1. ( Shades Of Basho )
Around Greenland booms
A white spume of cold breakers,
White noise, cool music.
2.
For the womb the seed
Sighs. – For light the eternal
Dark polar day.
3.
Once these were strong pines.
Came The Great Wind that morning.
Now they are no more.
4.
This bright New Year´s Day
I replay our autumn film,
Its lovely evening….
5.
Old tides rush in where
No hovering white angel
Dares open its mouth
MY SODDEN SIXTIES – PART TWO
As I was growing up in the fifties, my pre-television Ireland had little links with European art-music. Far-off Dublin had its Raidió ´Eireann Orchestra which was licked into shape by experienced conductors like Milan Horvat and Hans Schmidt-Isserstedt ( I visited his grave near here recently ). The Irish landscape still mapped a mythic past for my filtering ear; and the aural aura of my native island´s seas and strands and lakes and mythic mountains and awesome monastic ruins were very close; nor was the modal, inflected line of the Irish Slow Airs yet lost ( they do, yes, earn these capitals ). I hadn´t much more than my own body – music, the battered Hoehner accordeon, our family upright piano, the local church´s Gregorian Chant. I was only European in theory. ( Later came music-theory ). I´d bicycle down our then still empty Tipperary lanes, memorizing hundreds of traditional tunes with a method quite unknown even to Barto´k:( the toes of my ) right foot melody-tones,(the toes of my ) left foot the three chords I then knew. Then there was God. What kept the stars from lepping apart in a Hubble universe at night? I was no Mozart. It took years.