Stepping Westward, 1995 Peter Adair

Stepping Westward, 1995

Tramping that headland where the sheep bleat and gulls screech, I’d be rock and air, sea and sky, a nothing in the mist;

I’d be the corncrake clack-clacking, a fly flitting over the stream – anything, anything to forget his

gasping for breath after breath after breath, his hand shaking, dropping a glass, his blind feet stumbling in the dark.

Peter Adair

Stone Church

I venture no more than a low whisper, afraid I’ll startle the people of heaven. - Li Po The one stark gable form stands reminder a roof once sheltered worship there where, now, sky spills in. Weed, tough slender stalks of it, and other softer, finer wild grasses grow either side of a worn threshold. Stone masons, so long ago, carved fluted casing into the dark wall, this coarse granite smoothed at the small entrance off to one side of what had been the altar. My father came forty years ago driven to the site on his own. Standing at the doorway, looking in at what was no longer there, he’d realized this strange sense of scale, the stature of men a thousand years — five hundred generations — back. I think he said it was raining, cold, the wind was up. Telling me, he always tried to capture the mix of comedy and awe. History. Absent tracing the doorframe his hand had found one place smoother — more polished than the rest — where so many had touched the stone that same place as softly, just as elsewhere-minded as he was, fixed or trying to fix on prayer in whatever language, the blessings of different years, saint names, grief and its rote consolations — or only steadying themselves as they stepped across a width of stone the color of pale flesh, wet with rain.

Tom Driscoll

On the moor-ridge

A warm breeze caressed the moor-ridge murmuring in my ears as I angled toward the summit of a favoured mound.

Once there I lay watching a forever sky; the moons edge illuminated the finale of a rash of stars black, grey fading, a fire burning through it.

My eyes followed the horizon toward an emerging sun that turned cotton grass into lighted bulbs.

With eyes half-closed in gleam a deathly roar shook the silence it was predatory, authoritative, yet lonesome.

I gripped bracken, sat upright and there it stood above the quarry top, a Stag framed in orange. with extraordinary branches spreading from its head,

It was magnificent, close enough to outrun me near enough to admire. I felt no fear.

There was a scurry in a clump of grass, then the pale brown flash of a Hare or a Rabbit, or some mythological creature sent by the Stag to turn me back?

I stayed awhile for as long as a moment could last watching its majesty, staring in obedience.

The sun chased darkness, waking hills on the far side of the valley as the beast followed its shadow fading into memory.

David Ratcliffe Barrow Boating

after Du Fu

Waiting for “Sale Agreed”, here in my dream home. Heart sore, I wander the rooms, reading their stories.

But today, I’m his girlfriend on the barge, learning to throw ropes on the Bisto brown Barrow.

Damsel flies entwine in azure ecstasy on the reeds. A couple of buzzards cavort and soar in slow circles.

We moor up and dine in deckchairs by the campfire. Mirrored in the river, we are silvered by the stars.

Ann Marie Dunne

Dingle Wilds 16 - Trespassing Fish

Remembering Mondays, cockle steam decorating windows those shoes askew eternally damp with morning tides encrusted with shoreline’s hearts, glittering, just there. I and moon are one, watching morn, the evolution. Lone bladderwrack sits perfectly still on tongue, As if loaning itself to Shakespeare; act 2, line 1200 organic kiss synthetic harboured catching sun slinking in and you dripping butter fusions, garlic marrying mango, I sculpt furiously in mind to hold for Thursday’s vigil and tidal blessings of merlot’s seduction seeping further into Atlantic salt seasoning sands and tales of once a walrus came to Kerry on echoes of solitary dolphin clicks dispersed amongst turning tides washing up what ifs what ifs among the decaying common yellow corpses spat out with shells.

Polly Richardson Munnelly

Enemies

A friendship is a diamond cast in the unique clasp of your heart

But how beautiful is the Pearl That coated in layers and years of defensive barriers Once freed Shines full of iridescent colours

So can our Enemies be realised by our love

Tamasine Plowman