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 its once 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 in 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.

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 pus,

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

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.