I watched
her little fingers
twist and loop the thread,
push the needle
into fine lace.
This one a handkerchief,
this a piece for the table,
hunger pricked.
The size is the price.
Lay the coins end to end
along the daisy chain.
I wrote this poem when I was researching lace making. Lace was made by women and children at the time of the Irish Famine. The price of the lace was arrived at by covering the piece with coins. Most of the money went to middlemen.
From A Sense of Place
As summer fell
Away to autumn
I found
A solitary harebell
In the long grass
Where knapweed
And yellow rattle
Flower purple and gold.
That tiny splash
Of eggshell blue caught
The ripples of the wind
And danced,
And I danced too
With sheer delight.
Although this beech tree copse is just a couple of miles from where I live it was six overcoats colder this afternoon. The icy blast from the North whipped the trees into a crazy orchestra.
We were glad to join the skeletons warming themselves by the log burner in the Courthill Tea Room.
My aunt, Sheila Mullen, from Dundalk, Ireland, died yesterday. I remember her with love.
Today I came across
A cornucopia
Of slugs on the path.
Slimy and fat,
Yellow and grey,
This bevy of slugs
Slid away
With malicious intent
To the next banquet.
When my feet
Touch this path of rusty flint
And sun bleached chalk
Present and past
Have no meaning,
It is all one
Here at the edge
Of time.
Grey wethers,
Woman and man,
Stand forever bound in stone,
Elf shot and spindle whorl
Cast aside.
Lynchettes lie fallow
Under the vast and ragged blue.
Mewing buzzards rise and wheel
Through aeons.
What is this earth,
This stone?
Blood and bone?
A restless churning tide
Of stardust?
My footsteps echo
Through the rolling
Vaults of time.
The old man sits on the wall,
Sits and smokes his pipe.
The child dances in the puddle,
Dances on white clouds
In an upside down sky.
Water rises and falls,
Rises and falls.
The old man smokes his pipe.
Blue smoke billows
And curls ever upwards.
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