Fiftywords

@fiftywords.bsky.social

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Thinks too much and tries to make sense of the world’s chaos, beauty, and commas; mostly through poetry.

Galibier, 1998 after Pantani He rose not with tactics, but with need, as if the mountain owed him something. Rain blurred the road into memory. Mist licked the hairpin bends like breath on an ageing mirror He was out of the saddle, but never out of pain, only deeper inside it, driving toward some clarity the flat could never give. Behind, the peloton twisted, calculating. But this was not maths. This was poetry on a gradient. He vanished into the cloud, a wraith in rain, all ribs and rage and the hunger to be more than what they saw. He reached the summit alone. But glory is not shelter. Headwinds met him on the descent, and the storm waited on every bend. The Galibier gave him one day when nothing touched him. Not the rules. Not the whispers. Not even gravity. And then, as all gods do, it let him go.
Créacht na Staire The Wound of History The empire sailed away, or so the history book said, a small engraving of ships diminishing into weather. But it had already hidden inside the mouth. Our rivers answered to names they had not chosen. Mountains were corrected. Fields divided themselves obediently on maps. At school, we were given rulers. We learned to draw straight lines, to underline the subject, circle the object, and call possession grammar. The old words survived as contraband: in kitchens, at wakes, under the breath of women who knew a language could be beaten without being killed Still, when we speak, the wound opens: claim, clear, settle, own. A conqueror's verbs, passed down as ordinary speech. The flag was lowered. The alphabet remained, some letters missing, others drilled into order. And somewhere beneath each careful sentence, the tongue remembers what was taken from it.
Stage 1 The illusion of control They roll out as if motion were harmless, just another flat day in a land that never forgets what wheels can do to flesh. The roads are clean now, but memory sleeps beneath the tarmac: the rattle of cobbles, the teeth of wind, the instant a wheel slips, and time fractures like a myth exposed to weather. It is too early for victory, too late for innocence. Everyone knows you cannot win the Tour today, but you can lose it in a blink, in a rut, in someone else's fall. Elbows sharpen. The peloton bunches, breath held like a verdict. And up front, the sprinters smile, marking time. They've waited all winter for this one clean cut through chaos.
In Hoc Signo Vinces Before dawn they painted the sign upon our shields. The Emperor had dreamed it. We had carried eagles, invoked Mars, whispered to Mithras underground. A soldier learns how quickly heaven changes its name. Across the river men tightened straps, touched small gods, thought of home. We were told a god had chosen us. At the bridge I drove my sword beneath a man's ribs. He fell against me, his face pressed to the holy mark. That evening it was called it divine. I washed the shield in the river. The blood came away. The sign remained.
THE BORDER: NOT TO SCALE KEY - road no river border home history what cannot be shown .. • THE BORDER • • drawn through the page not through the rain not through the language not through the dead × checkpoint × watchtower x road cratered overnight × the name of the man who did not come back The line remains useful. It tells the state where its authority ends. It tells the map where to change colour. It does not tell the child why the road to school crosses history twice. (x) It does not tell the field which country it is in. It does not tell the river to turn back. YOU ARE HERE • though the map has placed you somewhere else.
Book cover of Language of Place featuring a hazy Croke Park stadium
An Ordinary Epic Man buys kidney. Teacher thinks. Dublin talks. Funeral, lust, memory, kindness. Woman remembers.
Helen is fixing her lipstick. Penelope is sitting on the counter, shoes abandoned somewhere in a previous century. The music outside thumps through the walls. A girl is crying in one cubicle. Three strangers have already assembled to tell her she deserves better. "That's nice," says Penelope. Helen nods. "We could have used that in Troy." A silence. Helen studies herself in the mirror. "I still get blamed, you know." Penelope laughs. "Of course you do." "A thousand ships." "Apparently." "I never asked anyone to launch a thousand ships." "No." "They could have stayed home." "They could." "They seemed very enthusiastic, from what I heard" Helen smiles despite herself. Midnight at The Elysium Another silence. "You waited twenty years." "Did I?" "The songs say so." Penelope rolls her eyes. "The songs say I spent most of that time at a loom or staring out of windows." "You didn't?" "I was running a kingdom." "Fair." A woman enters holding one heel, a handbag, and what appears to be someone else's jacket. Nobody comments. "You ever get angry?" Helen asks. "At Odysseus?" Penelope thinks. "Sometimes." "Because he left?" "No." "Because he took so long?" "No." "What then?" Penelope shrugs. "Because every time he tells the story he becomes more of a hero." Helen laughs so hard she has to steady herself against the sink. "That's men." "Think they're heroes for just washing up." Outside, someone has started arguing over a woman. Helen and Penelope exchange a glance. Neither moves. Neither looks surprised. "Think they'll ever learn?" asks Helen. The girl in the cubicle starts crying again. Immediately, three voices answer: "Forget him." "You're too good for him." "Honestly, Pandora, He's just after your box" Penelope pauses. "See?" "What?" "That's
Podium Mexico 1968 Three men stand where victory was supposed to be the whole story. The flags rise. The cameras click. History wants a photograph. Instead, two fists enter the frame. Not clenched in anger. Clenched in memory. Clenched for those whose names would never appear on a medal table. The moment lasts seconds. I he consequences last vears. Yet what survives is neither the punishment nor the praise, but the sight of two men standing perfectly still, asking a question the anthem could not answer.
Ulysses 101 A man bought a kidney for his breakfast. A young teacher went walking by the sea, thinking very big thoughts. The man wandered through Dublin. He went to a funeral. He read a letter. He ate lunch. He watched people. He remembered his son. He worried about his wife. The young teacher kept thinking very big thoughts. All day people talked, argued, sang, boasted, dreamed, lied, remembered. The city buzzed like a hive full of stories. At night the man met the young teacher. Neither was looking for the other, but they found each other anyway. They walked. They talked. The man offered kindness. The young teacher came home with him. Then everyone went to bed. And a woman, who had been there all along, lay awake remembering her life, her loves, and the day she first said yes.
Self-Knowledge For years I assembled myself. A philosophy. A history. A set of reasons. Every contradiction filed away. Every wound assigned a cause. Every desire translated into language. The account grew longer. The seams grew tighter. Yet the moments that feel most like living still arrive unannounced. A laugh that escapes me. A grief older than memory. A kindness I cannot explain. Somewhere, a story forms, bartering truth for sense. The more carefully I become myself, the more often I encounter the part that isn't.
A Fiendish Read There once was a brave Bloomsday guide Who opened Ulysses with pride; Ten footnotes, three maps, Two breakdowns, four naps And Bloom hadn't even arrived.
Cataract For James Joyce Light curdles in the bowl of the eye. The Liffey runs thick as kitchen broth. Faces arrive pre-remembered, already elegy, as through mother's muslin. Letters perform their blackstroke ballet, eel-slick, apostrophising the dark. O punctum! O scotoma! A blind spot breeding itself, Dublin's babble-spot, bibble-babble, see-nothing say-all, a wink gone feral. He lifts the lid. A proscenium of pink. Chorus of instruments tink-tink for entrance. Incision, a parenthesis parented in the cornea, (eye) (1) Between the brackets the world proofreads its blur. I have lived by squint, by candle-economy, by the miser's hoard of sight, coin of the realm, hoarded glow. A veil self-stitched. A bridal to nothing. White upon white till form forgets its edge. Night is not absence. It is a room with the lamp removed. Hand to wall. Wall to door. Door to word. And the word, milked, filmed, cataracted, still burns.
Before the Walk They called it obscene this book smelling of soap, kidneys on a pan, sea wind and stale beer, a man crossing Dublin with the whole weather of his mind showing. It gave thought a body, let desire speak in its own accent, made one June day stretch its shadow across a century. They feared the ordinary once it began talking back: bedsheets, advertisements, church bells, a woman remembering herself. It named the sacred and didn't capitalize it, found holiness under fingernails, in hunger, in the sound of someone coming home late. So they banned it. Yet it traveled folded in coats, crossed oceans in luggage, lived in penciled notes and borrowed copies. Somewhere a woman in the dark was already saying yes.
Gift The world arrives first. No asking. No terms. A weight, named blessing. A burden, named grace. To whom do you return it? God? Nature? History? The nameless? Gifts given without consent cut twice: you cannot refuse them, you cannot accept them. So the mind keeps one indictment only: You gave me what I must carry. Gratitude thins. Light darkens. The sacred torments and tallies. This life. This gift. It bruises. It brands. Cracked open by its weight, we bleed it back. Really- you shouldn't have.
The Main Event The cage arrived first. Then the lights. Then the men whose names appeared on buildings, campaign donations, and media ownership charts. The commentators spoke of tradition. The crowd waved flags. Somewhere behind them, the White House. Ladies and gentlemen, in the red corner, the Constitution. A little frayed, perhaps. Still answering to its own name. And in the blue corner, well. The introductions took some time. There were subsidiaries. Holding companies. PACs. Streaming rights. Several national myths. The opening rounds were difficult to score. A clean shot from Executive Order. A counter from Judicial Review. Checks and Balances absorbed more punishment than expected The crowd wanted knockouts. The sponsors wanted content. The commentators called both patriotism. By the seventh round the Constitution was through the announcer's table. By the eighth Democracy was pinned against the cage. The commentators insisted this was what freedom looked like. The bell rang. The crowd is already filing out, checking their phones, as the referee starts the count.
Arithmetic The starving child has nothing. You have more than a life can spend. The distance between those facts has a name.
Quietus The room thins. Names gather at the edge of sight, not the beloved, but the others. Those exchanged for a wedding ring, a child, a promise kept. The breath rests. The account remains open.
Erasure The name is cut away and cut again. Attend to spacing. Keep the margin true. The stone remembers what is taken then. Set iron to the line. Begin again. Do not rush the stroke. Let it pass through. The name is cut away and cut again. Dust gathers where the letters once had been. Clear it. It settles. That will have to do. The stone remembers what is taken then. Do not speak of who was written in. There is no form for that. It is not due. The name is cut away and cut again. The face is next. Reduce it where you can. The eyes last. They are harder to undo. The stone remembers what is taken then. By noon there will be nothing left to name. Only the space will tell you something grew. The name is cut away and cut again. The stone remembers what is taken then.
Saint Edmund Among the Pages They wanted us shameful, silenced in margins, you wrote us centre-stage, cracked the spine of silence with the weight of our names. You walked before pride had parades, before rainbow flags hung in windows. Wrote when a kiss could convict, when love had to learn silence. Not saintly in the way they meant, but in the way a body burns to light the way. Your gospel was sweat and wit, leather and longing, not psalms, but sighs in borrowed beds. You gave us back our bodies, not cleaned for Sunday, but raw, radiant, aching with truth. You said what others only dared to feel, and called it literature. Now the boy with his own story walks taller. Now queer means possible, not punished. Let no one straighten your memory. Let no one sand down your sentences. You were ours- spine cracked still burning.
More Than a Body They look at this body and offer worthless pity, they don't see the pulse beneath the surface, the hunger for more than just existence. They strip me down to what I can't do, as if desire is something I no longer hold, as if wanting and being wanted by another boy is a dream I have no right to. This body, not just a shell, holds fire they cannot dim. There is longing for his hands, for his voice saying my name, a yearning that refuses to quiet, even as they turn their eyes away. I want what everyone wants: not just to be loved, but to love him, to be seen as whole by someone who sees the beauty in both my difference and my desire. They forget that I am more than a condition, more than a life they think is lesser. I feel it all, the ache, the wanting, the thrill of imagining his lips close, his fingers not afraid to linger. Desire lives here, even if they refuse to see it, even if they think I am less than flesh and bone. Unworthy, they say. Yet his hand finds mine, rewriting their script in our tangled breath.
Italia '90 It began in the naming Italy, June Cagliari, Palermo, Genoa Words passed around until they took weight, until the days leaned toward them, hours fixing without being fixed, men already counting how they'd get away early, someone saying it wouldn't last, someone else not answering. It was in the talk on buses and the DART, in estates with half the lads gone or on the dole, in shops with the paper open at the fixtures, in offices where work came and went the same as ever and still the radio turned just enough to carry it. Italy, June as if saying it might be enough. But this moved differently. No single start, only a gathering the voice rising ahead of the play, the ball not settling. a turn held too long, a shot coming back, level, and already the word moving faster than what made it, taken up until it no longer described the game but altered the room. Kevin Sheedy, though the name came after, dragged through a sound already begun, Olé, Olé, Olé not quite in time, never quite in time, but everywhere, out ahead of itself, in houses with chairs set in rows, in pubs three deep, in rooms that wouldn't hold a crowd and now did. Doors opening. People already out, a shirt and tie not yet home, overalls still on, a woman calling it in from the doorway though she hadn't watched a minute. Cars taking it up, horns breaking it, carrying it further, Give it a lash, Jack, not one voice but through everything at once, as if the words had been waiting for the mouth. Green everywhere, shirts over whatever was there before, flags from windows that didn't open, tied to aerials, dragged loose in the wind, coming away and caught again, under it something turning, a rhythm held, Dearg Doom breaking through and folding back, so that the street had a pulse. It travelled out and back, from Dublin into places that didn't meet it, from towns where the shout carried too far, from houses where one answer came a second late, then again, not together, not needing to be. Even the rain di…
Customs I watched them cross without inspection. No questions. No search of bags. Homer in plain sight. Latin declensions tucked casually into conversation. They carried whole galleries, orchestras, libraries, through customs as though these things belonged to them. Mine travelled hidden. A tattered Penguin Classic beneath a second-hand school blazer. Poems folded between football programmes. Words whose pronunciation I learned in private, fearful of discovering they had never been intended for my mouth. I studied their documents. Looked for stamps I might have missed. Searched my own for omissions. What visa had been granted to them at birth? Only later did I discover there had never been a checkpoint. Only stories, passed quietly from traveller to traveller, warning us which borders were not for crossing. The strangest thing was how many of us obeyed. Standing before open gates, passport in hand, waiting for permission that was never theirs to grant.
The Sublime Ick Once we sought the sublime in glaciers, tempests, the star-filled abyss. Now one awkward wave, one misplaced emoji, and an entire cosmos folds inward. Burke had his terror. Kant his vastness. We have screenshots. The infinite survives, though altered. Not the cold immensities between the stars, but the bottomless question that opens at three in the morning: Why did I say that? And still the feeling is familiar. The sudden shrinking of the self. The vision of unseen audiences arriving one by one, each carrying a slightly different version of your mistake. Perhaps the sublime never vanished. It merely changed address.
Dawn After the Fire The smoke still hangs between the houses. The bricks still hold the night's heat. A child's bicycle leans against a charred wall. Did the fire, once lit, stop to examine passports? Could flames distinguish between guilty and innocent? Can smoke ask a child where their grandparents were born? The morning exposes what darkness concealed: not courage, not conviction, but the ancient cowardice of a crowd mistaking terror for strength. Everything else comes afterwards. The speeches. The appeals to 'understanding their concerns'. The guarded explanations. The carefully worded arguments. But dawn is merciless. It strips excuses And there, in the ordinary light, the truth stands naked: someone looked at a house full of strangers and decided it should burn.
Rootcall When the sun returns, she wakes beneath, flanks trembling, breath of loam and ember. The old god speaks in heat, the seed remembers its name. Through cracked clay, a pulse ascends, green vein seeking flame. We, who scorched and wandered, kneel to her rising. From dust and silence, she calls us home, root to star, dark to dawn, again, again, again.
Only Weather These days the world arrives in fragments: a war, a weather map, a market crash, a stranger's grief, an algorithm explaining it all. The machine is helpful. The experts disagree. The facts accumulate like snow. We were promised that knowledge would illuminate. Instead, the room grew brighter and brighter until the furniture disappeared Soon there is no path, only weather. The old stars no longer guide us. The maps grow larger. The destination disappears.
Deadfall The forest remembers not by preserving but by using. The fallen oak becomes moss, becomes beetle, becomes soil. A sapling rises through the hollow where its heartwood stood. Nothing is recovered. Nothing returned. Yet nothing lost. The forest keeps faith with what has fallen by making it part of what comes next.
Return The ferry hums, its rhythm lost to the sea's steady pulse. She stands at the railing, wind tugging at her coat, silence shaping the air around her. Dublin is hidden still, but it moves toward us: a city carried on her breath, skipping games, childhood 'gangs' memories salt-soft. She does not speak. She does not need to. The city lives in her, its streets worn smooth with memory. What does it mean to belong? To carry a place in your blood, to leave and still feel its weight in your chest? To pass it on, a half-remembered hymn, a scent in the skin; a shadow that moves with you even when you turn away? Her Dublin will never be mine. And yet, it is. Piece by piece, she gave it to me: a geography of love, memories in freeze frame, a gift I hold but cannot grasp. Her hand grips the rail, fingers firm, knuckles pale, as if holding something that shifts beneath her- not the sea, but the past, rising, indistinct. When the docks emerge, her face shifts - a flicker, a fracture: part joy, part ache. She exhales, and the sound unspools, a string pulled taut, then loosened. What not words offer? The water holds us; her city, her child, her memories. And now, it's mine. This fragile inheritance of belonging.
The Horror The ghost was waiting. Patiently inhabiting all I would not touch. The old wound. The old shame. The names I preferred not to remember. Every abandoned thing gathered there. I found myself arriving late to my own life. Speaking words already spoken. Walking familiar streets as though visiting them. Looking in mirrors and seeing someone almost familiar One day I stopped running. The ghost grew smaller. The room regained its weight. The world its texture. The trees outside became trees again. The rain simply rain. And the dead, whatever their business, were free to keep it.
Opportunity The harbour appears slowly, first a rumour of land, then a breakwater, then lights. A wind inclining itself toward arrival. All our lives such moments come. A friendship. A vocation. A door opening in an ordinary afternoon. The harbour does not choose us. The wind does not compel us. Opportunity lives in the small turning, the quiet consent to make for harbour.
Falling Sometimes it arrives as a foot caught on an uneven paving stone. Sometimes as a name spoken y a docto fer a naus Sometimes as the phone call that divides a life into before and after. It comes when the applause lasts long enough to sound like truth. When distance makes us deaf to the slower voices calling from behind. And suddenly the ground demands attention. The pavement. The breath. The ache in the knee. The old woman taking one careful step after another. The man carrying grief like a sack of stones worn smooth by years. The child learning courage through fear. Things unnoticed begin speaking again. A sparrow in the gutter. The neighbour dragging bins to the curb before sunrise. The cracked face of a gravestone weathering another winter. We remember that wisdom rarely arrives from the summit. Most of it is learned close to the earth, where falling leaves us, and where, if we're fortunate, we begin again.
Nika (At the Beginning) Someone shouted. Nika! and it ran through us like wine in the blood. Win. Win what? It didn't matter. We were colours then, Blues and Greens, bright as banners, loud as drums, names you could wear like a second skin. And the Hippodrome, God, the sound of it, thirty thousand voices suddenly agreeing on nothing except that this, this was better than silence. You felt it lift you. Men climbed where they shouldn't, laughed where they shouldn't, said things, loudly, they had only ever said in their heads. Even the guards looked smaller. Even the Emperor, up there somewhere, felt less like a fact. We were not thinking of endings. No one ever does. Only this, this bright unravelling, this sudden permission to be louder, freer to be, for once, unanswered.
God Doesn't Play Dice Beneath the world's confusion some hidden geometry, every consequence folded quietly inside its cause. The planets seem obedient enough. The seasons return. Light keeps its appointments. Ne stake ourselves continuall gainst uncertainty A proposal offered without knowing the answer. A seed pressed into dark soil. A friendship begun. A child carried home. A truth spoken aloud. The physicist sought a universe without chance, without the trembling hand, the unguarded word, the door left open, the voyage undertaken before the weather clears. Yet all the things that matter most were once a gamble.
Beyond Wonder After seeing Raphael's Transfiguration I remember the walk afterwards. The noise of Rome. A bus labouring uphill. A woman shaking crumbs from a paper bag for the birds. But first there had been the boy, eyes turned back to white, body given over to something that would not release him, and above, unreachably above, the light that had no business being that colour. Something had happened. In the air between things. For an hour or so the world seemed relieved of some ancient burden. Even the broken places, the stained wall, the limping dog, the man asleep against the fountain, appeared complete. The dog still limped. The wall still peeled. But each thing seemed to stand inside a significance larger than itself, as stars, before we understand astronomy, appear to belong to some immense intention. For a brief while the distance between what is and what ought to be vanished. The world, usually encountered in fragments, revealed itself as a single utterance. And the heart, which spends so much of its life leaning toward elsewhere, stood astonished to find it had arrived.
Inheritance At first we thought the horizon was a promise, some final harbour beyond the labouring water where the self might stand complete. So we rowed hard. Called exhaustion purpose. Mistook speed for direction. And being young, we believed the sea was merely distance: something to cross, to master, to leave behind. Then came the long weather. Friends drifting quietly into other currents. Maps dissolving in rain. The hand learning there are nights when keeping course is enough. Years loosen things. The need to arrive. The hunger to be witnessed. The old ambition to stand at the centre of the story. And if grace enters at all, it enters here: in delight at another's beginning, in handing over the small hidden things, how to read a darkening sky, how to survive the hours without wind, how sometimes a little kindness keeps a life afloat. The old, once they have earned it, begin to understand the sea itself was the inheritance.
The Iconoclast The iconoclast destroys the image in the name of the invisible, yet the blow itself becomes an act of worship: not faith, but hunger. hand rising against gold and god, not the image. paint flaked, face unmade, still, the eye remained, in dust, watching. smashing the painted face, only to carve belief into stone. a blow for freedom, for hunger's brief hymn, yet stone remembers each strike as worship. every rebellion hardens into its own idol; every purity, a new disguise. ruin gathers form again: colour seeps through the wound, and beauty that old heretic kneels, laughing.
Gravity Physicists say mass bends time. I think of old priests lighting candles slowly, nurses sitting beside the dying without reaching for language, a woman in a kitchen garden standing still enough to hear blackbirds return to the hedge. Gravity is not force alone. It is invitation. The moon lifts whole seas without command. A planet keeps its dead through tenderness of pull. And perhaps love itself is only this: to become present enough that another life slows near you, finds orbit, sets down its burden of hurried becoming. There are people from whom we leave lighter, though they have drawn us inward. Others flee such gravity, terrified of silence, of what might surface once the noise falls away. Yet somewhere beneath the frantic spinning, the heart still longs for that deeper field, for the unseen pull that brings lost things slowly home.
The Prayer of Breathing Before words there was this: the first tide entering the body, the first assent we never knew we gave. And after words, after all our names have loosened their hold, there will be this again, one breath leaving quietly, as if returning what was only ever lent. Between the two we live: coming, going, held for a while in the mercy of exchange. Breath asks nothing of us. It keeps faith through sleep, through griet, through familiar days. It enters without applause, leaves without complaint, comes back as if forgiveness were the body's oldest habit. And perhaps this is prayer
Judgement of Age Age came first as evidence: white in the hair, the skin creasing its affidavit under weather and grief. The mirror called its witness. There he stood that lined accomplice wearing my name like forged papers, his face carrying the long mistrust of someone questioned too often by time. I knew him only by association. His hands had wintered. His shoulders still bent under vanished burdens. His mouth had learned the restraint of hurt. And I, inside this dock of bone, pleaded otherwise: not guilty of this slackening, not guilty of cartilage, blood, or the slow conspiracies of obedient time. Yet memory turned witness. It named the dead, the weather, the griefs I had crossed through without knowing they were carving their record into flesh. Still, beneath this frail exhibit of scar, vein, and thinning skin, something refused sentence. But some first self, still inwardly quick, untouched by the visible law that drags the body toward verdict.
Dark Water There are days grief does not arrive as sorrow but as a low weather in the body, cups left half-drunk, the refusal of music, the long pause before answering a name. You think it wants to break you. Instead, it keeps leading you back to the same dark water, asking what was loved enough to leave this depth behind. Beneath the exhaustion, beneath the daily mimicry of ease, something still rises in the dark. Grief is not always the wound. Sometimes it is the hand resting there, refusing to let you forget what once made you fully alive.
Witness We have seen the children swollen with hunger, flies sipping at cracked lips while traders watched numbers rise. We have seen bodies lifted from rivers, names dissolved in border water, while politicians speak of pressures and controls. We have heard the sermons of neutrality, words washed clean in think-tank fonts while villages burned beyond the frame. We have seen men priced by the crossing, women carried toward buyers, children counted beside cargo before they learned they could be sold We have seen cities collapse in real time, dust moving through hospitals, the camera trembling just enough to become content. We have heard the language of regret: deep concern, complex situation, unfortunate necessity. Meanwhile the guns arrived on time. They said starvation was not policy, yet warehouses remained full while the queues grew longer. They said civilians must be protected, then mapped the dead into percentages. We have seen men grow rich enough to darken governments, while whole countries went dark. Somewhere, tonight, a mother screams a name that will not cross a border. And still the screens glow softly in the rooms where we explain why nothing could be done. Somewhere, a child dies twice, once from hunger, once from our silence.
First Door We thought we were arriving. Instead, the door opened and distance failed. Shock first a held breath breaking shape, tears arriving before words could organise themselves. Miles collapsed in the hallway. The years it took to build this life stepped aside to let us in. Shopping lists abandoned on the kitchen bench. Someone says, We'll go later, meaning not today, maybe not at all. A kettle clicks on. Cups are set out as if this were always the plan. No one drinks at first. The children watch, not intruding, screens glowing in their hands, thumbs still moving, keeping the world running while adults relearn its shape. One drifts outside, kicks a ball against the fence, again, again, the body working through what the mind has not named. And a dog, circles wildly through the room bounding, barking. too fast, too happy gleefully unaware but greeting everyone with the urgency of joy. This house has learned them, their hours, their pauses, how surprise fits without breaking routine. Plans surface, dissolve. Tomorrow rearranges itself, waiting its turn. Later, they will show us the town with a pride that does not apologise: this is where we live, this is where the ground answers us now
They gave me a jar, sealed, ordinary at first glance, clay, weighty, the kind you would store grain in, or something meant to last. I carried it inside. There was nowhere else for it to go. That is the truth of it. It did not shine. It did not call to me, not in the way they will later say. But it stayed where I could see it. And then it stayed where I could not stop seeing I moved it once, twice, not to open it, only to place it somewhere more sensible, away from the doorway, away from the draught, but each place felt wrong, as if the room had already arranged itself around it. You will want a reason. There isn't one that will satisfy you. Only this: it did not belong closed. Not like a secret. Not like something hidden. More like a word held too long on the tongue. Pandora I remember putting my hand to the seal and not removing it. That is as close as I can come to the moment you are looking for: the slight give of something that was never meant to remain as it was. And then, no, not "everything" That is the lie that makes it manageable. It was smaller than that. Worse than that. A thinning. A loosening of what had held. I still don't know which changed first: myself or the air. Things did not leave in a rush. They altered. What had been whole no longer held itself together without effort. I tried to stop it. Of course I did. But there is a point after which stopping is only another form of watching. I stood there with my hand still on the lid as if that meant anything now. Later, they will name what escaped. They will make lists. They will tell it as a single act with a single cause. They will say I opened it. As if it had not already begun. As although nothing else in the world pushed outward; sought its own release. At the bottom, yes, I saw what remained. I will not name it for you. You have done that often enough. I only know it did not comfort me. It lingered the way a question outlasts its answer.
Fragile The river flows, unmoved by ruin, its song inscribed in stone and time. Above, stars scatter recklessly, careless artisans of light, their permanence a quiet rebuke to our small certainties. This is not our world to hold. We are brief, flickering in its vastness. And yet, in the turning, we sift the shards, piece by tentative piece, as though reassurance could be built from the splinters of a season. And here, within the fracture, lies the gift: not behind, nor ahead, but the quiet, fragile now, a breath, a spark, a fleeting flame against the endless doubt.
The Stand Croke Park hums, a living pulse, flags frayed from wind and hope. In pubs from Malin to Mizen, pints pause for the sliotar's arc. Families trek, feet sore, voices hoarse from half-heard scores. The roar is parish, blood, belonging, a chant that carries every county's name across the summer air, binding stranger to stranger. In the stands, someone remembers their father's hands clapping here. A child balances a flag bigger than their shoulders. The game moves on. We stay, suspended between play and memory, between anthem and silence, between now and always. When the final whistle sounds, we rise, not to leave, but to carry it with us: the chant the colour, the unspoken knowing, we were here. Together. Still.
Following Diogenes I decided to live as he did. I began by giving things away. My cloak, my sandals, a perfectly good bowl. It rained immediately. I attempted to drink from my hands. This requires more practice than one might think. Most of it ran down my arms. A dog watched. Diogenes did not look up. When people came to ask him questions, I positioned myself nearby, nodding. He spoke for some time about virtue. I nodded longer than was necessary, trying to look severe, when the figs began to work. This was not interpreted as philosophy. I slept outside that night. There are, I discovered, many creatures who also prefer this arrangement. At one point I woke to find a goat eating what remained of my dignity. 1 shouted. Diogenes slept. Later, I asked Diogenes how one knows when one has enough. He looked at me, at my empty hands, at the mud, the goat still nearby, and said nothing. I am beginning to suspect there are parts of this I have misunderstood.
Foggy Dew Morning opens with the scrape of shutters and a truck reversing behind a café where plates arrive the colour of February sunlight. Near the GPO a man feeds cans one by one into a machine. Fog along the Liffey softens the offices already lit. People inside say housing crisis with the calm of clergy. A woman from Eastern Europe washes hotel sheets still warm from men attending a conference on the climate. Across from the bus stop a schoolboy vapes beneath an advertisement for apartments called The Foundry. Rain gathers in the sleeves of a deliveroo rider waiting at the lights. Near the canal two teenagers pass silver canisters between them. One laughs hard enough to startle the other. For a moment something opens. Then the fog comes back down and the Liffey moves as it always has, carrying what it's given out past the city to a sea that doesn't ask.
More Than a Chart They see the charts, numbers climbing and falling, the glow of scans held like verdicts in their hands. They speak around me in careful syllables, translate my body into percentages and timelines, until I become a list of symptoms, a hallway conversation, a file clipped shut at the end of the bed. Their voices soften as though I've already left. But I am still here, watching morning light crawl across the window, laughing at bad jokes, holding tight to futures they no longer mention. I live in the spaces their language cannot measure: the warmth of a hand, the memory of rain, the stubborn rhythm of hope returning even on the hardest days. I am not your prognosis. Not your diagnosis. Not the shadow you've prepared me to become. I am a person, whole, more than what is failing, more than the paper covered in my name.
Moonlight On the puddled backs of bin bags split by foxes, n shutters tattooed with old anger, on the man outside the pound shop asking passers by for pennies. Its silver coats of piss and damp coats. Moonlight gathers on the wet railing like something holy arrived at the wrong address. A lonely alcoholic shaking beneath the blue-white light asks nothing except to exist a little longer. The old romantics looked upward. And the moon settles softly on what sunlight cannot see.
Morning Kettle on. The tap runs on longer than it needs to. Iwo mugs out, though one is put back when it's clear no one else is up. The back garden holds what it held yesterday, one stem bent low, soil still dark where you turned it. I stand there a moment with the cup cooling in my hand, not thinking to go back in, not thinking to stay. Beyond the mottled fence something shifts, or maybe settles, as if the ground has a memory of turf and toil. A bird lifts and is gone. Later, I notice the tea gone strong, and drink it anyway.
The Heel Achilles, all fury and foretelling, breaks on a single point, the gods forgot to harden. Strength, undone by the place he never looked. He thought power was in the arm, in the name, in the choosing. He never noticed how many saw what he did not. How many waited. How many knew. They called me spoil. They called me prize. But I listened. I saw how heroes broke themselves for honour, for pride, for what would be sung by men who'd never bled. They remembered his rage, his war, his heel. But not the girl he dragged from a smoking city, not the silence she turned into memory. I kept my voice. Even in silence. Even in chains. And when he fell, that final, fated moment, I did not weep. He died. I lived.
After the Sirens Sing it, then, but not as it was. Begin where the oars took hold again, where the sea resists the rhythm of wood and the men returned to what could be carried. Leave him bound if you like, that makes a better story. But something came through, not sound, but shaped like it, caught in the bone before it could turn to sense. A pull out of time with the stroke, that would not settle. They rowed against it. The water held, the oar answered, as if each movement had been heard elsewhere and sent back altered. One of them felt it in the grip, that slight delay before the blade took hold, as though the sea had listened first. No word remained. The stroke not quite their own, the rhythm carrying them a fraction past itself. Sing that, if you can, the rhythm carrying them a fraction past itself as though the sea were still listening, and what they gave it came back not quite their own.
Before the fall, nothing stood alone. Water kept the shape of its telling. Stone held the warmth of passing hands. Even the wind arrived in conversation, between ash and oak as if it had been called. The five stood not as markers but as presence. Roots drinking from one dark tongue, slow and mineral-sweet. Branches bartering light, rustle answering creak. Each leaf a small agreement between what was seen and what was meant. Men came to them not to own, but to ask. Hands on bark, sap tacky under the palm, foreheads lowered, waiting for the answer that did not arrive in words but in weight, in pause, in the sudden lifting of birds. The Five Sacred Trees Na Cuig Bhile Then the first cut not anger, not hunger, but decision. Iron set to the grain. A brief, bright cry. The smell of green split open. Sap slowed. Air held. What had always passed between things, no longer crossed. In the quiet that followed, things were given edges. Stone forgot the hand. Lines were drawn where none had held. Distance fixed. Silence named as absence. They marked the ground until nothing remained that had not been divided. And what could not be counted was left unnamed in the margin.
Fulmen, After Battle of Pharsalus It is quiet now. The flies have come. They settle where the heat remains. A warmth not mine. They gave me the mark of Jupiter-lightning, clean, certain of its path. I carried it forward. I believed it knew where to fall. All day I met the same strike coming back to me Rome against Rome. Only the arm, the weight, the need to hold. Our blood dries here, lightning dulled to red. It should not hold like that. It should pass through, leave nothing. I thought it came from above, that it chose. that it struck for a reason. But nothing chose today. Nothing spoke. Only this, hand to hand, arm to arm, the same blow finding itself again. This was always the line, not sky to earth but a sign on the shield, until the shields fall with no one to lift
Moonlight The moon lends its fragile light, to tease the edges of knowing. What lies beyond the shimmer? What lives within the dark? The answers dissolve, like foam fading into sand. Here, time moves differently, each moment a wave, each wave a lifetime. Ephemeral and eternal, the ocean holds us in its rhythm, a pulse beyond measure, beyond grasp. I stand at the brink, watching the water reach for the shore, in this quiet vastness, the night speaks softly: You are not meant to understand. And so it washes over me, this mystery, this beauty, this endless sea.
The Dullahan Road wet nearly slip something don't turn don't hedge too close get off the road keep going just keep It's nearer. No sound why no sound feel it at my back run I am I am the gate nearly there just reach it hand on the latch miss it again turn the horse the head in his arm no no no don't say it
The Meeting of Charon and Aeneas I thought he would refuse me. He looks me over as if I've brought something he has seen before. His cloak is stiff, river, rot, the handling of others. He does not ask my name. Around us, they stand Not pleading. Just there. One man keeps touching his mouth. The branch is enough. It is always enough for those who have it. He takes it without looking at me and points. The boat dips as I step in. Water works the wood They remain on the bank in the same unanswered posture. No one calls out. Halfway across, I look back A man still touching his mouth.