Time

GIVEN TIME

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Rushes rustle a calling to the rain

mimicking
the sound
of those
molecules
of moisture
they long
to feel
against
their
sharp-
edged
skins.

We all
learn
to mimic
what we
must,
let go
of all
we can
not
hold,
lean in
to what
we love,
fake all
we can
not
feel.

Gulls
squawk
overhead
for prized
position
whilst
wings
spread
out
to claim
all that
eventually will come down from the clouds.

  

All words and photos by Damien B. Donnelly

 

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A SONG ABOUT THE SPIRALS

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The circles spiral.
Goodbye is not a definitive swan song.
Time cannot be buried in a single spot.

Early evening
and the sun no longer sets in this kitchen
that watches the seasons turn without comment.
The sills have new shadows we have not yet named.

This morning broke over fallen feathers
and for a second I caught the silence your song once filled
You lay where the grass had barely grown green,
below a tree where we’d placed a bird box
in a garden where a bunny used to come to play at night.

When the sun
shone the brightest
I took your dignity and covered it with a gentle blanket of earth
and placed the bud of a rose by the breast of your stilled chest
in the hope that circles do spiral,
that a root can find a home on a wing that once found flight.

Sometimes faith needs to be released before it can be returned.

Later, after naming those shadows before the sun set
and another spiral closed and then commenced afresh,
I watered that spot in the freshly turned earth
as another bird found its place to perch
on that bird box where you once sang your song.

  

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly

BY THE TIDE

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There, by the water’s edge, where kids collect sand in pails as if a piece of plastic can save time, he watches docking ships report their findings- new worlds beyond the old waves he never managed to rise above. I had the urge for going, he recalls saying once, when he could run faster than those kids who cannot yet count time. There, by the edge of all that cannot be measured, old dreams dreamt in younger days float out on a wave that drowns the acrid air while he comes to regard the castles his grandkids have captured in the sinking sand.

The sand is to shore
as the ship is to the sea
dreams rest in between.

 

 All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

BRIGHT LIGHTS IN GARDEN PONDS

/ deuxiemepeau / 6 Comments

 

Stars dance at the bottom of the back garden
where the rain waits in shallow ponds
for the earth to lick it dry.

Reflections are dependent on position-

you cannot catch the moon lying on the ground
from the front window where the sun lingered
a little longer today than the tear stained back
where stars tickle the empty earth we’d since weeded
while the moonlight’s absorbed by the shallows
never deep enough to hold the right answers
to the questions the imagination is too distracted
to decipher.

Breakable is dependent too on position and how we transition-

will the earth lick the stars from callous pond,
here, in the back garden while I sit trance-like,
in this window of the empty sky,
turning this piece of plastic over in my hands
to pacify panic, counting the intakes and holding…
one, two, three, four and then out… releasing
for a second longer like the sun that lingered earlier,
in the front, while I was out digging holes
in the earth at the back,

trying to get closer to the cure-

plunging pressured palms down into that hellish heat
to dry this pond of trapped starlight, allowing them
to rise again instead of dying out here,
on this empty earth.

There are times I want to quit this place, these concerns,
this kitchen, this garden, this land, this planet,
this moonlight and feel what it’s like to burn
through eternity and not just lay here,
waiting to be licked.

   

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

WHEN WE COME TO PRESS THIS TIME UPON THE PAGE

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Come friends to gather at end of cycle
Spring is done and summer will have new song,
Time will tell of when it all went viral
Of distance that reigned and hold that was wrong.

Come friends to pressure pen upon the page
Thoughtless is time if man won’t leave his mark-
Sing of the stars we’ve lost upon this stage
Yonder moon’s slow to rise so night lies dark.

Come friends as we stand with light between us
Our fighters are saviours in this war’s ward,
Hold a lamp, a candle, come make a fuss
This hope’s not hungry for soldier or sword.

Come friends, let us sing, apart, united
Night is long but dawn will not be blighted.

   

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

HEARTH

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The old walls have been walled in
by warmer ones
but their youth has nothing on the cracks
and secrets the originals would disclose
if you could still sit around that old fire
and watch the smoke rise up to the high ceilings
since brought down to a more manageable level
and yet I have seen that hidden height-
looking down from the upper attic-
and I know there are whispers trapped
in those forgotten few feet
just like the heat that must still linger
behind the fake wall and down below the soot
now gathered over the old hearth
where you all once gathered to hear the tales
of how life was tilled and turned and that shrill excitement
when someone first turned on a light,
indoors, in a wide-walled room with high ceilings
that kept the heat away from the feet,
a little room where once there was only darkness
just like the light that was turned on, out there,
in that Space where this world spins
while we know nothing of the whispers
that were once words,
echoing out from other planets that too evolved.

 

All words and photographs by Damien B Donnelly

BEFORE THE STILLNESS

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I sit, in stilled space,
trusting time and these proses
to act as forgivers
to all I cannot forget. I sit here,
in this stilled space,
taking trips that tease time with twists
and turns. I move not
in straight lines but articulate thought
through the acts
these tracks have taken, the un-regrettable
mistakes that brought me here
where I sit, in stillness,
in a space, not always my place,
a space grown damp since first stone
was first set
into place by hands I never knew, hands
ground down now
to nothing more than bone,
just like my bones
that will one day come to know the dampness
of all that has surrendered
its forgiveness to all that was not forgotten,
when the final lines
have been laid and I forgive time itself
for the finality of its stillness.

I sit and come to trust.

  

All words and photographs by Damien B. Donnelly