Rejected Verses 1-10 plus Introduction
Rejected Verses
Contents, in no particular order
Foreward
1. Our Lady’s Island Wexford
2. World Quaker Day in Wexford
3. St Vogues ruined church in Carne
4. September Sunshine
5. Messy Poems
6. De La Salle Churchtown
7. Fifty-year school reunion
8. Alba de Tormes 1975
9. Autumn garden breakfast
10.My sweetheart
11.Italian Affair
12.Morning sailing
13.Impressionist Wexford Countryside
14.Bottoms
15.Lily’s Island
16.Amazing Grace
17.Now hope sustains
18.New Year’s Day 2019
19.My slipping sanity
20.Omelettes without breaking eggs
21.Which I?
22.Fr. Martin Clarke PP
23.Hail Mary
24.Futility
25.Milltown Park 2013
26.Nature’s hymn
27.Crucify him!
28.They’ve promised rain
29.Fight for Christ!
30.Canarian Colours
31.We only borrow
32.Many people wrote the Bible
33.September Morning
34.Wexford Buddha
35.Our Lady’s Nursing Home
36.Where trees embrace the sky
37.Thank you for the now
38.Blessed are the depressed
39.It’s Original Sin.
40.The Longer Way
41.Hotel Earth
42.The only child
43.Month’s Mind
44.Summer springs back
45.Young Neils
46.Less is more
47.A Final Smile
48.A Cloistered Life
49.Quietly
50.Words
51.Now or never
52.Something
53.Nature’s hymn
54.No longer
55.Friend
56.Most times
57.Lazy hazy afternoon
58.Morning in Carne
59.A bruised reed
60.School poetry
61.Outside the shop, beside the school
62.When first I heard the forest birds
63.Glory Be
64.Give me heat, but not the sun
65.Rooted to the land
66.Brotherly love
67.Quakers aren’t quitters
68.I’ve the whole world at my feet
69.I stood by the cold graveside
70.The Doomsday Clock Counts Down
71.Poems Escape
72.Wexford, New Year’s Eve 2019
73.Kevin’s Dining Room Rosary
74.La Quinta, Tenerife, December 2019
75.Tenerife in November
76.On the road to Taucho
77.Prayers
78.If only
79.The little thrush
80.I’ve gone down this road
81.Thinking of Jim
82.Oh Ireland how dearly I love you
83.She is my other half
84.Our Lady of Victories
85.Nodding off in a garden chair
86.Hush little birdie
87.Prisoner 4859 Auschwitz
88.Five fifty-five
89.Dance
90.Death in a time of plague
91.The mystery of evil
92.American Humble Pie
93.Blessed are the taxpayers
94.It was a house of two halves
95.Isolation, Day 7
96.One day nearer
Foreword
This book contains, among others, poems rejected in the compilation of the recently published ‘Pilgrim Verses’. Some kind readers have enjoyed the poems in Pilgrim Verses which has encouraged me to publish this follow up book and print a small number. This book has been written in pursuit of sanity and published out of vanity.
About the author
I was born in 1951 in the little sea-side village of Murrisk, Clew Bay, Co. Mayo, at the foot of Croagh Patrick on the eve of ‘Reek Sunday’, the last Sunday in July, when traditionally thousands of pilgrims climb the mountain named after Ireland’s patron Saint, Patrick. As was the custom, I was Baptized in quick order and given the name Padraic, the West of Ireland version of Patrick after my father’s father, Patrick Murray, Carlow, died 1925. The West of Ireland has remained important to me throughout my life and has perhaps inspired a passion for the sea and an interest in pilgrimage.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to my family and poetry loving friends who have encouraged me to continue this folly.
Dedication
This book is dedicated to my wife Lorraine
Glenageary, County Dublin (under lockdown) May 2020
1.Our Lady’s Island Wexford
Our Lady stands so quietly
Dressed in blue so elegantly
Composed and silently
Greeting pilgrims patiently
In the tall Pugin Church
Standing watch on her lake.
It’s Friday noon in October
Sun streams softly through the windows
Stained glass sheds light so gently
Across a cold nave that lies empty.
The August crowds have now melted
Across the lake birds are wheeling
Calling in a chorus leaving
Mary standing by her son, only
Alone again.
2.World Quaker Day in Wexford, 2019
Five of us sitting in a circle
Sitting in silence just waiting
In the cold Quaker house
Where the narrow windows
Allowed the blue skies to enter
And the frenzied mind to wander.
Sixty minutes of silence
Free from hymns and liturgy
Safe from earnest sermons
Of clergy fresh from seminaries
Imbued with energy and certainty
The short sighted courage of youth.
We were testing the Lord
Who had promised
Centuries ago without thinking
Where two or three were gathered
He would be there among them
And we were five, after all.
Enniscorthy slept through our service
It didn’t mean offense, it was early
On a warm Sunday morning in autumn
And the world was at peace with itself
Not sharing concerns about justice
Or saving the world while snoring
No, all it took were the five
Sitting in silence
In hope more than certainty
The world would outlast this century.
It finished with tea and some biscuits.
If the world’s to be saved
It will be slowly
One cup of tea at a time
In the old meeting house
That’s seen some stories
And times as dark as our own
3.Saint Vogue’s ruined church in Carne
What men were these who rose and chanted
Before the dawn each day and patiently waited
For the sun to invade the Eastern sky
In lives forsaking everything for God?
Fifteen hundred years or so have passed
Since Vogue and brothers tilled these fields
And fished for supper in these waters
That share the tides with France and Wales.
Nothing seems changed but the heavens have moved
And God now sits anxiously in his kitchen
As modern man travels an unplanned path
To heaven or hell uncertainly.
4.September sunshine
September sunshine lingering
The longer shadows fingering
The trees on the orchard wall
An added day received gratefully
A ray of sunshine trapped hungrily
Nothing taken for granted
The children play on Sandycove beach
Four weeks after the schools reopened
Frolicking in the water as we did fifty years ago
Nothing seems changed in half a century
Time to immerse in the redemptive tide
To the sounds of swimmers in the harbor.
A bonus day, a soft surprise
A wind from the south that kisses
And warms our fleeting year.
The summer is in the hall but has not found his hat or coat
And conversation wanders
Tomorrow seems fine and the weekend too
Perhaps the autumn has forgotten to come
And the summer has forgotten to go.
5.Messy poems
My poems are a mess
But so is life and love
Why reverse in verse
What life served first?
Oh for the clear days in Spring
When right was right
The school crest ‘recta sapere’*
Seemed so surplus of course.
But with summer came the haze
That covered Spanish fields
The sweat that stung the eyes
Picking lentils, swatting flies.
With autumn came the mist
That rolled up from the Bay
Up Killiney Hill it crept
Keeping secrets from my gaze.
It’s hard I guess to confess
That Winter has arrived
Truth lies hidden in the frost
Hope covered but never ever lost.
*crest on the blazers of De La Salle Churchtown meaning ‘to know what is right’.
6.De La Salle 1959 - 1969
Looking back on the schooldays
It’s the teachers I can see
Writing on the old blackboard
Latin, English and Geometry.
The scratch and screech of chalk
With particles that dance in sunlight
The boy in front fiddles with a compass
The boy behind snores softly.
The urgency of exams in June
Lost in the heat of a May afternoon
And yet the teacher fresh from training college
Strives to stir his drowsy charges.
It’s not the sentences I recall
Just a stray word here or there
That lays nestling in the brain
That guides us blind for half a century.
Fifty years on with sixty to remember
Happy to say
The friends we made
Were the friends that stayed.
7.Fifty-year school reunion 1969-2019
Fifty years we remember
By the lakeside this September.
Happy to be here, happy to be
Among good friends in warm company.
We think of those who cannot come
We hold close all our De La Salle sons
We wish good health on all here present
We thank all those who will serve us.
It’s a special place this Coolbawn Quay
On a lake as big as the open sea
Hopefully we’ll enjoy this night just enough
To preserve the memories with a bit of luck.
Not to waste or overstate
Neither yet to underestimate
The memories of school that anchor and stay
As guide-ropes to this very day.
The old class of sixty-nine
Is part of the fabric
That makes up the clothes
And seeds our encounters
wherever we go.
8.Alba de Tormes 1975
I saw your relic that they kept
One sleepy Spanish afternoon
When the sun chased both man and beast
From the torrid streets of Alba.
The year was nineteen seventy-five
And we were twenty-five
Young Legionaries of Christ
Herded inside the dark church walls
Dressed in black soutanes
With shiny hair and shiny shoes
And bright white smiles
Young innocents of God.
It was during our twelve-month stay
In proud and fusty Salamanca
Whose academic reputation lay baking
In the scorching heat nearby.
We gathered round Teresa from Ávila
Or what was left of her
We who had hardly seen a female ankle
Were left gazing at her heart.
But the memory never left
The image that was etched
The presence of a saint
In a hot and blasted landscape.
A strange and noble place
Where years seemed to freeze
And time stood still
Where history turned few pages.
The black soutanes unchanged
For decades and for centuries
‘til change came sweeping through
The year that Franco died.
9. Autumn garden breakfast
The autumn shadow lies halfway
Across the garden bench
The smells of morning coffee
Rouse both body and soul.
It’s an early September Saturday
The blue sky smiles at me
An added summer bonus
That the busy never see.
The birds are in their comfy nests
Singing and chirping happily
The dogs are barking madly
At creatures mostly imaginary.
What a day to be alive!
What a blessing to see and smell
The garden flowers and the hedges
Small Paradise inside suburban walls.
The sun steals round the corner
Of a neighbor’s house
Reminding us that time is fleeting
With October shortly following.
10.My sweetheart
I feel her little heartbeat
She scrunches in beside me
She looks into my eyes
With total love and loyalty.
I get up, she follows
When sitting down she cuddles
She stretches out before me
I’m sure she does adore me.
She barks at every car
That travels up our street
I hadn’t realized
We owned so many houses.
I feel guilty leaving her
Looking out the window
Waiting for the hour
The return of her master.
It’s fascinating that this little dog
Shares so much stuff with me
Eyes and ears, teeth and hair
Beating heart and kidney.
Our DNA is intertwined
We’re nearly all the same
I’m sure she’s special wisdom
She knows when I’m alarmed.
She’d die for me, I know it
I surely don’t deserve it
She’s a window into happiness
I daily count my blessings.
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