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page 14
* In the near-ignored far corner of the yard there is a compound clustering of most uneasy nettles: unloved, useless, existing on dust; but the scent is a warm-hearth scent, where the eye of heaven comes visiting; they cry out to us, for they are cousins in sorrow to the woodlouse and the earwig, to street-urchin starlings with their mimicry and soft-flesh beak; these nettle-crowds are green, and grey-green and dust-green-grey, whose love-embrace brings sting and hurt; then dry after June sunshine, they droop and wilt, like standing ladies discarded on the dancefloor… * Over the dark on-flowing of the river towards Clew Bay, like black chestnuts or death’s head on the high wind-shaken branches, the crows – rook and carrion, monkish and clown jackdaw – insist on their raucous sermonizing, one to another in caw-words, unmusical, echoing, in their own church, structured and unreasoning, hallowed between street and sky, above roof and scuttling umbrellas, bustleabout deliveries, their clusters of twig-nests, their births, marriages and deaths, independent of the tolling of bells or the architecture of spires; in their dark feathers and warrior eyes, the fluctuant centuries, the millennia; and still the crow makes wing to the rooky wood… 12
page 15
By-The-Wind Sailor Send forth your spirit and they shall be created, and you will renew the face of the earth. In the beginning, breath agitated like the breeze, the stitched sheet rippled like a foal, and the home-built ‘Unsafe’ safe, craft for the now, shivering beyond the stones; wind slight, the bog-lake standing at ease. We are children, always, attentive to the breath. Braced for the extraordinary. * In the enclosed garden there is the high proud mastery of hollyhock and delphinium, of soft-pink rose and lupin where bumble-bee and variegated Eden-coloured butterflies speak ease and silence and the passion of earthen things. Outside the walls there is the wilful human violence, darkness of the common soul, of the quick and the departed. Belief, with its creel of ritual and mystery, becomes difficult. The walls are coloured with the figures of dread: dragons and demons, the cockerel betrayal of the Christ, barbarian terror abroad. Our breath is prayer, lifting our spirits 13

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* In the near-ignored far corner of the yard there is a compound clustering of most uneasy nettles: unloved, useless, existing on dust; but the scent is a warm-hearth scent, where the eye of heaven comes visiting; they cry out to us, for they are cousins in sorrow to the woodlouse and the earwig, to street-urchin starlings with their mimicry and soft-flesh beak; these nettle-crowds are green, and grey-green and dust-green-grey, whose love-embrace brings sting and hurt; then dry after June sunshine, they droop and wilt, like standing ladies discarded on the dancefloor… * Over the dark on-flowing of the river towards Clew Bay, like black chestnuts or death’s head on the high wind-shaken branches, the crows – rook and carrion, monkish and clown jackdaw – insist on their raucous sermonizing, one to another in caw-words, unmusical, echoing, in their own church, structured and unreasoning, hallowed between street and sky, above roof and scuttling umbrellas, bustleabout deliveries, their clusters of twig-nests, their births, marriages and deaths, independent of the tolling of bells or the architecture of spires; in their dark feathers and warrior eyes, the fluctuant centuries, the millennia; and still the crow makes wing to the rooky wood…

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