Time and Distance; something like that anyway.

I seem to be preoccupied by the past these days, am not making much of a success of living in the moment. That said, the sound of the birds singing on the Green this morning was quite entrancing: a cacophonous mix of jackdaw, rooks, ducks, magpies and gulls. A punk rock rendition of the dawn chorus. I managed to stay in that moment until the pigeons joined in and then I was off again, remembering how my elder son spent the first twenty years of his life thinking they were morning owls! I guess the cooing could be whooing. I love the idea of morning owls now.

Anyway, my Irish holiday (the past) is still with me and I find reliving moments which then lead me further back in time to when we were young (ish) parents and the boys were little.

I feel the need to impose some order on things so I am experimenting with form. This is always a challenge at the best of times, but form with rhyme…does my brain in. Nevertheless, I am determined to try. The poem today is my first attempt. It also revisits a moment from the recent past of the Ireland trip and a moment from the same place but thirty-eight years earlier.

As ever, it’s nice to have feedback but try and be nice because I am feeling a bit vulnerable. Last week a male poet host damned me with faint praise by telling me my poems were lighthearted and whimsical. Whimsical. I read a poem about seasonal depression. Anyway, here’s a bit of light-hearted whimsy for you. And did he cross the sea, dear readers? He did. I miss him.

Saint Christopher Carries His Son

Down The Dunes To Strandhill Beach

My son with his son clinging to his back,

runs through the dune sand and the marram grass;

They giddy slip, slide down to a soundtrack

of whoops, laughter and mothers’ fearful shrieks

to slow down, stop, slow down! Everyone’s cheeks

flushed pink by the teasing of the wind.

I watch them race: the rider, his horse;

they gallop, neighing and snorting their fierce

joy in the wheeling of gulls and the wild force

of waves breaking white along the shoreline,

the scudding clouds, moments of sunshine

the pinch of the ordinary left behind.

On the beach they begin their acquisition:

pebbles small and large, seashells, grey driftwood

which form the target and the ammunition

for the game. They launch the wood and throw,

fling the stones, the shells, wanting each one to go

higher, further, deeper than the one before.

I think of my other boy, far from us now.

When he was our only, we brought him here,

brought him to this roiling crash and foam. How

he hurled himself into the blue-green ocean,

made me cry out, heart wracked by a notion

that he would cross this sea once he was grown.