inscrutable

Coffee with a daughter of China.
Luyi sips a tea.
"What do you think of the Gay Pride parade?" she enquires innocently.
I favour her with a suspicious look.
She is inscrutable.
I know full well what she's really enquiring.
I thump the table.
"You little Chinese minx," I cry. "That does it. No ridies for you. Or as you say in China: Lidies."

splashings

in the pool of evening
quicksilver
ripples widening
forever

cold water thing
risen to exult
in some unthinking imagining
ordinary is wonder enough

what do fishes dream

busby berkely he say

In olden times
A hint of Jihad
Was looked on
As something really quite bad
But now who knows
Anything goes


***

(Written after Irish police failed to arrest two men this week who had been casing the underground service tunnels near Dublin Castle prior to the scheduled meeting of European Union leaders at that location shortly. The Jihadis disappeared into the tunnel. The cops were unwilling to pursue for fear they might die. The motto of the Irish police force is: We'll worry about it when it turns bad.)

the inheritors

Coffee with the RTE types.
They're laughing about Ireland's revolutionary tradition.
They're scorning the rebellions which pockmarked the road to the present incarnation of the Irish nation as a Republic.
They're ladling contempt on Theobald Wolfe Tone, Eamon DeValera, Padraig Pearse et Al.
Particularly Al.
They hate him.
And I, no friend to RTE types, to Ireland's revolutionaries, or to rebellions generally, am keeping silent.
Presently the RTE types cease their excoriations of the founding fathers and pause for air.
"What about you Heelers?" one of them crows. "You're supposed to be some sort of a Catholic but you're more of a West Brit. You don't like them rebels do ya. You're more a West Brit I think. Go on. Whaddaya think of the bould rebels?"
"Just remember," I say softly. "you live in the house they built."

history of the world part one

A Roman legionary is taking drugs.
He stares through a cloud of fumes, touched by what seems to him to be cosmic awareness, and muses aloud: "I wonder will it fall. The Roman Empire. I wonder will it fall."
And Cian O'Connor's horse, sitting companionably beside him, draws on a cannabinoid spliff of his own and answers with mellow enlightenment: "Ah f-ck it."