Alchemisland

Blackmail leverages continued revenges, even queens bend

Lend diamond-laden wrists for tethers, fetters, feathers in the headdress

Arrows in a quiver of leather, sacred number eleven repeats in headlines

23 followed by someone dying, some unspeakable crime, the confined

Released before time, the streets unsafe, rife crime knife crime

Life on line when you leave the line marking your garden from the harder

Parts of this departed Dublin, displacements, this place is ancient

Ghosts living and dead line the strand, sand sedge where a dirty tidal river ran

Blackened land like a giant hand’s span hung overhead casting shadows

Abandoned flats, bandit filled back alleys where a man can get stabbed over a half

Bag over the head, stuffed in the van back and trafficked to Africa, Zanzibar bar maid

Balmed by opiates and guarded by armed guards, third failed harvest, the soil hardest

When it’s time to plant cornstalks, what stalks through the corn killing like an artist

Dearly departed, I myself nearly departed, won’t be part of it, haven’t left my apartment

Since the great war started, dotted with searchlight gazes the maze of broken buildings

Guerilla engagements, back to steam rail, coal haul and whistling ticking gauges

Back to sages, wise ancients who remember well the days when golden hay

And holy wells abounded, before the abominations stood to be counted

Ruined statues in the centre of a wide thoroughfare, fair Europe

Fair Éireann ruined by the far right, the open air hatred we took lightly

Rising flares steal the night, forbidden daylight brightening the sky

A clear view of the ruins of the place that I once knew, it was once new

But that was a long time ago, it has been old for a long time, its cold hand

Few had felt so long as that, few had been so long and come back

Back to wicked practice, back to the raising, trading and praising of cattle

So much to go back to, that banks and booms stole from us, the rust

Is scraped from the lichen-bearded faces of the old places, amazing

Sigils are uncovered, the discovery of hitherto undreamt succours

Back to the land our mother, smothering the fallow fields in wild flowers

The fallow deer fears the wolf returned, the old world has returned

Every impassive verb turns active, every massive worm lurches, the curve

Of a wave, the curling spirals of the kerbstones, the dolmen rose

The rows of dogged stones deep in their custodian holes, swiped by moles

Sated by offerings of blood and soul, the stolen moments seen again

The myths are everywhere prevalent, the smith’s forge is very busy

As it has not been in a century, the roads are left to erode, the roots

Rout them, coming up the centre flowers white as Pegasus

One with their mounts, moving like centaurs

What we sent away returns unprodigal, becomes reessential

Ancient ores are smelted, the striped pelts are worn in Celtic

Style, W.B. Yeats from somewhere smiles, leaning on a gatepost

Daydreaming about ghosts and changelings, the chain link

Fences offensive to our cliffs are done away with, consigned to waves

Amergin’s Challenge is intoned as a prayer, the unwary, the staring

The caring, the unsparing, all reside here, fearless with their peers

Fiercely picky over their appearance, spiked hair and laser-cut beards

The skulls of deer hung over doorframes like bulbs highting new ideas

New rips creased reality, dripping moons, increased reality, uncountable fatalities

Become normality, the mallet bashes out threnodies, sounds of anarchy

Every man given to vanity, become a libertine proponent of willed insanity

The ladder climbing to heaven, the lessons imparted by the Christian brethren

So eager with a leather during Latin lessons, the lessening of holy things

The frenzy which with the mended world is rended, rendered less than.