Traditions | Damien B. Donnelly

I weigh flour and sieve it, like snow falling-
a few select seconds of harmless dust
to decorate these stopped streets
with isolated sirens that stir more in body
than the contents of this bowl.
I reach for those tiny flakes that offer rise
before pouring over the honey-
a smooth sweetness to cut the bitterness
of all that cannot be held in isolation.
Oil comes next, with the water,
once called incompatible
but when all else is distanced
other things find ways to dance.
While it boosts by the window
in a bowl of sunshine,
we take a slow stroll along small paths
that meander through muck and memory.
Mum points to a rickety door
she once knocked on to buy milk,
only a jug left now in an upper window
holding moments that will evaporate.
We pass fields and wonder
that is leek and what is weed
and in our minds make lists
of all that still grows in open pasture
while aisles look empty indoors.
Back home we sit, after bread is baked,
finding comfort in its crisp corners
as butter melts over this uncertain heat
and we remember yesterday,
when life was as simple
as a slice of bread with butter running.

All words and photographs and bread by Damien B. Donnelly (bread recipe from The Happy Pear)

Inspired by a #PoetryPrompt on Twitter from the #PoetInResidence Catherine Anne

Cullen at @PoetryIreland

Reposting this oldie about Ireland for Saint Patrick’s Day

And again I found myself, of a morning, that morning,
on a winding road, once more, meandering like a stream,
before it opened up to unveil a vast expanse of stillness
where brook and lake entwined, where rugged roads
wandered into wilder woods and the light, that sat upon mossy mountain,
reflected the break of another boorishly boisterous day in a landscape
where Yeats, having left the Mauds of his world to fight the battle
without him, had climbed nightly The Thoor Ballylee to find rest, and so,
that morning, I revelled in what it meant to be connected to these often harsh,
sometimes barren but seldom anything less than breathtaking lands.

Immense clouds hanging on the horizon, fertile lands out front,
awash with the 40 shades and a silence, amid so much
awe-inspiring nature, that the Emerald in her name seemed so justified.

And yet, as if forever ingrained and known, but for a moment forgotten,
from somewhere deep inside resurfaced the notion that it was not these lands
that I missed but the memory of laughter that blew above these lands
on the breeze that crossed fields of verdant greens, that skirted over grass
waiting to be grazed on and found rest in trees that longed for lovers to kiss beneath.

And then, as normal as the nodding of the cap to the passing stranger
along the roadside, I was taken back to those lucidly liquid days shining
from my youth when the patriotic spirit of a nation, so small but spirited,
more laughed with than laughed at, doused itself in shamrocks
and drowned itself merrily in spirits of an altogether other nature,
a time when neighbours knew each other like family
and a new face in town was merely a friend we did not yet know…

And there I stood, home again, spun on that same laughing breeze
into the past and I saw before me the Me of today reflected
in my childhood form of yesterday with teddy in one hand
and Tayto’s in the other, smiling amid laughter I had heard
but was far too young to understand in a land that I’ve fled so far from,
swept up and away on other breezes, and yet, however high I fly
or however much I roam, I never seem to feel too far
From that Fair Green Isle called home.