He sits there in the dust, scratching his boils.
A Job-like figure, apart from the smell.
But maybe Job smelt, too.
I give him two pounds
And pass on quickly.
How did he come to this?
A victim of Care in the Community?
Or booze?
Or a seeker after freedom,
Breaking out from the rat-race,
To live in a rats’ nest under the floorboards?

The walls of the well are well up now,
And the walls at the back are quite well on
As well as the walls for the flowers at the front
At Listooder.

I sit in the temporary garden chair, and feel quiet dropping from the escalonia,
Each flower complete with a fat, round, thick-striped bee replete with honey,
And the sweet smelling honeysuckle behind me drips clean drops of rain from the recent downpour.
I am watching white sheep on the low green hills, round hills with fat round balls of wool stuck on against the felty grass.
The soft, beige-coloured collared dove lands awkwardly in the nest in the elder tree.
“Awk, awk, awk, flap, flap.
Look out, below, I’m coming in to land!”
Then, “Coo,” as he settles in his own place.

We looked for our place for a long time, for years; and now find it here in the heart,
The geographical centre, of County Down,
(Right in the middle of the map.)

I watch my husband building stone on stone, working hard.
He is building up the boundary walls.

The walls of the well are well up now,
And the walls at the back are quite well on
As well as the walls for the flowers at the front
At Listooder.

I can tell if you really want
to hear how the spotlight
of my attention was grabbed
by something not quite right.
But straight away we are into
moral judgement. Then there
is the processing of the spotlit
information, the filtering and
blending with that already stored
so that only by some perceptual
hypothesising did I arrive
at anything at all. And maybe
my description would tell you
more about how I am now
than what I thought I saw then.
But, as I said, I can tell you
if you really want to hear. 

Wring the metaphors dry
as a leaf rattling through branches.
But think spring and new life
in abundance from what seemed dead.
Take faith and talk it certain.
Sing the hymns, concrete the ethereal.
Just stay well clear of certain trees –
the skeletal ones, bark peeled,
limbs exposed, all insect riddled
and crumbling back to stumps.
Or think a ship. Better still, think two.
One arriving, one departing,
off beyond the horizon, gone from view
but no doubt still existing. Raise your hands,
wave from shore and dance the tide.
Just don’t sink to the ocean floor.
There you’d drift among the wrecks
where fish make homes in empty skulls
and sockets stare at passing hulls
off to some unknown destination.