Music

COMING BACK TO COURAGE

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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

STILL BEATING

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Resounding
Within

You beat
With the softest stroke ever felt
And I come back for more
Every time

Resounding
Within

You beat
And I fall further with every breath
I listen to your rhythm
And in it

I find

My rhyme

Resounding
Within

 

All words and drawing by Damien B. Donnelly

WHEN NATURE HEARD ME AND I FOUND HIM

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Husky voice cribs my troubling thought.

I turn with fear hard on heel at the far end
of an ancient lane.

I borrowed these footsteps, I reply
to the open side of a ploughed field where wires allow
random thoughts to teleport across the sky.

This is not your path. This was the thought in my head
this voice had entered and uncovered and stolen.

Stolen? It asked.

You’re right, I continued, I forgot your presence
in too many cites of crushing television cables. This is not my path-
it is ours to share.

I remember now, can see how truth befalls in the darkness
these recent weeks of stillness seem to be resetting
an imbalance.

Husky voice returns to a tweet, but this time
it is a tweet that is sung in the trees.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

BIRD SONG

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I stroll in soft sundown across the cushioned grass,
the earth a pillow I never stopped to consider,
I consider going in, inside to where the light looks neat
and named but a bird calls from a branch I cannot see,
sight comes in second after his song- soft, slow
and cycling back on itself like time, tide and your touch,
at times. Time was never our lover until it left us,
until we saw how quickly we aged in its agonising absence.

The night holds less time, with less light to cast shadow over,
with less sight to see the hands surge around the circle.
I move in circles around this garden of cushioned grass
while the moon comes out to feed, we eat what we can,
sleep when we must, the birds sing songs and only when lost
do we permit ourselves to stop and ask of the meaning.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

THE MOTION OF GOING SOUTH

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I’ve only been to Cork once,
to a funny place they called The Other Place
which I thought was like the Scottish play
with the name you’re never supposed to say.

In another place, beforehand, we’d sat
on beer kegs in a girl’s bar called Loafers
and I giggled at all the comfy shoes
in astonishment and thought that sitting
on a keg felt more like a punishment.

I’d only been to Cork once, when I was 20,
a year since I’d had my first kiss, with a boy,
behind a sofa, at a party.
You catch on quick, I heard him murmur
and so I dropped the tongue in further.

That drive down to Cork in the 90’s
felt like operation transportation-
5 sisters of Dorothy all crammed in the car
singing Liza and Barbara in proud
polychrome while inside I was thinking
this was certainly no place like home.

We slipped out of Loafers
and their shoes that had absorbed me
and headed to that no name place
that was actually called The Other Place.

A disco it was with lads against the wall
and I thought you’re man in the white socks-
I won’t be snogging him at all.

They opened up a back room, in Cork,
halfway through the Whitney medley
which caused a run for the big buns on sale-

fruity scones sausage rolls,
fondant fancies and fairy cakes,

in Cork, at the disco,
in The Other Place,

when all the gays still ate sugar
and some grandmother’s doily
was the only bit of fecking lace.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

WATER FLAMES

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We moved, once, and habitual was your foot to my follow,
in debt my blush to your concern

like we were the oxygen of the other, at either ends of the water.

We swam, once, to the other, in crossed currents, in avoidance
of those cold-blooded fish dipping their blond hairs
into clotted canals that your darker locks turned briefly bland,

the beginnings of a ballet in two parts, you the body and I the babble

written in flame on the water

in this city sucked from the sea with its ferry, crossing and connecting,
as habitual to its route as I became to the curve of your spine.

You were fire and I the fury. Or was as I the fire and you the flight?

We lit fires, for moments, on the water, flames that found their place,
finally, in the stars, fading before fully noticed.

We moved, once, as if each was the compliment to the other’s jewel
even if we knew that time was not the compliment to the us

that danced, for a time, as a flame, on the surface of the water.

If I was still there, by that water, waiting for the blue ferry, crossing,
I would habitually dip foot into current to test its temperature.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

 

Inspired by a Twitter Prompt

WHEN LOOKING UP; DON’T LOOK BACK

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One born to song and sorrow
One killed by serpent’s bite
One lost to hands of Hades
One walk from dark to light

If I could say to hold the note
If I could say to keep the chord
If I could say that she will follow
And that fear should be ignored

One descends to catch the hand
One walks by light of moon
One leads and plays the lyre
One follows and trusts the tune

If you can trust that she’ll follow
If you believe the devil’s dare
If your song is true and steady
You can escape the Cerberus snare

But Orpheus was melody
And Eurydice his muse
But Mr. Hades was conductor
And kept the band beating blues.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

BOOKENDS; GOLDEN GREENS IN THE GARDEN OF GREEDY YOUTH

/ deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

 

In days now distant, we were one floor up, apartment dwellers
whose viewless windows revealed to us more than the darkness
that tried to appeal to us. Tambourine Therese tapped her tunes
of truths not yet tasted, tumble leaves freshly fallen from the trees
in the apple orchard of golden greens begging to be bitten into.

We were eager-eyed innocence yet to be broken by the blue;
scavengers, seeking the scent of salvation on the shiny streets,
saving up to buy beginnings to cut cords on. Mitchell as muse,
we were lyrics yet to be licked and covering Carey and cases
of whoever might come calling on the Casio in a little corner,
salivating for suggestions to rise in us seductions and thirsty
for tattoos to plot paths along our pale pinkness so as to track
our trajectory while singing in the ignorance of our sweet sorrow.

Sweet birds of youth busy building nests in confines of concrete,
too blind to the battery, we were born for the bloom but forging
a forever on a friendship that failed like the lie of a lead balloon.

In days distanced from all that was once dream, I’ve found form
as lonely painter on this canvas of winding words, a connoisseur
of cutting cords, often curt and callous, in the challenge to manage
the malice and learning to be fateful only to the fate that awaits
but caught at times, by the complicated cords that cannot be cut.

I hear you on the wind sometimes, tapping those tunes I thought
this body had forgotten with its skin no more so pink, so fresh.

The fruit fades but we find ourselves then reformed into fractures
of what once was, frail fragments unfinished, like filigree too fine
to unfold, like a dance as yet undone or a song we had still to sing
in this city I once returned to while moving on, slipping forward
through shadows passing, still building nests, still seeing better
in the darkness and touched, in that half-light, by the purity
of your sprite, once so fair, one so rare. We fell so fast
to finished and yet, as she sings of those songs like tattoos,
I’m reminded of that one flight up that can never be diminished.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

This month is about looking back at all that cannot be forgotten.

We will always have Paris, it appears…

THE PRICE OF A STAR

/ deuxiemepeau / 3 Comments

 

And she sang of hope and harmony
in a borrowed frock on Tuesday nights
in a smoky bar below the Bowery
where the Irish downed their whiskey
while the Italians were always frisky
and they touched her, always, after;
her faithful followers fingering flesh
as if to caress the affection she injected
into lyrics light and loving, in that bar
beyond the Bowery where she came to entertain
the Irish and Italians who always joined in the refrain.
Though they left her, always, after,
on Tuesday nights neath the smoky light
with hope and harmony already fading
in that bar below the Bowery where the laughter
never managed to linger for that long after
and in the silence below the Bowery
as the stars went out one by one
she felt betrayed by what they’d taken; by the hope
they had mistaken to be theirs for the taking,
and felt betrayed by herself; by her need to amuse,
to be the muse in the limelight but then alone
in the shadows, always and ever after,
by that bar below the Bowery where the light
was far too low to notice that her soul
had left her long ago.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

This is a repost of a week of moon and stars 

GOLDEN HARMONIES

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Sight sees,
on Sundays,
beds of bowing
sunflowers, bowing
in beauty, not weeping
from weary, caught under
careful clouds; to comfort, not
to crush, sweet simplicity in growing
gardens, growing gold, going on, going green.
Sight sees, on Sundays, harmony reigning majestically.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly