Niall OConnor

Life and Death.

2024-04-05T14:42:00.004+01:00

When I moved to the countryside

the killing started:

first spiders, and predator wasps,

then mice and rats,

vine weevils and fly,

beetles, mildew and blackspot.

I kill chickens now,

with both remorse and purpose,

and though the taking of life

has not yet become routine,

there is no denying

my newly acquired skills in dispatching

lives before their time, -

killing in the country,

being no crime.

Surrounded by the lives I‘ve taken,

I am no longer sure of the hierarchy

of consciousness involved,

and the more death I encounter,

the closer I get to life and its living.

©Niall OConnor 2024

Three Wise Men

2024-03-15T12:28:00.011+00:00

Happiness is not defined
by complexity of construction,
and a happy fool
is often better company than
a sad and bitter sophist.

We sometimes mock
the simplicity of simple goals

I have known
three of these small and work bent men
all content in their knowledge of
servitude and nobility,
acceptance and toil,
learning early, not to reach
beyond their grasp.

Abbreviated they were
both in name and life
denied the knowledge
of their full existence.

Dan made houses
from stone, and wood, and water,
and avoided his ‘betters’.

Dick sculpted dreams,
simply honed from words he polished
with diligence. until
he himself was pinned too early.

Billy snaked pipes,
imagined water where it was needed,
felt restrained only by the need
to turn a bend without a kink.

None of them ever had anything more
than they had already given away,
and they were the wealthiest men
I have ever known.

©Niall OConnor 2024

Piazza del Tango

2024-03-08T09:49:00.002+00:00

In the Piazza del Tango,

the dancers have no name,

the sinuous make love to the sinewed,

and old men can strut without shame.

Above the rising shadow

through shutters left ajar,

their wives look down, gold banded,

appreciating from afar.

In their laps their cats a ‘purring,

dream of mice and the way they play;

the old women dream of young men

and the ones that got away.

I walk from the Piazza del Tango

with my head held low in shame,

too many lovers I lost while guarded

. . . didn’t even ask their name.

©Niall OConnor 2024

Hands

2024-03-01T10:55:00.000+00:00

one hand greets

the many explore

minds are channelled

to both paper and mime

fingers lead us to our rhyme.

like railway tracks,

they lead us to each other

digitised terminals

to strum a chord

on another's heart.

hands that are used to clean the vile

deliver both the newborn

and food from the soil

dispatch the anointed with holy oil

tell ochre stained stories

in womb-like caves

conduct both orchestra

and missile,

and guiltless drone,

the actions of the right

by the left disowned.

©Niall OConnor 2024

The Gardener's Fork

2024-02-20T14:53:00.002+00:00

His father’s gardening fork sits
comfortably in new hands,
smoothened shaft already changed
at least three times,
over two contiguous lifetimes.

In his hands, it probed the crumbling ridge,

revealing the nested potatoes like
growing children awaiting the tines
of his bitter self-loathing.

He constantly prodded their underdeveloped
resentment, until hollowed

and hungry, they finally left the nest,

reared as they were, to accept the kind

of love they thought was their due.

And so the generations spend their birthright,

each passing the coin from generation

to generation; each child sharing

the guilt of the father, each parent concealing

their hurt, as a gift to the child.

©Niall OConnor 2024

Immigrant 2

2024-02-16T10:17:00.001+00:00

Photo: AFP

I am the outsider

the stranger

the invader.

I come because it is what I want.

I come because I have nowhere else.

I come because my desire has made me

a stranger in my parents' home.

I will never be as you,

but my children's children

will look back and yearn

for what was once our promise.

I will work, or not work,

- as you see fit,

lie and falsify, to fill

the twisted forms you place

before me, and when this journey

is finished, I will not know who

I am, or where I have come from:

for this is your demand.

©Niall OConnor 2024

Faith

2024-02-09T11:00:00.001+00:00

Faith is apparently the basis of all religion,

arousing us, like the smell of stale milk

on cloth, or the silhouette of spring hanging

in air, heady with the scent of freshly cut grass,

screaming for help.

Childhood truths are dissipated

by time and ordering, subsumed into multiverses

and endlessly entwined, parallel belief systems,

until intellectual concessions are birthed by possibilities,

and a need, to have answers.

It is sometime easier to suspend anxiety and suspicion,

adopt a faith, even temporarily, in order to place

discipline and comprehension,

on what is fundamentally beyond

our simplest vision, or nightmare.

The child-Buddha squats on a seesaw,

and is happily ying-yanged,

with levitation and our imagination

as his only partner.

Reality, is a plump child

with no-one to play.

©Niall OConnor 2024

The Bog

2024-02-02T19:47:00.001+00:00

We stand,

here in this sacred place, where a mind

is widened by emptiness, and

no boundaries but the willingness

of the living, breathing, earth

to bear our oppressive weight.

Not a stone in sight

- not even the memory of a stone -

only the brown sods hardening

in the wind, and the promise of

a smouldering conversation, as

protection against a harsh future

that has yet to come.

I see misted memories of wandering tribes

picking their way by a maze of

paths only known to them, and the

insistent repetition of the cuckoo

to confuse all that followed.

I hear the curlew’s call

as a song that can only be seen

in the bog pool ripples.

This is an inland sea where the wind

knows no obstacle; meandering by,

raking the blushing heather, playing

the swaying reeds and feathered cotton.

Young trees proclaim their hope, not as

you would plant them, but as they wish,

and I wonder who will survive

to claim this spot, almost laid waste

by greed and arrogance.

Now we take only what’s needed

to warm our hearths, toiling beneath

the burning sun; the distant drone of

an encroaching motorway drowned

out by the buzz of a solitary bumblebee.

Turning, footing, castl’ing,

and always with an eye to the sky,

and the west, because it is there

you can see the weather coming,

as ocean whitecaps echo in

the white flowered dancing heather.

I love this place where the land and the living

grow out of sinking dreams and

yesterdays, where the strongest iron is bent,

where a dream world hides the tribal soul,

only for it to rise once more

with each and every birthed sun.

©Niall OConnor 2024

Train Journey

2024-01-27T20:13:00.001+00:00

A scrolled rosebud of a young woman

entered the rocking train carriage,

breasts pushing against restraint,

sat down, and quickly placed a cigarette

between two stubbed and bitter fingers;

stubbed from biting, bitter from ‘Stop-n-Grow'.

I chose not to see, and looked away.

Four callow youths, united by hormones,

like a primordial pack of predatory, hunting males,

were corralled by their seating, but free to desire and conspire;

giggles and guffaws loud enough to drown out

the clickety-click soothing of our therapist track.

I refused to see, and looked away.

The mother of all, as yet unborn,

sat quietly biting her nails,

oblivious to my fading, my silent whimpering’s,

and relief arrived finally, for her and her hunted kind,

with the shuddering halt of the train’s arrival,

to another deserted platform,

and our subsequent noisy departure.

©Niall OConnor 2024

Rebirth

2024-01-12T17:38:00.001+00:00

I buried a goldfish, a rat and a badger

this week

all set aside for different reasons.

The goldfish floated to the surface

after its opaque and frozen prison thawed out.

The rat, by my poison and cold,

and all the hate and fear its kind attracts.

The badger by a passing truck or car;

a meeting of tyre and asphalt

on an alien, unscented landscape.

I buried them so they would start again,

and hoping to learn how.

©Niall OConnor 2024

The Village

2024-01-08T16:25:00.001+00:00

I left my house for the village.

I left the village for the city.

I left the country for a job . . .

When I left the planet . . .

looked down from the stars . . .

I saw only villages,

and they all were the same.

©Niall OConnor 2024

Pallas Lake

2023-03-03T20:01:00.000+00:00

At Pallas Lake, the waves whisper tales of what was before,

and the cradle of Moses lies waiting still,

entangled somewhere in the tall reed boundaries,

and attended by a pair of acolyte swans

secured by its promise of deliverance.

Two cormorants cruciform perch motionless

in the skeleton of winter trees, on the sunken island

- once a home -

moated by waters that bent both bronze and steel;

a rippling gateway for swift passage

to another world.

Sit awhile on the whale bone logs of long dead trees,

bog-blackened and cracked by the drying restless wind,

and find - here on the lower lake - a lonesome

memory-stone of a young life tragically lost

in a playground turned deathly cold.

The swans rarely trespass here;

only the oaring wheeze of their wing beats overhead,

as they change from one feeding ground to another,

with a brief salute to the emptiness, on their passing.

A rosary of freshly painted houses surrounds the lake

and a pair of hand-raised walls, windowed with patches of sky,

stand as a last salute to an arrogance long since faded,

only seen now, because the low winter’s sun points it out to me.

Where the lake empties,

a castle that once lorded this lake and landscape,

now an island of fallen stone and redundant unions

grown through with whitethorn,

and shat on by every sheltering cow.

Mortality casts a long shadow o'er these ancient lands.

‘And even though the mountain must crumble,

and the strong timber beam must break,
and the wise man wither away like a plant,’

this lake will forever hold secrets in its limestone lighted depths,

safe from the wide enquiring gaze, of all who pass this way.

(First published Tullamore Tribune Mar 2023)

2022-08-14T10:18:00.002+01:00

A stream is widened

as time runs through it

reflections remain still.

Note to a New Grandchild.

2021-09-14T21:34:00.000+01:00

We, your grandparents, welcome you,

and bequeath to you, our best efforts,

- your parents.

You will complete our work

and teach them that to love without condition,

is to finally grow into adulthood.

We promise to spoil you,

- ignoring their protests –

and give you the very best, and possibly the last,

of all the cuddles we have stored,

in preparation for your arrival!

Our embraces will be your swaddling clothes;

our children are our gift to you.

In Memory of the Thirty-Nine

2020-03-24T20:20:00.000+00:00

Like a jigsaw puzzle,

and after the jigsaw’s travel,

unkeyed figures are thrown aside

in a rendering of reality

now made incomprehensible;

splintered lives waiting to be rejoined

to families, meaningless in their

separation.

Humanity is a house

divided ‘gainst itself.

The memories of thirty-nine,

frozen into icy eternity,

hearts stilled,

blood once livened by soft smiles and secret tells,

now postured with death, and all its horror.

Filled with resolve and strength of purpose,

they pointlessly gambled with the biased dice,

drawn to death by false, and malicious promise.

And from homeland to dreamland,

this coffin ship, branded,

but without flag,

was passed off as a deliverance, of sorts,

finally berthing in a bay landlocked

by cemented English countryside.

Even though they paid their toll

-so their arrival might be overlooked-

$2,000 is now the price of their return,

discounts offered for ‘ashes only’,

-tourist class reserved.

Humanity in deed

is a house divided ‘gainst itself.

© Niall OConnor 2020

Grandson

2020-03-03T20:03:00.002+00:00

Subwhelm me now.

Into the universal consciousness,

take this tired and failing pseudopod

from where to here, - still driven as it is

to reenact that first splitting

and penetration.

We can still be startled into unity simply

by a chaos of red berries, hawthorn splayed,

or the gently falling eyelash, virgin snow;

we are the continuance of the great division,

that eternally heralds spring.

Announced by little things, we are

codicils of summer's fleeing greener past,

often trodden into rebirth without thought,

transmogrified into the sweet unscented child,

gaze still connected to the galaxy of womb,

distance yet to be learned.

Under a child’s observation, I examine

and learn of a life story still not fully told;

more to be shared of this reawakened life,

joined as we are, in an ancient repetition.

© Niall OConnor 2019

The Secret Name

2020-01-05T21:26:00.000+00:00

The Secret Name

first published The Writers' and Readers' magazine Jan 2020

There was a young man, and his name it was Scott,

but that was a given name, and his real name it was not!

He grew up on an island where lots of little people play,

and when he walked among the trees he thought he heard them say:

‘Listen for your real name. It’s hidden in the sounds.

It’s hiding in the sounds of nature, that are all-around.’

As little Scott grew older, he put thoughts of all else aside,

and tried to used the magic in his mind, - in every way he tried.

The trees, the grass, the clouds way up high; they all knew his name,

but no matter how hard he listened it was always just the same,

though he knew they all whispered it right out, loud and clear,

it was only haunting nonsense to young Scott’s still straining ear.

The birds, they tweeted and called his name, over and over again,

the wood pigeons softly cooed it, with such sweet refrain,

the red squirrel chattered and the little shrews squeeked

the fox barked at nighttime, and all day the wide-winged buzzard screeched,

but little Scott was all grown up now, and could no longer understand,

and still he searched and listened on his journeys, throughout this magic land.

He searched through books and websites, with names both strange and foreign,

even went on outings with his Grandpa to try and spend a florin,

he did crossword puzzles and swiped touchscreens, whatever he could find,

in the hope that even one thing, would jog his silly absent mind,

he listened to the whispers, of winds both soft and stormy,

he even went to Clare, and kissed the stone at Blarney.

All the trees who knew his name, rustled it out loud,

but Scott could never hear it, no matter how hard he tried.

He searched for it in English, in Arabic, Irish, and ancient Sanskrit,

Swahili, Hindu, Binary, and the fairies language, Biscuit.

Finally he realised, though all around him clearly knew his name,

he would never know it now, until his second childhood came.

Now all you boys and girls who think you know who you really are,

remember only Mother Nature knows your special name, both here and afar,

and just like snowflakes, no two names will ever be the same,

and just like you listened carefully, to our little rhyme,

you must now go listen with Grandpa, or when walking down the lane,

‘cause Mother Nature loves you, just like your Mom and Dadda do,

but it is only she can whisper your two names, both the given and the true.

Blackberry Picking

2019-11-04T14:58:00.002+00:00

(Tullamore Tribune 2019)

No guilt in these berry-stained fingertips

black emeralds of abscessed half-truths

teased from the brambles vine, childhood

trills of laughter still echoing

There was a logic and justification

in the accidently fumbled fruit

gifted to the continuance;

offerings made to a mother who dared

to hope not all her sons would be

sacrificed.

We competed with birdsong unseen,

imagined the as yet unexplained delights of

compound eyes staring up from deep buckets,

full of dark promise and possibility.

They still stare at me from the confused

wayside ditch during the meditation

that is solitary blackberry picking.

Time has extended my reach, so I

can see now, both through and over ditches,

ditches that blocked and frustrated

childhood dreams, ditches where some fruits

suspended, are still beyond my grasp; promises

that never can be delivered, despite

their price being now clearly understood.

I reach for the forbidden,

- last taichi moments of an old man plucking

memories from an ancient ditch,

- a ditch, still wilder-filled with dreams.

The Illegal Immigrant (Shadowman).

2015-08-13T15:59:00.004+01:00

Twelve steam irons, and a thousand business cards
— if you ever felt the need to count them —
and we didn’t.
Free newspapers folded neatly, never bought, never read,
a bus stop complete with pole
and all manner of warning signs about
men at work, and naked flames, and live
electricity, and gaping holes.

Filed inside the folded mattress,
the identities of young girls and men,
foreign
eyes soulful, putting their hopes
in the hands of anyone who would hold this photograph,
take them to a new life in an unknown island,
Ireland,
that must be like Britain or America, only smaller.

Their lives arrived before them, and were
filed away in a damp and dark ground floor flat,
where the curtains never opened,
and where they still lie,
musty and mouldy,
but still hopeful.

Thirty suits that have seen the glamour of NGO land,
and the embassies of the world, where
a fairy world exists above the harsh bureaucracy,
and needs acolytes of its own
to maintain the apparent gentility;
embassies that embrace with a Moi! Moi!
but no real affection.
 Plastic, childless scrotum filled with coin,
hidden everywhere,
but never retrieved,
every letter, every mention of his name
piled and buried, folded
and pressed down by the weight of the years passing,
and superficial encounters,
love letters entombed in this flat
that has now become a crypt,
and where he still hopes for immortality
while breathing out his last gasps.

Thirty years of refusing to return home,
thirty year of refusing to make home,
thirty years, and a life held in such secrecy
that it was flittered away in its neglect,
— no respite in prayer.
 Oh Holy Mary, Mother of God!
The Bible, The Koran, the Tarot cards
and the psychic healing;
all refuges of a man who had no home,
not even within himself,
— a shadowman.

Why?

2015-06-29T10:48:00.003+01:00

sunning themselves safely,
just out of sea's reach,
the hunter gatherer finally rests
on a budget brochure Tunisian beach.

a community at prayer
with open arms, welcomes the wolf;
in loving God's creatures
they can come to no harm,
but then prayers for the living
become prayers of the dying.

school girls giggle happily
in a Nigerian school yard
role playing a better life,
that might not be so hard;
again,
prayers for the living
prayer of the dying

deluded we are by our own transition
from womb to world we move,
to a world not shared
as our beginnings would have us believe.

now explain to me again how is it the boy that was raised with love
can be taken by terrorism . . .
a stunned grandfather asks.

© niall oconnor 2015

Money

2015-06-27T08:49:00.000+01:00

we get money;

pressed, printed and promulgated

it is a currency of belief,

temporary relief.

with the heroin slow drip of dependence,

persistence,

it hones instincts of survival at other's expense,

hardwiring soft feelings

to be measured in euro and cents.

and the jeunesse dorée,

with their branded bags,

and an insatiable appetite for

all things worthless and new,

stroll the streets of Dublin,

with white wires hanging,

from speakers that are banging,

the same old messages

that brought us here.

condemned are we to learn

No Poem.

2015-06-20T09:09:00.000+01:00

Published at Idler

There is no poem to be delivered this week

no rhyme or shape to be drawn from hastily scribbled words

no hive where a thousand pieces of past living

can wax together, to give a moment of sweetness

or even a nasty sting for those that would be careless

the mind is emptied

it takes all my efforts to repel

that which might infiltrate
in this moment of weakness

I hope to avoid being erased and numbed,

returned to that state of adequacy

Cider in the Park.

2015-06-13T08:50:00.002+01:00

The cans of cider hit the mark

Druid or some such anomalous name

druids in paper thin aluminium cans

surrounded by razor sharp lips

but there is always one,
even in this summer gathering of lost souls
temporarily stranded under an ancient sun

the one that bares his canine teeth
lupine

eyes aback in dark lairs

blinded and wary

hair bristling on haunched shoulders

constantly under attack

from within

I taste his dripping saliva with my eyes

but feel no fear

where I have gone

no one can hurt

no one can follow

I have control

and only I am the instrument of my own suffering.

The Wedding Fair

2015-05-30T12:37:00.000+01:00

Rollup! Rollup!
Come on down to the wedding fair.
25 euro per person
or free with a voucher . . .
How many vouchers did you want?

The wedding uniforms were hanging,

all in the same shade of ivory
as many an endangered species,

and the sweetheart bodices, suspended emptily

in rows, waited for the press of human flesh.

They hang on rails, above a black and white
cow skin rug.

Poor cow!

One image fits all;

customisation and fitting
is by the addition of diamantes,
and dieting.

The A la Carte shoppers
stroll down the aisles

gathering brochures on silent discos

and ukulele bands.

Clip board competitions

troll for details,

while ceremonies are written,

hen parties organised, but

cock-nights are never mentioned.

Photo albums and fruit cakes,

LOVE everywhere;

invitation cards, place cards,
balloons and cartoons,

James and Michelle,

Robert and Mary,

no Jack and John,

Mary and Millicent . . . yet.

I timidly point out the one stall

with man-suits for a thousand euro.

and am greeted with absolute disbelief,
'No way! Ripoff!'

Yet again,
I am reminded that men are here

Perhaps.

2015-05-23T08:44:00.000+01:00

perhaps

death is a safe place to be

despite the threat of magic gardens

and needy virgins

perhaps

the big switch-off / reboot

is merely a rediscovery of self

without the selfishness

perhaps

mishaps will be forgotten and forgiven

and the whole bullshit ego trip

will finally be erased