Irises

TO HOLD YOU IN MY ARMS

Dawn, under a pale opal sky
the mysterious hour before light
a tear in the clouds
above the horizon reveals a turquois eye,
Spring and my love!
Reborn rushing through my heart
a sacred feeling,
infinite bliss:
God, I humbly thank you!

To hold you in my arms....

Feel your tender breasts beneath me,
your white loins press tight against my thighs,
the verdant grass and fragrant flowers and gentle rain
all beginning each year again and again
rushing to my heart
overflowing with warm love.
You satiate the desire of my soul,
playful little breeze
the Epiphany of a songbird and the city stirring
calls from pilgrim mists progressing
up the sylvan draws towards me.

Where are going to,
as I coming am coming,
but where?

Soaring, striving to celestial heights
ensconced in floating clouds
love take me to Cerulean distances
in our mutual embrace!
Ever higher in your heart,
our all-loving gracious Lord!

GABRIEL'S TRUMPET

Gaily laughing at me you bring the Spring's sacrifice inside.
"Cannibal, you've decapitated it," I cry.
Cut off in the flower of its youth,
the daffodil brightens the room like a small piece of sunshine.
It calls silently to it's brothers and sisters outside
who anxiously peer in through the windows.

WHOSE FOOLING WHO

A pale full moon shines through a veil of clouds.
In the South, late autumn fields lie fallow.
Sitting down after the latest performance,
of the theater of the absurd,
the tired clown sees his image in the dirty mirror.
Having played the part so long, it's dificult to tell
where the illusions end and reality begins.
The make up, applied at the break of day,
feels etched upon the superficial reflection
that grins mockingly back.
Layer after grotesque layer are removed with care
until nothing remains, but the clowns idiotic countenance
leering back from the mirror into a dark empty room.
In the growing silence a shadow flits past the moon.

THE CHILD SLEEPING

The child sleeping in his mother's arms
has changed the whole World to me.
Somehow my bearing is more serious,
and my heart is a shrine lit by a burning
candle that flickers in the darkness.

My voice is gentle, like a brook
singing in the Spring sunshine,
for fear of waking my son.

My eyes seek out faces
that hide behind the faces,
searching out their hidden pain
so that hopefully, one day he may
live in a World of tolerance,
where all men strive to understand;
rather than experience the mindless
innate respect of power, and the insensate
animalistic pleasure people have
beating another to their knees
and by brute force imposing their life styles
on others weaker than themselves,
people who think, feel and live otherwise.

With a fear born of love,
I search the mountain forests,
where the deer have made their beds
in the long grass for the night.
Silently, like a mendicant,
for I believe the trees, rocks and animals
all have souls which watch over them:
souls which weave together
in one vast mysterious tapestry of life.

ORPHANS

Our parents have been killed.
Our skin has been pocked
by the burning embers of your hate,
you have broken our staff
and thrown it on your fire.
Our parents who were our protectors
you've murdered
before our very eyes-
they who served up dreams
for us and wanted nothing
for us but love.

Defenseless orphans: you present us
with your presents, which we open
only to swallow all our sorrows.
Lying in bed, our parents appear before us
from behind the black wall of night,
the loving faces longingly gaze at us,
their voices and laughter echo to us.
Recyclables we are crushed into a pulverized mass-
but from artificial expressions
our eyes have become the color of lost love,
which bore through the black wall of night
as they stare at the living scar that is you.

Our parents have been killed.
We are like no one now alive.
We who bear the sorrows of the World,
why did you steal our sweet mothers and gentle fathers
from us? The clouds have become our toys,
our parents faces appear in them.
At first we picked stones to play with;
but, they wept, and besides
clouds can not be crushed,
nor burned into cinders.

You who would rule the World-
we accuse you!

AGING VICTIMS

Here,
on the infinite surface
of this planet,
wrapped in a worn out shroud of night
they wait, concealed in their perspectives,
for God.

Their lips are stapled shut,
mute appeals are made with eyes only;
eyes that teem with agony,
like poverty stricken room
which constricts in size
with the presence of a corpse.

The poor aging victims
who carry their persecutions
in their expressions:
its all they have left.

UNDER DAWN

Under dawn's pallid light
existence, writhes awake and continues without reason,
presumptuous and cruel with malice.
__ barren as Winter trees.

Day, sensuous and immense,
rises, making hunger rapacious,
exposing all hidden things, even disgrace,
the poet whispers to a sea of grey: Again!

My aching soul and broken back
fervently beg for a respite. I go
with withered dreams in my heart,

to lay down on an invalid's couch,
where the fanatical fire furnishes deep shadows
that embrace me in their black.

RADICAL INTERVENTION

America's radical right fell upon Dublin
with virtual reality technology, guns and bombs,
prostituted blossoms faded and fell,
they murdered the Protestant militant leader
in jail, and then imprisoned IRA operatives
to gain influence on both sides for their double agents
(in the Western Hemisphere they've been
doing this to gangs for years) this was to
clear the way so that they could
get on with their real dirty business:
genocide, disguised under the veil
of a brutal Irish fight generations old_
assaulting nonpartisan who got high,
their businesses, farms and faiths,
their's were the copious coffers of the factions,
the clandestine serpent of death.
Then they crossed the Irish Sea
to the Thymes, river of history,
bearing blood as their plan.

The somber river saw its children
murdered or survive as slaves,
it witnessed rights and reason disappear
young minds were tormented into suicide
in dark rooms filled with despair.
But the infinite infamy
grew, its cruel cancer spread
towards new and more extreme intolerances_
as a bird of prey it preened itself,
and fed its young on its victims.

II

1. How can a experienced terrorist group commit a supposed random act of violence and get caught in a prearranged hideout, before they can change and get rid of the clothes they committed the crime in?

2. How can a weapon suddenly get into a high security prison and into the hands of IRA partisans; further, how can the murdered prisoner be shot when held in semi-isolation protected by a special guard who is always with him- in a procedure that has proven itself effective for a long period of time- when he has been the primary IRA target for years?

3. Who benefits from these events politically at the polls in Great Britain?

4. What radical right wing American group with the economic means that has a publicly stated agenda to be a leading player in the internal affairs of every country in the World, and has a goal to exterminate (zero tolerance) all individuals who live life styles they find unacceptable to them i.e. individuals who get high?

PARADISE'S VALLEY

What arrived in Paradise's valley,
the verdurous valley around Portland,
was a fiend, not a friend.
I wanted a friend for the fun of it,
a happy, high-flying person,
boisterous like the laughing lark.

Talk to him: he records your conversation.
Share a joke: he snidely smiles.
Night descends, he snarls;
a compulsive criminal anxious to begin
- he wants to murder

again. I try to tell him:" this is no good,
an honest man like me
can't associate with the likes of you.
Why can't you leave,
take your crimes and bankrupt Christianity with you,
down to the Devil's punch bowel,
over the Western Cascades."

Silence, not even a syllable.
He meets with the others
feeling mean and full of evil,
and I pity them for their guilt,
he's like a vulture
to gorged and bloated to fly.

BATHING IN AMERICA

They're a kind of honey colored
oak cabinets, staid early American,
solid and dependable,
with their fine grained lustrous finish.

They complement the pretty floral wallpaper,
which matches the bouquet painted on the sink;
the fittings are old fashioned polished brass,
and the shower is enclosed in clear beveled glass.

A blue Degas print of a nude bathing in a round tub
is curiously modern in perspective,
it and a few antiques contrast with the rich earth tones
providing the finishing touch to a modest room which exudes a
quiet charm.

I often run an appreciative eye lovingly over its familiar features, my wife and I designed it and I built it, including the beige tiled bath, whose accentuating pieces match the sink, wallpaper and cabinet knobs. A languid bath in the evening, luxuriating in the hot water

make my body steam, as if I were soon to be cinders
a damned witch standing staked on a flaming pyre-
but this is a literary illusion even though I remember
reading about the victims screams from another age, long loathed.

At any rate there I lay, sweating with the tiled walls
book in hand, carrying the universe in the observatories in my skull
from my free state of symbolism and allegory
I am pinned a squirming specimen, a computer enhanced image
of fibre optics:

a nude, not worth worrying over,
taking my nightly bath, reading Gautier,
laying partially submerged simmering-
my privacy violated.

A WOMAN OF

EASY VIRTUE

Mr. Brady, that fine fellow
full of civic zeal,
has a wonderful wife;
there isn't anyone as beautiful,
as loving and as faithful,
or more sincere,
freer from doubts,
sunnier dispositioned-
and more eager to be a seductress.