Association

It’s open link night at the dVerse Poets Pub,  Grace is behind the bar and any one can belly up to tell a tale, old or new.  She began the telling with Lines for Winter by Mark Strand.  I didn’t know Mark Strand, but I liked his poem so much I stepped out to google and found another poem about black maps with a line – …not the attendance of stones, that I liked.   All the while, simultaneously,at the back of my mind is wondering what story I should tell.  Studying Mark’s Black Map  the place (that wasn’t a place) felt to me like an island and reminded me of a Irish poem from my book Sitting on the Hag Seat: A Celtic Knot of Poetry.  The poem is about friendship and maintaining it across space and time.  And here we are meeting in a virtual barroom, socializing across unknown times and distances, connecting the way stones connect, and places connect, and maps connect people to places and… and… and the list goes on and Indra’s net continues to twinkle and shine as we dance across his ancient endless web of connections… Que milagro!

A Piece of Irish Earth

She walks the muddy shore alone

searching for just the right stone.

Her friend, a mesa carrier, initiate

of a cosmology indigenous to far away Peru,

has asked for a rock. It seems a small request,

but ordinary Irish earth is hard to come by.

Crannogs, castles, standing stones, hill forts,

faerie trees, tumuli and towers dot

every mile of countryside from Malin Head

to Bantry Bay, from County Down to Dingle.

The woman who gathers for her friend

will not loot some treasured site, instead she picks

around the Nile green excrement of swans,

bits of snow white, feathered fluff, an empty

mussel shell or two, trusting that the palm-perfect

pebble will rise to stub her toe or send a sunbeam

bouncing from a facet to glance across her gaze.

She hefts a shard of granite, more ancient

than any man-made artifact, old as air and water,

more traveled than the woman, her friend, or Ireland

adrift upon tectonic currents, and wonders at the gossamer

ties, strong as spider silk, that float across the hemispheres

of planet earth connecting us, each one to another.