Poems by Jimmy O’Connell
Birds Feeding
For weeks I’d never put bird food in the yellow
rimmed dish out the back; it would lie there
on the ground filling with rainwater; no bird
would come to dip its beak, only the neighbour’s
raggy cat to check for milk, sniff, and in a cat’s
slinky way, move on to the next garden, hoping
for more generous fare. But then, on a whim,
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I fill the bowl with breakfast muesli or wild bird
peanuts and within minutes it is swarmed with
the nervy flight of crows in a frenzy-flock of grey
beaks nabbing and stabbing while sparrows circle
and flitter nervously for scraps; head-proud starlings
on the garden fence attend to each new flight of crow
and a single magpie hangs back a vulture swoop
until all are flown from where they came.
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How can it happen? How do they know when
a random act, a moment of pure chance has
fated them with gifts of food? Who signals?
What mysterious telepathy announces my fitful
generosity? Yet somehow they know. And what
else do they know, even before I know that
on a whim I decide to feed the birds?
A Robin Pays a Visit.
‘When robins appear, loved ones are near.’
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The ghosts of time have burnt their trails
of blood; what is distilled now is but mud
dried from primordial slime. Time has entered
into a pact with this robin as she, pin-legged,
skips from grub to grub, pecking
into the winter’s evening, while fog frosts
again the moss-ravaged garden with delight.
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How passion is hummed, how the wing-bannered
magpie alights the trestle fence and waits!
Time indeed has stilled till nothing is revealed
but the simple dignities of laundry-doings
and water-boilings for tea and shortbread treats.
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Other ghosts return to renew the patterns of the past,
the anticipated remains of this morning’s promise,
the closing in of night and her attunements to
the central heating clicking on and the rustle of blankets
warming our bodies as we lie together within time,
within an embrace remembered and renewed.
Daddy & Daughter Cycling
(Written during ‘lockdown)
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There are no cars parked outside Nanny Quinn’s,
the barges lie silent in the cooling summer,
as Royal Canal water, seeped in the clays of peat
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and prickly gorse, glides iridescent in cloud-
tufted sunshine. Our lone heron stately sentinels
among companionable moorhen and the swift
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swerve of blue gloss-tinted swallows.
The Waterway’s towpath has been re-laid,
and where once horses dragged barges through
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Abbeyshrule and returned commercially laden
to the Dublin docks, now in the new logistics
and imposed contingencies of lockdown
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and social distancing, I take my routine canal walk.
Old dusted down Raleigh bikes and children
wearing safety helmets gather; a father cycles by
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in shorts and summer shirt, his daughter on the
carrier seat, familiar now to his tack and turn, sitting
in the safe swerve and glide of her pre-bridal dance.
Jimmy O’Connell performed at both Electric Picnic and Kilbixy recently. Inklings Writing Group meet on Tuesdays at 11am in the Annebrook House Hotel.