AUGUST 2007

Dave Lordan, Poet

Booterstown Marsh

A wind halt

Where the winds-ways brake momentarily and dip

to let down kingfisher, moorhen, dowitcher, heron,

from along their incredible unguided trips

from Reykjavik to Rome,

Istanbul to Edinburgh,

Algiers to the Orkney Isles,

here to take their balm and ease, preen and dine,

perhaps to nest, cavort, give birth

Among the dock leaves and the mud-piles and the puddles and the reeds

staking this ancient claim of a natural rest

Between the rolling clatter of the DART line

And the ceaseless metal anthems of Rock Road.

A place of departure or point of return?

You are neither one thing nor another.

And I will not have you called sea nor land.

A tipping point

where stream is always flowing

Infinitesimally into brine,

Stone unknowably being turned into shell,

Earth mutating into sand.

When at rise and fall of light

A hundred different cries and calls

Mix to breed one chaotic hub of song

You are a marshy acre proclaiming the world’s mestizo tongue,

a Cuba alive with warbles and clucks,

croons and caws and chirps, lilts, twitters and trills,

breaking the ugly embargo of engine noise.

purposeful screeching of rubber,

intentional hammering of steel.

Though I won't deny you have your habitual malevolence

as when your green rot blooms

unleashing a tidal stink so nauseous

it flushes toxins through commuters eyes and lungs, and tourists

trapped in stench drowned carriages,

think perhaps a mass grave has been exhumed.

(This being priest country,

I know that somewhere sunken in your oily holes-

those demonic hoof-marks of my childhood bog-

you keep a black bag pulled tight around

a pile of small unwanted bones)

Still, you are a marvel.

Your old wings out-flew arrowheads and cannonballs

ranged past the reach of centurions.

You remain

the womb of countless incomprehensible voyages,

as flocks of Reed Bunting, Sedge Warbler,

Teal, Snipe, Lapwing,

Oystercatcher, Redshank, Dunlin

come streaming to your sanctuary

over the high airs invisible courses

older than the oldest human route

older than the first brick,

the first wheel,

the first slave,

the first whip.

But money wants you gone

Senseless, insatiable, amnesiac money

spreading itself endlessly by tar

wants wiping out

your oasis for the nomads of the air

your redoubt of the precious, the gorgeous, the rare.

I wonder

when the money comes

Who will hold your ground,

Who will stand between you

and the obliterating road?


Dave Lordan©2007