Niall O’Connor is a published poet, blogger and short story writer. He reads regularly at the Writer’s Centre and other popular Dublin venues. poems have been published in The Examiner and most recently in The Stoney Thursday Book, thefirstcut#, A handful of Stones, Carty’s Poetry Journal, Madrush, Outburst, Corvus and others.He promises to have his first collection published in 2013.
Three poems by Niall O’Connor
Budapest
The stuka pigeons have been banished
from the black-bladed roofs of Budapest,
confined to iron rails,
on the prickly, shingled shores,
of the sleeping Buda,
and its Danubian companion.
This is a river so confident
in its own importance, it
flows east, – not west,
or north, or south;
rolling with the earth’s turn,
it makes its own dark sea.
On the bank, empty fossilised shoes,
forlorn, speak with tongues of brass,
where Chinese tourists now gather.
Their shoes, are filled to over-flowing,
and point a way forward, as they progress
in digital frames, past the newly planted
memory trees. Ginkgo biloba.
Here in Budapest
the dawn of a nation-earth
seems now, to be a distinct possibility.
Climbing Mount Kilimanjaro
The garden zone -friendly, then the forest zone -cool.
Night fell too soon, the steeply sloped rain forest and
the servant hills, slipped underneath us, in the dark.
I fought my way up, headlamp illuminating
nothing but poring dirt; all around me the sounds
of leopards, snakes; geography confused, in this
primordial forest, where life springs from decay.
We camped, and stripped to nakedness, trying
to rebuild our shattered spirits with folded clothes
and tea. Sleep came uninvited, like a burglar
silently stealing half finished cups from sudden
limp arms.
Next morning, saw the departure of those who could
take no more of this risk route; trip turned to hard task;
each day, life thinning out, nothing left to be shared,
but pollo, pollo, slowly,slowly.
And then we left the earth, there could now be no rescue,
-even helicopters need air to fly-
On we climbed, and lungs breathed normally,
but our tired muscles never received relief,
and not a sound, other than those you made your self,
no echo, to keep an empty skull company,
We were now beyond the zone of life.
Beneath us, the jets running like trains,
criss-crossing the pond of Africa,
and the curve of the world lay below
and beyond.
On the last night, we tricked the mountain
using its frozen shale, to climb when she slept.
By the time the sun had risen, we had reached her
top, standing ragged for our moments glory each
a god among men, albeit with feet of clay.
Descent was by the coca cola route,
and with each thousand metres we fell,
fresh tears came, as emotion
and life, and oxygen returned.
I called your name to save me,
but even my footsteps . . . . .you had already erased.
Dance
Dance is Life he told me,
forked rivulets springing,
from august temples.
Springs of eternal youth,
still willing his efforts forward.
They had danced from Budapest in ’56
out of necessity, — the Csàrdàs their only passport,
and each evening, with a new cry for freedom,
they performed, after the dancing bears
and the Gypsy fiddler.
From Vienna to Paris,
Rome to Amsterdam, a dancing troupe,
that carried their country in carpet bags,
and hidden in the tips and heels,
of their shared heartbeat.
Dance is Life he told me
in a low ceilinged, basement restaurant,
that had not seen a summer,
or winter, for at least four hundred years,
and his woman stroked the back of his cupped,
resting hand, that still reminded her
of the arched back, and its challenge.
She hides modestly now, behind the vase of plastic flowers,
soothing the friss of his heart, in affirmation
of a time when he released, and caught her again,
at will, — forever in his orbit,
tripping over heartbeats with each approach.
The Galway Review 