A revenant on the bench where I would meet her

In that cold-floored waiting-room in Magherafelt,

Her shopping bags full up with shovelled ashes.

Death walked out past her like a dust-faced coalman

Refolding body-bags, plying his load

Empty upon empty, in a flurry

Of motes and engine-revs, but which lorry

Was it now? Young Agnew’s or that other,

Heavier, deadlier one, set to explode

In a time beyond her time in Magherafelt …

So tally bags and sweet-talk darkness, coalman.

Listen to the rain spit in new ashes

As you heft a load of dust that was Magherafelt,

Then reappear from your lorry as my mother’s

Dreamboat coalman filmed in silk-white ashes.

St Kevin and the Blackbird

And then there was St Kevin and the blackbird.

The saint is kneeling, arms stretched out, inside

His cell, but the cell is narrow, so

One turned-up palm is out the window, stiff

As a crossbeam, when a blackbird lands

And lays in it and settles down to nest.

Kevin feels the warm eggs, the small breast, the tucked

Neat head and claws and, finding himself linked

Into the network of eternal life,

Is moved to pity: now he must hold his hand

Like a branch out in the sun and rain for weeks

Until the young are hatched and fledged and flown.

*

And since the whole thing’s imagined anyhow,

Imagine being Kevin. Which is he?

Self-forgetful or in agony all the time

From the neck on out down through his hurting forearms?

Are his fingers sleeping? Does he still feel his knees?

Or has the shut-eyed blank of underearth

Crept up through him? Is there distance in his head?

Alone and mirrored clear in love’s deep river,

‘To labour and not to seek reward,’ he prays,

A prayer his body makes entirely

For he has forgotten self, forgotten bird

And on the riverbank forgotten the river’s name.

The Gravel Walks

River gravel. In the beginning, that.

High summer, and the angler’s motorbike

Deep in roadside flowers, like a fallen knight

Whose ghost we’d lately questioned: ‘Any luck?’

As the engines of the world prepared, green nuts

Dangled and clustered closer to the whirlpool.

The trees dipped down. The flints and sandstone-bits

Worked themselves smooth and smaller in a sparkle

Of shallow, hurrying barley-sugar water

Where minnows schooled that we scared when we played –

An eternity that ended once a tractor

Dropped its link-box in the gravel bed

And cement mixers began to come to life

And men in dungarees, like captive shades,

Mixed concrete, loaded, wheeled, turned, wheeled, as if

The Pharaoh’s brickyards burned inside their heads.

*

Hoard and praise the verity of gravel.

Gems for the undeluded. Milt of earth.

Its plain, champing song against the shovel

Soundtests and sandblasts words like ‘honest worth’.

Beautiful in or out of the river,

The kingdom of gravel was inside you too –

Deep down, far back, clear water running over

Pebbles of caramel, hailstone, mackerel-blue.