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Indian Summer Journal               Temple Bells

         The Great Lough           Nick Drake

 

 

Indian Summer Journal

(after Louis MacNiece)

 

As the sun burns in a red September sky

Children are dying in some far off place

While we, shocked neighbours through the lens fish eye

Recall 10 years of our own glowering peace

 

Where plans begun with all the best intentions

Rot under the pallid, deferred glance;

Courage creeps away into the darkness

And hope is something hazy in the distance.

 

Yet for all that, the guns are mostly silent

Our violence strains its shackles in the wood

Not to be provoked, unleashed, or whispered

For fear of 'God, or whatever means the good.'

 

Could it be our causes are just minnows

In a teeming sea of snapping, rabid sharks,

Our bloodshed not sufficient for the zeitgeist,

Where conflagration matters more than sparks.

 

I fear that we are all scooped out and hollow

Cold vessels in an unprepared state;

Who if not filled up with love and reason

Choose holy vengeance, and the dance of hate.

 

Michael Conaghan

first published in Fortnight Magazine

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Temple Bells

 

You've been to the east, you've heard

The icicle tones of temple bells

Tinkling out of the mountains to the tilled lands

Far below, to copper, Buddha-serene valleys

Where imagination posits us in Shangri-La.

As it's going to be one of those sunsets

A blood orange fiery spectacular

Flame thrown across the sky

Let's dander in the late summer breeze

Down to where the boats cram the harbour

Or dry dock on the oyster shale

To that humming aluminium forest

where in the quickening August swells

Masts shiver out the sound of Temple Bells.

 

 

Michael Conaghan

first published in London Magazine ,  May 2002

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The Great Lough

 

From my childhood bedroom window

The great lough lay

 

like a woven scarf of silver

A mere four green fields away.

 

To my infant eyes it marked

The world's pale horizon,

 

Which every morning boked up

A vegetable sun.

 

I knew that when the time came

To run away from home

 

For some sin yet uncommitted

Some homework not done,

 

I would pack my bags and hit the road

in the direction of the Lough

 

As it glimmered in my vision

With only four green fields to walk.

 

But my short legs never carried me

Through that broad mid-Ulster plain

 

Though the fields are long built over,

The great Lough, of course, remains.

 

 

Michael Conaghan

first published in The Frogmore Papers ,  No. 61

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Nick Drake

 

Strange that you, who were so sad

Should bring about such happiness

Or maybe not; that humming thread

You wove into sound with dancing fingers

was not perhaps wholly of your own making.

 

Why this meandering Celt should fix

Upon your Oh so Englishness, God knows.

Except it seems a gentle place

Full of the subtler qualities

We are forbidden to have now.

 

For the troubadours who fed our dreams

Have been outlawed from the world

And damn them for it; I know too

Your butterfly elusiveness solidified

Into an earthbound death star.

 

But the songs escape all that

Lovingly possess the hearts of others

Like benign and welcome spirits.

As beyond time you wistfully sing

Something perfect for a damp May morning.

 

 

Michael Conaghan

first published in Connections ,  Spring 2004

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