North East in Eden
At the borders where North meets West and East,
Hillsides slide into northern flatlands…
Exhaling ravishment.
Seduced with levity,
I forget darker scenes -
Ulster’s hillsides,
Sucking life to premature death.
Black despair
Tearing reason’s staff,
From solid ground.
A twisted mind,
Tortured by deaths...
Hate’s rhetoric,
The stench of corrupting goodness
Rising from rivers of unworthy termination,
Now seeks the meandering streams of memory;
Sticklebacks skimming in idle becks,
Pond Skaters on quiet pools,
Swallows darting -
Chirruping cheerful summers,
Curlews crying a plaintiff strain...Stay.
Larks raising me to past joys,
Butterflies drawing me down their fluttering path,
Where the Damselfly hovers
Over my safe earth,
My Tranquil lake -
Where Reed Mace whispers peace.
Opened by desiccating sun,
Crazed earth
Echoes my shattered mind,
Cracked by bigoted intolerance,
The rantings of the right
Their hostility ringing round half-forgotten Ulster hills.
Now…
Surrounded by the scented air
And ripening Barley fumes,
Hogwort raises her mature head,
Acknowledging the fertile sun
Settling on her bed of hungry children,
And slumbering poppies wave at me
Without addictive platitudes
That promise vapid dreams of paradise
And forever.
Northward, dark woodland
Whispers serenity,
Her dark, garlic-scented sweetness
Drawing death’s bitter cud...
Purging it.
I had left for hillocks of the dead,
Where those who breathed tomorrow
Lie in unquiet rest -
Exterminated innocence.
From landscapes of mourning,
She called me home.
Cypress - tall and motionless,
Breathe the perfumed exhalations.
Moon rising behind
Streaks the Barley heads with mellow glow.
Peace here.
Green fields without the staining of lost life,
Pure rivers
Not red
Like the raging torrents of the dead.
Mind flees to boyhood earth...
Where eternal orbs illuminate the
Cooling Towers at Selby,
I am returned to Eden,
Inhaling her tomorrows.
© David McLoughlin August 2010
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