Sunday Morning
At Cill Rialaig Artists' Retreat, Co. Kerry
A roof-light of eight panes slants over an easel, a work table layered with paint — now art themselves —
and this bed from which I view dreamscapes wrought, brought undone above a hill rife with ferns.
On the radio, sacred music such as filled the great stone palaces of God, centuries ago. Time to pray?
I remember, in the small hours, a spill of arcane patterns on the glass — heart-sparks
treasuries of hallowed grief, of yet-to-be-lived hope, sequestered in the infinite.
Then, outside in the black summer air a full, paradisal glimpse, real and beyond imagining:
the abundance of the mustard tree, of a million million groves of mustard trees flowering through time.
At death I would like to become, not the astounding, burning truth of a star, but a star
as the naked human eye might know it —a mustard-seed pinpoint of light implanted in fabled depths…
Across the window-frieze, liquid shadows cast from the eastern eaves as jackdaws tumble and dance
though their private, public lives. A raven, lifting from a fence post leaves it trembling. Prayers?
Now that the great world is falling away from us, where will any of us, all of us, be left standing?
May the best of what we were, and are to each other, and to this earth deliver us — somehow, o stars —
from the armouries of vicious harm: the innocent ever more vulnerable,and so many — beyond counting —
bereft, cut loose. Of their journeys of flight, their lives in storm-thrashed shelters,
later, stories will be told —treasuries of grief and hope; new images — heart-sparks — will take shape.
The sky draws our vision with its solitary fractured icons, its swirling maps — all set against
the blackness of hidden light. It seems, anything, now, is possible. May each star be a guiding prayer.
Zen Morning
I pace the drive, back and forth, breathing myself into the day. On high-summer blue, a halved moon that was, a week ago, a blue moon, an eclipsing blood moon held in millions of eyes.
Along a stave of powerlines, convocations of magpies, starlings; a lone honeyeater balances,is still, looks near and far — manifests, moment by moment,its intelligence, its freedom.
Beside the