Among Gulls


Among gulls
it is the old who are beautiful,
rising up from gray-brown,
inconsequential adolescence
into the sea air, lords of it,
cruciform, blazing their white glory.

Mark this
say I to an old man
bent like a tree above his own lap
on the benches along Liffey,
watching the snow gulls,

writing.





Liffey Swans



Droll swans of the Liffey wag their tails,
glance backward at us passing on the bridge,
in that mocking way they have, the tilted head,
the half red smile, as if the river
were, of course, the better road.

I have known them thundering from the sea at dawn,
where, whispered to on all sides by the deep,
they dreamed what dreams the deep must give them,
strong and mysterious, with the monsters
passing under them upon the rivers
laid on rivers beyond imagining,
the deepest laid at last upon the Fire.

And they come back before the bridge is filled,
settle in, waiting for their crusts of bread.
Oh Swan! I cry, dropping my image
in the ripple at his moving breast.