~~~~~~~~~~ anamchairde ~~~~~~~~~- The trees have been writing to each other for centuries; roots threading letters underground, a slow communication no time prohibits. I am learning their patience. Every season I send you the same message in a different colour. You know what it says. #vss365

I learned to read in rivers; how water writes itself over stone, erasing nothing, only deepening the mark. You are all my letters now. Every word I form is just your name in loose disguise. Even silence spells you out. #vss365

I need no silver coinage when the water knows my name, My fortune is the wild deep sea and every wind-kissed wave, The basalt and the heathers are the vast estate I hold; I am Éireannachas, and the whole earth is my living, breathing gold.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #vss365

Look thou upon the water not as mirror but as manuscript, for those with eyes to see shall find, writ in its fathomless hand, the signature of eternity. #vss365

What water swallows, death itself must borrow; The deep hath secrets older than all sorrow. #vss365

When first I saw the white tide sink from stone, And leave the weed-wet ledges green with light, I thought the sea had knelt to pray alone, And spread its beads of foam for heaven’s sight. #vss365 #Ireland (What is Paradise, if not this tender brim Where earth gives over, trembling, into grace?)

The water has no memory of the shore, each wave a thought the mind cannot restore. What stillness could this endlessness contain? The sea forgets itself to live again; forever dying into what it was, forever born, without a moment’s pause.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #vss365

When first I saw the white tide sink from stone, And leave the weed-wet ledges green with light, I thought the sea had knelt to pray alone, And spread its beads of foam for heaven’s sight. #vss365 #Ireland (What is Paradise, if not this tender brim Where earth gives over, trembling, into grace?)

The breakers lift, yet every shining line must sink again beneath the breathing blue; so does the heart, made restless by the world, go down through pain until there’s peace anew. #vss365

So does my heart, that little tidal thing, Lie down before them like a tameless shore; The soft love in my green eyes starts to sing, And dusk comes flowering through the shadowed door. #vss365

Sweet things do not just bloom; they teach the soul to sing, For God hides weightless heavens in the least and prettiest thing. #vss365

Waters beat like chapel-hands upon the ringing shore, and sing, Till even my dust would rise in praise, as gulls in widening circle swing. Some old, green holiness moves in the spray, half-heard, but wholly near; The sea keeps turning all its beads of foam, and God grows bright and clear. #vss365

When thunder threads its iron ‘cross the pine, My sore mind, as a shoreline, learns to sing; Black waves of sound break hard, yet leave divine still pools between the stones of everything. An so this music storm-tongued, fierce and wild can hush my soul to peace, as song soothés a child. #vss365

Waterfoot ~~~~~~~ So let me sleep where silence has a pulse, where peat remembers fire, ash the tree, where every wound the heather takes from wind becomes a door in what I think is me; till, emptied as the bank by winter flood, I find Thy strangeness flowering in my blood. #vss365

I thought the soul was fastened in the breast as heat is kept in peat against the rains; but standing where the dark seas kneel to rock, I felt it loosen from its little pains and pass like curlew-cry through evening air, made less of self and more of Nature's prayer.

Here, where Ireland lifts its prayer from basalt to heaven’s brink, I stand upon earth’s far bank, and think I hear eternity think. #vss365

Tell Me You're Happy As rivers seek the sea and cannot rest, So does my soul lean towards you, soft confessed, Speak then, dear heart, as dawn speaks to the rose, And bid the night of my wee worries close; Tell me you are as meadows after rain, And I, like sun, will shine with joy again. #vss365

As amber light dissolves through cathedral boughs, And nectar seals the honeybee's most sacred vows, So art thou woven in the frame of my design, Each breath a tide that pulls towards thy shoreline.

Declare thyself as sweet as morning dew, And all my world shall flower, robed in you.

The ink of peace runs slow, like morning light, to fill the cracks that sorrow left in night. #vss365

To the Daughter of the Starbreather ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ I have no gift but ink and will, No treasure but this poor regard, Yet look how every field and hill Is written on by wind and shard Of light, and every word The earth receives grows beautiful, not hard. #vss365

otherworldly

I plant this stone as men have planted seed In hope, not certainty, that what is sown With honest labour shall be fully grown: The hand that gives is answered in its need. #vss365

But not today. Today I take this hand, This hand that held my children, turned the page, That learned its lines and now must find the stage Enlarged, and press this stone into the land. #vss365

My soul, long bruised, lay like a rock in foam, Till Mercy’s tide flooded with silver hand; It taught my grief, as gentle waters comb The darkened kelp and quiet the weeping strand, That who forgives himself lets God make peace, And, lo, within the heart, the dark waves cease. #vss365

Let the night place its tender hand in yours; peace will find roots again. #vss365

And all the ocean’s longing breaks across one hand.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #vss365

The sand along the estuary receives the tide, releases it, asks nothing of the sea but to be shaped by it; to bear the going and the wear. Is this my prayer? To stand and look until the looking clears, to open either hand and let the hours, the years, the light run through without a fight? #vss365

What is my soul but sand the wind has stirred? #vss365

I turned myself to sand and let time’s glass divide me, grain by grain, As though to be diminished was the only cure for pain; But what if mercy is not earned by grinding me to less, And to despise what God has made is its own wickedness?​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #vss365

The sea forgives the sand its every scar, Smoothing each wound beneath a patient wave. #vss365

the universe rings on cruel, indifferent and wide #vss365

~~~~~~~~~~~~ grief is the bell silence the ring ~~~~~~~~~~~~ #vss365

My grief, like some cold whisper in the foam, Doth ring the dark and calls no answer home; The sea, God’s bruisèd mirror, heaves and breaks, As if all nature mourned for my heart’s sake. Each gull’s thin cry threads through the salted air, And ties grief’s boundless deep to my despair. #vss365

the day draws out my sorrow like the tide

Every tooth of this iron ring once bit into purpose, and so sea rehearses its turn, patient, endless, ruthless. #vss365

Lovers find secret places inside this violent world where they make transactions with beauty. Rumi

What hand lifts the tide with invisible pen, inscribing the sand with the wisdom of time? The water returns, and returns, and again, until it’s bereft of its reason and rhyme. One day this soft sentence will simply go still, and silence will gather where language once swirled. #vss365

As dew descends on thorns and turns their edges into grace, So a man of proper strength moves gently through his space; Does the mountain boast its height, or dawn demand its praise? True strength walks in quiet light, and tender is his face.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #vss365

Yet what is man, that he may wear such gifts and still feel Winter in his soul? #vss365

The fullest vessel, being full, must overflow.

For Goodness is a candle that consumes the very wax from which its light is made, And he who burns most purely, burns most wholly; brightest glory, deepest shade.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

She is sprite and she is shimmer, she is dusk on the face of the lough, Woven into the griefs of the twilight, turns of the tide and of the clock, And to love her is but to lose her, as the wave is undone by the rock.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​ #vss365

Thou tiny sprite, what boldness made thee press Through moss that stopped the raven’s probing bill? No raven’s claw could find thee, nonetheless Thou found thyself, or rather, wast found still By that same Love that bends the searching will. #vss365

Feel my heart, my illusive, trembling sphere, Where joy and sorrow share a single tear, My rivers merging into one strange sea, The sweetest ache of what it means to be me. #vss365

sun spills illusive gold upon water and the path is never solid ground #vss365

The Sea and Me ~~~ Two selves we are, illusive pair; I drown in thee, thou drown’st in air. #vss365

What illusive glass is this, where drowned angels kneel. ~~~~~~~ #vss365 ~~~~~~~

Thug tú leat an éigríoch, d’fhág tú an lom, Lasair mhealltach an ghrá, d’imigh ar ceal san aer, San áit ar chumasc dhá anam ag imeall na taoide, Níl anois ach an tsíoraíocht ag ní istigh.