and finally a little montage of myself and the mother and our merriment…
All photos and videos by Damien B. Donnelly. Taken on Sunday 24th January 2021
WORDLESS WEDNESDAY: SNOWFALL
home
TIDES
Words and painting by Damien B. Donnelly
THIS HISTORY OF A HOME
I live now
in various shadows
and only a few whose forms I’d distinguish.
By a round tower
on a little hill
at the far end of a short road
I can read the names of the first ones
who named this place
as a home,
I’ve no faces for these folk
who were whispers even to my own mother,
the mother and father of her father
who is now but a whisper to me.
The bag man he called me
till he passed on when I was 5.
I remember
saying goodbye
to his bald shiny head
in a dark room with brown walls
and a glass atrium you walked through to get to him.
Now he walks beyond the glass
while I’ve come back to the rooms
that once held his warm voice and soft shuffle
along with his wife, my gran, my nana
with her cardigans
and concern and coppers
for the collections in the church
and later, in the summer-
for outings to the slot machines
where the train comes
to an end at the edge of the sea.
All things have endings, even waves crash.
Nana is now
in the grounds of that church
she gave her coppers to, next to her man,
her Pop, real name Bernard- my middle name.
All things come back
like days
after darkness,
names that we lost
and laughter after loss
and then mothers to their mothers,
like mine did when Dad lost us,
and sons to their mothers,
like I did when Paris said adieu.
Adieu- to God, it means. Funny way to say goodbye.
All things come home, like me now
in this house,
now my mothers,
once home to her mother’s sacred heart
and her father’s devilment,
once the home to my mother’s grandparents
and her brothers and sisters
and the cats and the dogs
and the odd chicken
they kept in the pig-cot that never held a pig
where the boys stored all the pears
they’d pilfered from the orchard.
We planted
rhubarb last week
and a sprig of wild spinach
I’d plucked from the edge of the savage sea
in the back garden of this little house
where the shadows watch over us
in various forms
that I’m trying to distinguish.
All words and photos by Damien B Donnelly
TO CAPTURE EACH OTHER TOGETHER
I took photos of us once, together, to remember
all I had before I set off to find myself in other fields
that other lands had whispered of other welcomes
across other waves, moments to return to later as I navigated
new roads, strange turns and gates I had to manage alone.
Now, our shadows sing again of the old songs we once sung
when we hadn’t considered to count our connections.
We potter and ponder and eat and gossip and get grumpy
and take to our rooms and then eat again and garden and paint
and re-ponder and thread newly discovered thoughts across
old fields that still hold fertile as a familiar favourite.
When we come now to gates, we have seen what extends
beyond them and appreciate the safety of what exists within them
and so stop and listen to that song, recently resumed,
beneath all this stillness- mother and son, singing slowly
on the same path, somewhere between the coming home
and the lockdown. Someone sent wishes recently and I said-
We’re back together and they replied- You were never apart.
Mother and son, capturing moments because somewhere else,
out there in another field, another town, another land,
another mother has lost another son or a daughter to a gun
or a bomb or a noose or a knife or a knee or a pill
or a pointless moment that no camera will ever
be strong enough to capture how the world just stops,
thereafter
I took photos of us once, but now we simply try to capture
as much time as we can possibly hold.
All words and photos by Damien B Donnelly
TRACKS AND CHANGES
They’ve built a running track beneath the low hum
of this humdrum small town with its two pubs,
skinny batch and round tower. Men lift weights
with uncovered arms that’ve been internally attacked
by giant sized popcorn. I lift smaller weights
in the privacy of the shadows in the back garden
but have still yet to distinguish the difference
between mass and muscle. Every day they build
more roads, ring roads, roundabouts around us
as if concrete tongues were unfolding from metal
monsters driven by manmade megalomaniacs
while we take shorts walks around slowly widening
circles, digging out those older lanes that twist and turn
around rural trees instead of the line of an urban plan.
Everything keeps changing- bodies, muscles, roads,
routes, plans, personalities. Nature is the only constant-
still rooted in who she always was. I was not born
to be so confident. Even my name is not the name
I began with and even earlier someone gave me
another name before giving me away. But I’ve stopped
running and covering things over, being naked now
is so much more revealing than when I was born,
the scars on this skin tie together the threads
of my tale, even these skinny arms have been seduced
recently by so much more sunshine than ever before,
digging through the dirt to get closer to those roots
turning through the earth. The view is once again
familiar when looked at close up, in detail,
even if all the cars race you away from what matters-
the vines of veins trying to climb out of these ditched
trenches. They have a running track here in this town
and when I follow its route I realise how enlightening
it can be to make steady circles around all that you
had not yet considered about yourself instead of
hasty tours around the edges of this cold old world.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
HOUSE. HOME. HARBOUR
Spiral. Sea. Sound.
Snail shell. Seashell.
Cochlea.
Calm. Current.
Cacophony.
Hollow to house. Hollow to harbour.
Hollow to hear.
Slow. Sand. Sense.
Snail Shell. Seashell.
Cochlea.
A house. A home.
A harbour for the sound
of everything.
All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly
COMING BACK TO COURAGE
I’d heard of songs being sung in other fields
before I could even read the notes.
Sometimes scores are set before the scenes
have even been shot. Brave, they said,
but I shrugged and set off. I had yet to learn
how fear could freeze.
A fool’s soliloquy is often lighter
than the enlightened and I’d little room for weight
during take-off. I’m certain I folded nothing more
than dreams into a back pack just beyond
the ripening of twenty. Courage hadn’t yet come
to be of any concern.
It arrived much later, when the breath disappeared.
Only when you cannot breathe can you appreciate
what it takes to climb down
from the mountain of ignorance you’d ascended.
Notes can only be held for so long and the higher
the note the more difficult it is to control.
I learned, midway through discovering
I was expected to construct my own questions
before finding the answers, that I was more base
than tenor though forever reaching for that illusive note.
You need breath for both but it takes bravery
to bring either back home.
I didn’t hear those strings strung over home lands
until I was so far away that sound
circled back on itself and I became the shell-
far from shore, finally a chamber to house an echo
that held a song swelling in from the old sea.
Leaving didn’t require anything other than the frivolity
of a single flute but coming back, coming back required
the courage of an entire orchestra.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
FRESH PERSPECTIVES AT THE MIDWAY MARK
I pulled a seat
up along the far side
of the first hill
of this midway through life’s climb
and sat myself towards country,
having been stripped
for so long
like bare bark by too many cities.
Green blood poured
upwards from your soil
onto my skin
until there was nothing left
to separate either of us
again
but for those ditches
that we would climb over
and perhaps leave the parts of ourselves
too ridged
for these winding lanes,
and those gentler hills
that we’d allow time to consider
while we considered nothing more
than what we had-
air, earth and this seat
on the far side of life’s hill
growing over time
with honesty.
All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly
ORIGINAL SONGS
Here now, flown back to nest since moved in absence,
these streets hold no shadows of my former shyness,
they do not call me by nickname, or your name.
I was never open enough then to be called by your name,
their name, his name, back then when there was no him
and barely a me.
Here now, back to where they began, before me-
their nests, their streets, their lanes, their stories
I’ve since borrowed, not knowing much of my own,
those told before me.
Funny now, to be here, in this nest, perched on this position,
you say it’s home and there’s truth in those words
but it’s like saying we’re family- this was never my home
and our blood is not the same.
We look out at the same land, the same tree, the same leaf
but we do not perceive the same stars at night
when the garden is gone and the universe asks
where did you come from?
We are what we believe. We come back to what we know
regardless of where we’ve been, of who we’ve become.
Of where we started. Adoption can be a cold word
to begin with.
I came from a broken shot off cupid’s bow where a single tear
flooded the moonlight as a siren screamed and one other,
lost to her first song, called out for another chance to hold
a snowflake in her hands. We were both born to sing
in seasons different to our own.
I came back on a wing’s turn to question the concept
of a nest, of where feather first found flight, I came back
older, taller, wiser, to look at youth from this odd angle
of middle age, to look at connection from the perspective
of having already left the nest, to sit, here now, in this garden
freshly trimmed down and cast this bird’s eye view
over where the roots were first planted
and who laid the first twig.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
VREEMD OF MISSCHIEN NIET (STRANGE OR MAYBE NOT)
She was called Éireann, even in Holland,
(misschien vreemd, ik weet het)
though she was greener than I ever was,
back then, with the mud of the land
still caked into her guards while I was off
and running, ever forward, adding guards
to my guards till I saw the earth was round
when home appeared again, on the horizon.
(Vreemd, of misschien niet).
Later, decked in a fur coat of fine snowflakes
that clung to your form while they melted
off mine, you appeared as blank canvas
before a river to skate away on, like she sang,
once, in a city that was not this one. Funny,
what sinks in and what drowns, even light
can fade into the wrong water, even water
can remain on solid structures as icicles.
Some things cling on while others slip away.
(Vreemd, of misschien niet).
Round that red bricked bridge we rode,
a decade of being Dutch, (how long?
Ik weet het- vreemd, toch?), thinking
I was only stranger and the road my home,
but those were the days when the wheels
spun in circles around canals that turned
back on themselves. Maybe that’s how
we learn to come home- spinning in circles,
on roundabouts or her carousel of seasons
that went round and round.
She was called Éireann, even in Holland.
Maybe the answers to all I was looking for
were already there in her name.
Misschien wel!
Maybe some things take a cycle to sink in.
All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly
Damien B. Donnelly 