Tag Archives: mother earth

Voices From Cnoc Alúine

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Caoilte

I will raise mountains to the sky
I will cover Islands with the sea
And I will gather broken things
And weave them quietly through dreams.

I will sing forgotten songs
And lift my voice, though none join in
And I will come by wind and rain
To see the lost live once again.

Ailbhe

Who will count the landscape’s scars
The path is red, blood of old stones
Shards of time, earth mother’s bones:
Once more found, are we never alone.

I

I will journey on the seven tides
To find the reason for your cries,
And I will sit in surrender to
The sadness welling up in you.

For you who are so very dear,
I will hold the far more near
And shed a single, weary tear
For all the dreams that flew from here.

Oisin

The great conversation is not halted
By the sun burnt desires of the taking
I am here in all that is,
What lies broken, all awaking

Do not cast a cry from the tallest trees
For what was never meant to last
Has not future met it’s origin
Has not the child come home again,

Striving for beyond,
And held the strands of the pattern in weaving between her fingers,
To become the song of sunbeams whose streaming laughter lingers?

In your hand you hold the vast and through it learn to soar,
Patiently within you, for child, it is yours.
There is no turning back, only turning, earth and seasons turning,
A time for growing and relearning.

Time to realize we’re all some mother’s child,
Time to honor and continue to rekindle
The wild look in your eyes,
And the color of belonging, green and blue and wise.

Did you really think there would be a single one
Who would not make it to the other side?
Change, the knot
That cannot be undone, it lies

Between our orchestra of longing,
And the whole with fractured facets rearranging.
And among chords played, between silences, we fly,
Letting go of all that’s left behind.

Life shimmers like a firefly’s light,
Transient and tenaciously, we dance what’s yours and mine.
Life leaps in joy and wonder into everything,
Glowing then for all it finds.

Life strikes out in frenzy through forever,
And for that, ever, ever shine.

*This is in response to my friend Ali Isaac’s post, “Almu, The Home of Irish Hero Fionn mac Cumhall,” which you can read here: http://aliisaacstoryteller.com/2014/05/15/almu-the-home-of-irish-hero-fionn-mac-cumhall/.

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On Origins

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ImageImageI skip stones, sleeping in gaps between landings,
Losing her to the cold, quoting her in the sea.
Our long afternoon drones and buzzes with bees–

Be or not be, be here or there,
Believe, be loved, belong, become–
But I am none of these things.

Sheltered under her precipice,
I fear ground might slip from under me.
Tar tarnishes her smock, she creeps

Out of cracks in sidewalks, checking up on us,
Noting how far from her we move away.
She forms stones that soften into sand,
Measuring time with each expanse of her mouth,

An eon when she yawns.  How can it be so?
I walked by the piers, singing the grief of trees–
I am none of these things.

I saw myself in shards of her looking glass,
Scaled her knees, curled in her lap,  still a child.
She says hush, hush, the roar of her tears cascading

Waterfalls crashing in her eyes, hollows of cliffs– comfort me.
We are broken in places where wounds recede
Back from rims of caves, her eyebrows.  We stumble
On the peaks of eggshells and crack

Under the weight of wounds that do not heal.
She erupts in the north, for it takes time to hatch,
Longer than we give it time.
And so we wither like a thousand winters,

Our names waving in the air like flags–
Human beings, we denote ourselves everywhere
To conquer who we are.

On the ground where I am weeping,
She wipes my eyes when I  turn away, and tells me
About the day I was born.  My eyes open

And the green clears, and no longer numb, I feel her
Pain.  One door locks when another opens.
I choose like that butterfly chose that flower,

And she is out there, an acorn away.
I gather her eyelashes in my arms like baby’s breath,
I say, someday we will remember the songs we sang

As fireflies, there is only so much light to shine,
But I live like a flame, waxing and waning,
Shifting in and out of the particularities of things.

And how does change come?
Through turning here– or there?
In a shell, the propper names?

But, I am none of these things.
And so she says.  I hear her whisper
A distant melody, an echoing that lingers within silences.