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.