A giraffe would be impossible to sit behind
at the cinema.

In the cinema, in Amsterdam, people talked
like it was a cafe with an incredibly large background TV
and didn’t seem to nonsense from the hungry mice
beneath the low lighting.

Light can often distract decisions on how to dress
in the murky fog of morning when the mirror won’t help explain
who you are.

I helped a passenger on a plane, once-
I placed their bag in the overhead compartment and felt abused
later when they claimed the total width of the arm rest
as if I was only too willing to be a servant
to their sovereignty.

A king in a castle is not always as fulfilled as a man, quiet,
in his shed or the kid reaching down to grab a hold of happiness
while growing up, somewhere in between adolescence

and the astonishment of a giraffe.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

AFDRUKKEN

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I found you in Amsterdam, weet je nog?
Natuurlijk!

Somewhere on the Overtoom, in the summer
of my slow 30’s when home was a broad barge
on a narrow gracht. Lijnsbaansgracht it was.
Weet je nog? Natuurlijk!

I wonder how deep the things we’ve held
are carved into our core- like all those letters
you once housed that formed words, that gave way
to structured sentences that someone then pressed
and printed and someone else, sitting far away,
read and wondered

or does it all fall away, natuurlijk

when we ourselves slip from the canal that held
a barge, that housed a home where a letter press
rested against the port wall and I wondered
what it once held.

Weet je? Natuurlijk niet!

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

AL LAST

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Shoes thread lightly
over freshly stirred soil.

Seeds are no longer singular cells but shoots
and this hardened carpet no longer compliant
to cover up.

Sometimes we plant with the dream
of discovery.

Sometimes we dream in the hope
of being woken.

Sometimes
light begins in the dark

where roots rumble in soil, now stirred.

Green grass decides, at last,
to admit that being buried

was only the beginning.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

BLOOMING SHADES

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Everything is cyclical like sunlight and seasons
and hair styles and hemlines. Everything is cyclical.

I found you at the first turn- a pencil line on a blank canvas
by an academic of fine fashion with a fringe of falling violets,

it was the back side of the Botanics, at the later side of winter,
all grey, even then, back in my untasted youth, even there,
surrounded by all that should have been blooming green

but I just saw the shadow between the black and the white,
the empty bench in between the bark, not the blossom sitting
a frame away, left side, across the bridge, more to the main path.

Roads, wood and diverges and me-
always looking for another way out.

Everything is cyclical like creation and country and going out
and then coming home again and again. Everything is cyclical.

I found you recently, again, on a green day, later, when my hair
was greyer but my soul a sway more centred towards the violet.

I stole a piece of you, this time, on film but when I looked back,
after coming home, I noticed how I’d caught you in that shade,
that former shade found in between the black and the white.

Everything is cyclical like births and blossoms and sometimes
belonging and sometimes colour when it’s blooming grey.

 

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All words, drawing and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

OWNERSHIP IS NOT ALWAYS THE ONLY CONSIDERATION

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Squirrel scuttles across the sea of grass.
Stops to my right to consider someone else’s acorn.
Mouth twitches to mimic tail before I’m noticed.
Embarrassed by my presence he adopts a still stance
as if that might make him invisible.

Don’t worry, I whisper, I can relate.
Once I found lips too sweet to miss and kissed them.
There in the open. Knowing they were not mine.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

COME THE GLEAMING

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New leaf climbs old tree-
this ivy will not be held
down is no direction,
dynamic is the trail of this root
now gleaming on the hallow wood.
Sometimes empty centres are for holding
hopeful hearts.
Layers of leaves come like coats of zinc-
a wrapping for these times were comfort is craved.
Nature nurtures freshly cut back bark
by the side of the garden
where thought had been neglected.
Not everything will survive-
not all bark, not all breath,
but hope, when held, can be as simple
as a trail of fresh branch
born around a broken bark.

 

Words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

A QUESTION OF POMEGRANATE ANSWERS

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I saw you first in a library,
in a bound book on front of the light,
as if you needed to ripen any further.
My first book, bound and borrowed
from a library, was Mrs. Potter’s
inquisitive rabbit Peter, all eager
to explore the taste of all he could
not yet name. We’re like that, children-
eager for the answer before we’ve
really come to consider the question.
I ask myself more now, at this midway
through the darkness than I ever did
then, where all was so seemingly light.
Yesterday, in the garden my youth
once played on, that time has now
returned to consider, an eager rabbit
came out to play and I asked if perhaps
there was camomile in the cupboard.

No, but there’s a pomegranate
in the pantry

came the reply.

And I looked at Peter and laughed
like I’d taken you from the bookshelf
in that light library, that day and smiled
as I turned your pages that held just
as many questions as there were answers.

 

For Eavan Boland. 

Words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly. 

WHEN THINGS EVENTUALLY GIVE WAY

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We were waiting for the green man beneath the blue sky,
waiting on an open corner to cross over, do you remember?

A simple day of smiling sunshine, an easy lunch of eating
smiles and we were laughing, were laughing at everything
and nothing- at the osteopath and his cracking observations
and the sunshine in that blue sly and your belly getting bigger.

You were listening to me, looking at me telling some tale,
making it taller, I’m sure, but you didn’t see I was floating-
my feet off the ground on that silly day, on that sunny day
of simplistic observations on easy corners with their moments
and movements when I found myself laughing and my feet
no longer weighted- no longer ground down or in or under.

We were bouncy and breathy and your belly- unbreakable,
so delicately unbreakable beneath the blue sky at a crossing
while eating up those bright smiles and breathing in easy air
under all that yellow laughter and realising that the red man,
when given time, will eventually give way to the green.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly