B

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Belfast Baps

Great big floury baps
become a staple of your diet here: 
Huge fists of bread with extra flour
to dust your fingers on each bite.

Fillings become irrelevant:
it is that dome of bakery
that symbolises lunchtime:

burnt brown shell
caked over white flesh
inside every lunchbox.

---

Blackbird of Belfast Lough
(translated from the 9th century Irish)

Behold, some minor bird
giving out a loud yelp
from the tip of his
clear-yellow lip.

A blackbird
crafts his cry.
Belfast Lough
turns yellow.

Belfast Lough as photographed from Redburn Country Park, Hollywood

---

Bogwood / Bog Meadows

Recovered, I begin the slow, unsure process
of drying out: dry of my beginnings
inside a scattered fruit, split
across my forest's floor.

Dry of tentative footsteps
into the soil, roots fingering
for moisture spots; hungry, keen,
asking for the rush of seasons
to push me ever skywards.

Dry of rainfall,
now tucked away
with other fallen giants,
my cold bark reveals
only slices of my history.

Dry of bees
seeing me as a maypole,
using the sun as a dance partner,
streamers of branch oscillating
to tide of lakeside winds.

Dry of birds
and the welcome fall
of all talon and claw; of nests and
any celebration of young,
happy weight of fledglings
held inside my arms,
I, surrogate Mother,

Dry of lovers
looking for secret shades
and all my co-conspirators
that turned a grove into
an enchanted glade
for young romance to tingle in.

Dry of children,
losing the days of tiny limbs
sprawling to explore me,
each new plateau bringing forth
one more yelp of excitement.

Now, what is ahead?
A jig, but no dance;
a chisel's cruel kisses;
perhaps one thousand brushes of a plane
that gives no comfort.
I fear the rasp, dread
the avalanche of saw teeth
that may fall upon me.

In my sleep, I see a bog
without footprints,
singular in its temperament
for holding assured silence.
    Let me rest there,
and bring the cycle of my years
down with me, to melt
into sloped, sloth-filled cadence
and become            undiscovered.