Density Duncity October 2000

The words I read I recognise
Some phrases hang together
A line or two communicates
The verse is so much blether.

I know, I know, the way-to-go.
Layer on layer the meanings build
But to reveal or to conceal
I cannot tell the poet willed.

Pearls in crusty mussel shells
Diamonds in a coal pit
I know they're there but do I care
To fossick and explore it?

The critics love to delve, discover
meanings hidden and notions grand
Which takes me further from the poet
who I set out to understand.

Circumlocutory ultraprolixity
The way of the poet in ancient rhyme
Now all is density, echoes and whispers
of something that may or may not be worthwhile.

Can we not find a simple song
for simple folk of simple things?
Must poetry a corpus be
for surgical dissectings?

Out of your charity
Give me some clarity.
Give me a break.
Yeah.

^

Biography

I was born in Ballon Co Carlow 1929. I joined the diaspora as a ship's radio officer (ditditdah stuff!) and have been moving around ever since with some years in Peru and since 1965 in New Zealand. Don't write a lot but occasionally an idea won't let go until I put it on paper. I had two lovely brothers, one still farming and foresting in Carlow; the other Thomas P (Tom) wrote the biography of Devalera and was highly esteemed professor of history at Galway for years. His widow, Marie, has also published with many papers and a biography of Jennie Wyse-Power. I get home at every diminishing opportunity.