…On Life

… and Death…

ANCESTORS

Carry me on your sloping shoulders
And I will try to grip on with my toes
My arms around your neck, crouched here, clinging
Leap with me from branch to hanging branch
As I swing and dangle, almost letting go
But not

Hold me in your loving arms
Clean the dirt from my eyes and ears
Wash the mud from my hands and feet
And the mites from my tummy
Hold and love me as your child, as your
Liquid eyed embodiment of self
As you

Play with me in the long grasses
Roll me on the ground and fling me
High into the air, catching me with long fingers
And confident hands grabbing me safely
As I bounce, as I tumble, never falling hard
With you

Save me as the bulldozers roar
Ripping at the trees that home us
Pulling at the roots that bind us to the ground
Scream for me, grab for me, I am falling
Through the dark branches, loose from you
Lost from you, into darkness, into nowhere
Gone Now

Copyright Carey Lenehan 2000

 

 

The Trouble With Grief by Carey Lenehan

Hard to be positive or filled with elation
Hard to look forward with anticipation
Hard to be hopeful of happiness to come
Hard to be here, cold and alone
Even harder still to be with anyone
To have to pretend that living is fun

Hard to be even a bit optimistic
When pessimism is so much more realistic
Hard to pretend that the sadness will end
That I’ll soon come to terms with the loss of my friend
Hard not to miss him when he’s here everywhere
Each minute without him so painfully bare

People say that they get it but I know that they don’t
He was my best friend, he loved me the most
It’s so hard to keep going, to wake every day
To a hard bad world that won’t go away
I’m trying to be strong and show my brave face
But it’s hard without someone you just can’t replace.

RIP CMS

Wisdom of Ages

by Carey Lenehan

She is wiser than you,
that leather faced woman in the wide brimmed hat,
skirt at her knees, as she plucks the weeds
from between the corn rows.
Eschewing technology, refusing the Internet
connection to a world she sees as
riven insane,
she feels the black days coming,
as the user abusers float by in their
climate controlled cars, eyes agog
at her ancient hoe.
She looks to the sky,
watches the aircraft trails spread
like poisoned arrows to a world she disbelieves.
Time and season mark her year,
tradition guides her way
as,
stoop-backed, she bends to pluck
the fruits of her labour
from a generous earth.

She is wiser than you,
that sturdy grandmother by the old pear tree,
bottling the fruit that the wasps have softened
in her hand-me-down jars,
preserving for the future what cannot be eaten today,
pickling cucumbers with a practised hand,
just as those stored from summers before
line the pantry shelves,
because the hard times are coming,
even if the busy people
don't see the signs.
See her airing the bedclothes on a sunny morning sill,
or stacking the wood against winter chill
because flicked switch heating,
or tumbling driers
cannot
be a good thing.
No effort no reward,
as her mother would say.

She is wiser than them,
that fool themselves they can burn old sunlight
dug from the earth's own pantry,
but yet never pay for such largesse,
making fortunes, to fill their homes with
expensive, buzzing electronic toys
and a never ending pit
of spend, spend, spend,
when so many things, could be used again.
She recycles the resources
in her timeless world,
watching the modern people,
use and abuse,
wondering why the certainties stirring in her gut
cannot be felt by the generations beyond,
who
make no effort
but take all the rewards
and still want more.

She is wiser than those
polished beauties with their easy confidence
and their voracious wallets,
wiser than the fat cats on their glittering yachts
who lie to themselves that what they are
is Okay,
who tell pretty tales of profit and necessity,
knowing only the one
with no familiarity to the other.
She knows necessity,
that living is a choice between sleeping and pain
and nothing comes for free,
that the best things cannot be bought.
She tills the flower garden,
pleasure earned through effort,
because Interflora don't deliver her way
and she wouldn't think to call them anyway,
knowing beauty tended by her own hand
gives greater pleasure
than that force fed by the hand of another,
on her feet,
the galoshes her father used to wear.

How can it be,
that we are not wiser than she
with all our education and the certainty of science,
how is it we still fail
to enhance the experience of life for all?
How did we start
consuming without regard
as if we have the right, like children
to lay waste without consequence?
She feels the world at her core,
its rhythms define her, as she takes only
what she needs
and no more,
using what gifts are offered for the taking
but not taking those the earth
has hidden for itself.
And,
as she moves through the corn rows,
watching shiny user abusers passing by
with all their myriad riches strapped to the roof rack
or hauled on the boat trailer,
she can only wonder,
in a world where man can find coal five miles down,
how they managed
to lose her wisdom?

*****

Pointless Dreaming

by Carey Lenehan

I dream about innumerable things
Vast and fervent wonderings
Gallant knights and days of old
Battles fought and heroes bold

I dream of love immeasurable
Perfection so compatible
Tenderness and strength entwined
In virtuosity combined

I dream of wisdom all around
Of smokeless, bloodless battlegrounds
Where bravery can never die
And happy children never cry

A world in which the sun shines through
A never ending dream of blue
Where all of us are rich and fed
And innocence is never dead

In my foolish, wistful dreams
Justice always intervenes
Perfect truth pervades our souls
And unity becomes our goal

Perfect lives and perfect loves
Clear blue seas, clean sky above
No one too rich and none too poor
Then I would dream for nothing more

*****

The Secrets of Self

by Carey Lenehan

What are the things you cannot know,
the moods and shades I cannot show,
the many nuances of myself,
Stuck dust collecting on the shelf?

The smiles paraded for the world,
those frequent faces I unfurl,
the wrappings of a private me
I do not want the world to see.

Can you know my secret fears,
the shames I've suffered through the years,
the things I am when I'm alone,
safe inside my little home?

How I look when first I wake,
or all the liberties I take,
could you stand me if you knew,
all the dreadful things I do?

I'd love to be an open book,
all before you when you look,
nothing kept in privacy,
A human singularity.

To never have to falsify,
the secrets of the the self I hide,
but let us face reality,
you wouldn't like the real me.

So as always I shall dance,
smiling with resiliance.
Staged in my publicity
Nothing but a mime of me

Confidence and blasphemy,
conceal my actuality,
safe behind a painted face
of dignity and awkward grace.

So thus entrapped I struggle on,
my solitude and darkness one.
Quick to curl inside my shell,
if you try to know me well.

There I shut out all the light,
blinker and conceal my sight,
I might be me, but how to know,
when it's always someone else I show?

*****

Tennis Players Thighs

by Carey Lenehan

Russian tennis players have great legs
I've never noticed it before
So I'm gonna get my racquet out
And head off to the courts
I'm gonna spend eight hours a day
Hitting little yellow balls
Perhaps my thighs, so fat and lumpy
Will magically metamorph.

At last that will be me as well
In a tiny little skirt
No cellulite, no wobbly bits
Tanned and fit and pert
Perhaps my legs will grow
twelve inches longer than they are
And then I too can become
A russian tennis star.

I'll run around and grunt and squeal
with my bouncing ponytail
Lobbing, smashing, topspinning
while I wait for my fan-mail
I'll be a famous pin-up girl
Rich and so desired
With my newly fattened forearm
and my thighs all slenderised.

*****

The Girls We Were

by Carey Lenehan

In the years that have passed my friends,
How much, how little has changed?
New lines on our faces, grey in our hair,
spreading waists, shrunken dreams, growing families,
Taking the paths that life carved for us,
Following the threads of spinners tangled to chaos
For so long, we have lived, but far apart,
Halfway through our lives from
halfway through our childhoods
So when I look on you now, I ask myself,

What is left of the girls we were?

Of those laughing, foolish children, who clung together
for no reason, but friendship?
Where have our lives taken us?
Across oceans, over continents,
to the next village and back again.
Where did we go to, in all of that time?
Here, there, nowhere and everywhere.
So now, in the wake of a quarter century,
where our paths never crossed,
In the years that have passed, my friends,

Here are the girls we were.

So much, so little has changed,
Those same smiles, the times that bound us,
the laughter of our own familiar humour,
These shared memories that grow us,
those children who defined us,
and down the years apart
We have found and lost families,
fathers, loves and hopes,
Through the years apart we were broken and remade.
scorched and aged, while time ran away with,
the fears and failures we could not share
But now,

Here are the women we became.

And I want to tell you
In the years that have passed my friends,
Everything and nothing has changed
You are the girls I knew, the friends I loved
and the memories you have, are the history of me.
I am both aged and undone by you,
but despite all the years that have passed,
Despite the distances we crossed
The loves and hates of our secret selves
And the good friends who define us

We are the same girls we were

*****

False Start

by Carey Lenehan

I was fooled, werent' you fooled,
by that early burst of Springime?
I pulled off socks and dug out flipflops,
short sleeved t's,
and hung the sweaters out the way

I basked, didn't you,
in that warm afternoon sunshine?
Toured around on the mower,
listening to thrushes mating and revelled,
yes, revelled,
in the warm kiss of the southerly breeze

I watched, we all did,
those first yellow butterflies
dancing their chaotic ballet
amongst the early bramble shoots
whilst the ponies
frolicked amidst a burst of daisies,
pushing out between the clover shoots.

I smiled just like you,
when I saw the rain and snow elsewhere
while we were eating lunch in the sun and wondering
just how hot it might get.
Had a giggle on them, as we sweated,
all those poor sods not so lucky as me
Then opened a bottle of wine in 80 degrees and felt smug

That was last week.

Today the clouds flew, like fighter planes on a mission
entirely the other way
colliding with our sweet, warm air
in a clash of titans.
After a brief tumult of pressures, in swept a chill
from a whole new direction

I watched it, didn't you,
Chasing the honeysuckle buds back down the stems
Murdering the frogspawn beneath a skim of ice
Turning the wisteria shoots
to shrivelled fingers.

So I'm looking, aren't you,
for the thermals I stored away?
And those snow boots I thought I'd never wear
because
just when I thought it was Spring,
Winter returned
Who's laughing now?

*****

Low

by Carey Lenehan

There's nowhere to go, when you're low
there's just low
The patterns of life click unchanging,
days interminable, immobilised
under grey skies.
I am cold
and the ache of wishing twists
inside like a dancing windchime
silenced, just dead strings turning.
Frustration pulling at the tendons in my eyes,
my head hurts with it,
a sullen ache that
sunlight alone can lift, but
not today.

Motionless, trapped like a moth in glue
every movement too much,
limbs so heavy, exhaustive, my
amorphous wings saturated,
I
will never fly again.
There's a hollow chasm waiting
to swallow every speck
of luminous hope,
guzzling me down whole,
regurgitating crumbs like poison,
fragments,
of the nothing of me

So far from the world, too far
to cover the distance between,
stagnation envelopes all connections
and the way out is
invisible, inaccessible, no answers
exist in here, in this half-world
of amorphous diligence
so
encased I stay, low, solo,
invisibly visionless, emotionally
unfeeling and from here, at the sour base
of life
There is no way up.

*****

Writing For Death

by Carey Lenehan

Am I writing for death
In the quiet moments when my head is empty of inspiration
to act, to achieve, in those
long hours of nothing, of inactive antipathy
Am I waiting for a spark, or lights out

Ticking marks the minutes
Of a steadily diminishing span stretched finitely before me
of my half lived existence
when I seem to be waiting
for it to arrive without doing a thing
to avoid it, to embrace it

In these empty vials of time
when apathy haunts the guilt facade of my conscious
personality and I think
of all those tasks awaiting me
Is it death I am looking for
or the start of my life?