Kaleidoscope III 
The Church of Air
I enter the nave as if walking through
A closed door, dissolving the material;
My every thought’s a blink of an eye
Or imperceptible dilation of a pupil –
Suddenly I’m walking through a memory,
A summer on the root-buckled road
From ancient Wilton to Stratford Tony
Old beech trees vaulting either side –
Branches touch like prayerful fingers
As if they’re trying to close a crack
In Creation by weaving leaves together
Like emerald feathers on an Aztec cloak.
This nave of air now stretches for as long
As the mind can imagine; the transepts
Are the garden of Reagh on Sliabh Bawn;
The left has the arch of the box hedge
That leads you to a secret garden
Of dew-glinting grass, wild roses in trees,
Asparagus beds and a green-painted bench.
The right reveals the Reagh Maze
With hedges of yew and hawthorn – I enter
The path, like a memory of my life,
And wind towards the hazel at the centre
From which I pluck a golden leaf.
The choir is my April garden at home
In the hill-top hamlet of Rossmore
And swallows are flitting to and from
The darkness of the shed’s open door
With straw for nests – their tails flick
Like slick batons of conductors
As they sing out strings of click-music
Imbibed from the insects of Africa.
Behind the shed a wren in the furze
Is thrilling full of life, and a crow
Above – a rag of black sky – flies
From Murphy’s field to Lyre Cross.
The altar is our kitchen table
With tartan cloth, candle and clutter
The envelope of an unpaid bill
A tumbler and postcard from Padua –
Tools for putting out a bee or wasp.
The kitchen wall – the reredos
With my daughter’s paintings – a lighthouse,
A still-life lemon of waxy lemon-ness.
And as I glide through this airy church
I murmur confessions to myself
Of sins and faults of the sort that lurk
And wait for moments of unguardedness;
But this time – I forgive myself forever,
Obliterating every regret and sorrow.
And as I move, unencumbered,
I mingle with like-minded souls or those
Who’ve stumbled in, unsure where they are
And wondering what happens next
Then realise, amazed, that they are here
And there is no ‘then’, ‘now’ or ‘next’.
And all the while I hear the choir –
The song of the blackbird at dawn
Below my window, when light appears
Alleviating the dark of the curtain:
In the glowing screen of benevolence
My fear of sleep, of death, recedes
With the bird’s unfollowable sequence
Of flutings – breath at its sweetest.
And the prayers first of all recall
The utter strangeness of existence
The mysteria, the unexplainables
Of love, beauty and coincidence –
As when one time in holiday Kerry
My father drove back to the beach
To look for the tooth he’d lost at sea
Deaf to our churlish doubting jeers;
And, lo!, he found his tooth beneath
A shell, like the pearl of great price.
Then prayers enter the Silence
A common quietude, and we try
To touch the lives of the sick and infirm
By holding their images in mind
To cradle them with the glow of a candle flame
Not knowing if our prayers will succeed
But knowing we’re changing ourselves
Just for a moment, and during that moment
We ripple a wave of light to caress
And brighten the aura of the intended.
For the host there’s a china tureen
Of my mother’s watercress soup –
The cress always cut from the nearby stream
The pot always steaming the kitchen up
As we arrived after driving from London
Our eyes attuned to darkening Wiltshire
The heron-grey liths of Stonehenge
And the distant cone of Salisbury’s spire.
The soup my mother kept in the freezer
Where after she was buried it stayed
In scrawled-on cartons by packets of peas
Daring us to thaw her memory away.
And giving the sermon … is Gautama the Buddha –
The one when he faced a crowd of followers
And finding no word could utter the wordless
He lifted up a lotus flower
And with his smile in bloom he offered it –
Because just then, it was the universe,
And one single word might destroy it;
And his smile flowed through them like a wave.
And for the final blessing I can hear
A whisper of Plotinus reminding me
That ‘our country whence we came is there
But we cannot reach it on foot, for our feet
Take us only to realms of this world.
Let everything go, shut your eyes
And a way of seeing will unfold
That everyone has, but few of us use.’
And as I leave this fading church
And enter wherever my no-self imagines –
I pass through the Romanesque arch
Of Killeshin and gaze from its hilltop ruins
At the fields of Laois and Timahoe’s tower
And the church where my granddad Thomas
Is lighting white candles on the altar
Rehearsing his sermon for Evensong.
And leaving the door made of air
There’s no priest to pump my hand
But my mother, waiting there,
Looking out for me, ready for a hug
As if I’ve just returned from school
Aflush with the prospect of summer ahead;
There, too, my dad – with that smile
When I’d open his door and see him in bed
Sunk among corpses of pillows
His smile like a wide-open door –
As if he thought it was a miracle
That I had bothered to visit at all.
And now I pass from home to home
With the joy that Kazantzakis felt
When he wrote what’s engraved on his tomb
on top of Heracleion’s Venetian wall
among the palms and winter jasmine:
I do not hope for anything
I do not fear anything
I am free
With the joy and simplicity I glimpse
When walking the fields with Cooper our dog
Who’s running after ghosts of rabbits
Then dashing back through forest and bog
To check I exist – we’re bound together
As we move from dark ranks of spruce
To the sunlit roll of fields and hedges
And Coopy’s Labrador-Collie nose
Is sniffing a thousand smells at once –
As if he can smell all the scents of the universe –
And as we move towards the fields beyond
He’s a black streak above tips of grass
Dashing to the stream, the banks of gorse
Dashing just for fun
The simple joy of the dash and pause
And dash –
amen.
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Kaleidoscope III