Garden Homage

1950 –

Three windows are at work here, sophisticated
spaces against the day, against the light.
The sky looks as if it has been added later
to a glimpsed world as nobody saw it.

Small gaps of awkwardness between overlapping leaves
bring their time to us, as we our time
to them. The hand alone is amazing,
the skull and the owner’s hand holding it,

together on a page for fifty years,
with the earliest smile. A rope vase
of flowers returns the angels
to the ground, that still beautiful brown.

Painting by Moonlight

It was a bright inviting, freely formed, 
though I suppose it was I who brightened,
with an internal scattering of light,
as though weather maps were more real
than the breath of autumn. 

The low colourfulness
of the broken and dying leaves
was no embrittlement
to every decided colour on the sunlighted grass
and the warm-hued wood of his door. 

But with the dust descending
in the glaring white gap
my backbone pulped and I closed up
like a concertina.

Medbh McGuckian

2010

Love Affair with Firearms

From behind the moon boys' graves
bleed endlessly; from photograph
to browning photograph they blacken
headlines, stranded outside of time
at the story's frigid edge.

Though they are long buried 
in French soil, we are still speaking
of trenches, of who rose, who fell,
who merely hung on. The morning drills
secretly, like an element that absorbs.

We are right back where we were
before the world turned over,
the dreary steeples of Fermanagh and Tyrone
are all that Sunday means.

Medbh McGuckian

2003

Poems

Garden Homage

More by this poet

Painting by Moonlight

Love Affair with Firearms

Poems

Page submenu block

Garden Homage

More by this poet

Painting by Moonlight

Love Affair with Firearms

Newsletter Sign Up