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Alan Ireland Poem
On Lindisfarne, they say,
St Cuthbert took a hooded crow,
A jackdaw and a jay,
And on their strident tongues bestowed
The gift of harmony.
No more did ugly croaks and caws
Dispute above the sea,
Or trouble those sequestered shores.
They sang all day, those three;
And as they drew their corvine kin,
The devil wept to see
His shrinking nursery of sin.
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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Alan Ireland Poem
Why am I drawn
to this scowling girl
selling her poems
in a Shinjuku underpass?
Every Tuesday she is here,
next to a Nikon ad,
threatening commuters
with her cyclostyled angst.
Busy people keep up
with the times,
do a tap dance
on their smartphones.
Only drunks buy poetry.
Grubbing for their last,
sweaty coins, they
mock her with every purchase.
First published in Eclectica Magazine
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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Alan Ireland Poem
A black cloud
rains selectively
on the dispossessed,
a wretched lot.
My billowing abaya
now clings to me,
revealing my form.
Their glances lacerate.
The road stretches
to the horizon,
but has swallowed
my expectations.
Palestine, 1948
First published in Blue Minaret
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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Alan Ireland Poem
The dark, drenched forest
was tinkling with tuis and bellbirds,
blind to the ledger book,
the bill of lading,
the glint in the eye of the ax.
Pious settlers wired the land for religion
and switched on the lights.
The natives were dazzled,
but loved the portly man in the red suit
who gave them everything they wanted.
On the Historical Society outing,
we struggle for footholds
in whirlpools of organized ennui,
clutch at the slack rope
that cordons off irrelevant ancestries.
‘The end is not nigh,’
the Dom-Post tells its readers.
Doors are bolted against the wind,
the tick, tick of the electric fence
around eroded pastures.
First published in Southern Ocean Review
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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Alan Ireland Poem
Of all the birds, both foul and fair,
You stubbornly refused to wear
Full mourning at the Crucifixion,
And were cursed with this affliction:
Piebald broods of raucous young,
The devil's laugh on every tongue.
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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Alan Ireland Poem
In the shadow of this tree,
Judas mapped his misery,
But saw no finger-post, save one:
A beckoning oblivion.
So up he climbed, with labored breath,
To where he could devise his death.
The twisted tree, by time distressed,
Would ratify his wretchedness,
And let him fall — his loss complete,
The seamless sky his winding sheet.
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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Alan Ireland Poem
After work,
drinking in a matchbox bar in Shimbashi,
waiting for a sign...
The noren twitches.
A hand appears between the flaps.
An eye assesses the interior,
and is gone.
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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Alan Ireland Poem
A single stroke
dispatches emptiness,
in one ambitious line
gives backbone to
my limp attention.
Rigid fingers tighten
on the brush.
The bristles slash again
and incorruptible reality
is neatly tailored
to my artifice.
Leaning on my arm,
I glance behind me
at the letters
inching down the page.
There's no return,
no second chance.
The brush no longer
mediates between
intention and accomplishment.
It races on ahead of me,
guided by the incidental
pattern of its progress.
Independent of endeavor,
indifferent to what I am
or what I hoped to be,
it brushes my design aside
and draws its own conclusions.
First version published in Poet, India
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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Alan Ireland Poem
In the tidy marina,
the tide is going out.
My last image of her
tugs at its mooring.
I pause on a slope
of the Alpujarras.
The wide sky can't
encompass my loss.
A hooded crow calls
two hours before fajr.
The engraver has come,
desperate for epitaphs.
First published in NOON: Journal of the Short Poem
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2024
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Alan Ireland Poem
The wind arrives
with sleeves rolled up.
All day it stirs
the cauldron of the sky.
As thunder boils,
the clouds explode.
Each raindrop falls
to its appointed place.
First published at vox poetica
Copyright © Alan Ireland | Year Posted 2017
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