The farmhouse floats, an island in a sea of rape.
From a bus labouring on high roads you gaze down
at a boreen, visible now, snaking through an ocean of amarillo.
The Van Gogh scene reminds you of our recent holiday in Spain.
I too glance at this vision of rustic Carlow, but on a
different canvas. Beneath stalking seeds crawlies slither and sting,
earthworms excavate zigzags that loosen foundations
faster and more efficiently than wartime tunnels.
Above ground, flaps of dried muck on flattened soil;
filthy brown luggage straps to lift the lid off cruel earth.
There, by the farm’s gable end, cracks appear under nettles
growing over bits of broken glass that lurk in hiding
to rip the feet off the unwary, the unknowingly innocent.
Ghosts are on the prowl this insufferable day.
They are on the hunt for the susceptible. The man that prowls
hovers like a dust-devil in ether-air. He rises up to strike.
The house so pretty from up here, now treacherous;
young laughter lost in wind-shifting, shape-changing fields.
A child playing games, chasing shadows, running for the swing.
She stops in her girlish tracks as if what is about
to occur can never really happen at all; confounded,
unsure at first whether to giggle or cry out, yet knowing
this to be no laughing matter. The sun, staring down
from mouth of sky, is her only witness, but suns cannot speak
or tell and who would believe them if they did? The world tightens
around a soft, delicate arm; twisting it savagely side to side,
a hound’s jaws shaking dewy-eyed trust from a leveret’s heart.
Our bus crests the high road to the north, the yellow world disappears.
You turn back to me, sighing with satisfaction at such a landscape.
‘Oh aye,’ you look me straight and say, ‘This day is so beautiful.’
David Murphy‘s poetry has been published many times in various magazines and anthologies in Ireland and abroad, including The Poetry Bus, Stony Thursday Book, Revival, The Burning Bush, Irish Literary Review, Cyphers and The Shop. Also a short story writer and novelist, his latest book is a fiction-memoir called Walking on Ripples published by the Liffey Press in 2014. Website: www.davidmurph.wordpress.com
