By trickery of spring, the fern is but a green thought, still folded from the dark; the earth has taught it how to keep a secret. #vss365

green scripture curls by trickery of light a thought still coiled in the throat of the earth paradise kept in a closed fist #vss365

investiture of safety found in another #vss365

The soul puts on its bruised investiture of bloom; God hides His tenderness in little things like these pink smiles of dust still opening through doom. #vss365

Decay is not defeat but prayer made green and patient in the earth, and age, in moss and silence dressed, leans back without a word.

By green investiture, anoint the waiting rock; a gentle tongue spending itself in moss, and mortal noise grows hushed to hear a broken water pray #vss365

green fire is laid on mortal things

I held a miracle

O sea-wind, do not name me; I have worn an investiture of harm. O blackthorn, keep your blossoms: my beauty has no charm but that which frost has on the field before it kills the green. I should be left, a fallen nest, all hidden and not seen. #vss365

Do not look long into me; I am bright enough to bless, and ruin, like the moon on a drowning water.

so fair the drowned moon seems when broken in the tide

O pale estuary, hold your breath where the last light sifts through reeds; my investiture was always made of loveliness and weeds. I’m worn like evening on the water, soft, immense, and gold, till my hidden poison kisses ‘pon the hands that thought to hold. 1/2 #vss365

between the wave and the shore rolls the seafoam neither water nor air nor earth where the soul has always been in the holy trembling #vss365

There at the lip of water, wind and cloud, where seafoam clung like blessing to the shore, my heart, so long a locked and inland thing, grew wider than its sorrow, and no more asked why the world must vanish to be known, or why love wounds before it makes us whole ... #vss365

Maybe you are not a person. Maybe you are the part of the world that loves me back ... the part that left a shimmer at the seam of what is real, a signature in foam, a rumour of a radiance the water carries from some other shore i don't have maps for but am walking towards.

And some impossible morning the sea will hold its shape for once, and what I saw will step out of the water and stand on the actual stones and be, at last, beyond all seafoam, here with me. #vss365

The old women along this coast knew how the world is made, not of stone and water but of threshold; a door that never closes.

I have stood at the edge of the known field and felt the stone wall end beneath my hand.

The old ones knew this border, that the world is thin in certain places, that love itself is one of those thin places, a gap in the rock where two lights touch without meeting.

As seafoam is the ocean’s breath made visible and whole, So art thou both the sea itself and my shipwrecked soul. #vss365

~~~ love ~~~ Your word lay down in me like evening rain soft on the grass, and making all things shine; the blackbird kept it hidden in his throat, the tide received it as a secret sign. 1/2 #vss365

~~~~~~~~~~ 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

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