1.

Sierra Flight
Burnt banners and crooked steel.
Plate armour, dulled by blood.
The battlements of a sleeping castle.
Only a horse survives the combat.
Snorting in the fog,
It drifts to the hinterland,
Fire uncurling from its nostril.
The ghost of a butchered knight trips
Over the body it once occupied.
The horse gathers speed,
Its mane swirling,
The road blistered by its hoofs.
The wind hisses.
Shadows manacle the trees.
Smoke tinges the grey dawn.
It was a sight you may never witness:
A horse without reins or bridle
Hurtling through the sierra,
As a vespers bell clangs a dusky refrain,
Monks intone a prayer to the vast emptiness
Of their church.
And the horse, absorbed in its flight,
Gallops
As if to outpace the horizon.

2.

Ship Burial
The kindling. The cremation begins with brushwood. I know this.
The ship is made for burning, forged in the name of immolation.
The mast is without a sail. The stern is without a rudder.
Together, we nock arrows, smear the bodkins with oil, and set them alight.
The ship drifts past, and we fire a volley at her.
Our arrows shrill the morning mist, and the keel is spattered by erupting flame.
The mast becomes a rod of thrashing gold.
The smoke’s stern, furious perfume clots over the bay.
Carrion sparks. Funereal aromas. The Celsius swelling in thousands. The wind
whisks the flames, and they roar as lamenting with us.
The blaze hovers, kinder than lit candles. A flaming chapel, neck feather of smoke,
flailing at the dawn like a convict, warming our faces up, though the pyre has drifted
far from the coast.
Beads of rain stud my tongue. The Northern sea is calm, greyly calm, awaiting all
death-piloted ships.
Our ruler’s hands are clenched with mortis. In the drab glare of dawn, death
toughens him, clamping his sword in his fingers, his breastplate a husk of old steel.
No longer the scourge of coastlines, he’s just another corpse, polished for his sendoff.
Our own swords are piled about him, as a salute, along with trinkets and oil. The
ocean can take him. It’s high tide, the coastline bubbling with surf. Neither the flames
nor ocean care who he was, how feared he’d once been.
The blaze hasn’t yet quaffed the prow.
It protrudes over the waterline, like a lookout.
It is neither dragonhead nor horse-head.
His shield is buckled to it, catching hints of sunlight as the ship lurches, scratching
the tide.
Through what unpolished waters had that ship crawled? What waterfronts had she
preyed on, out of what fog did her prow slither, oarsmen raring for the plunder?
Countless stories burn with her, all crooked and abandoned as the flames.
We’ll scratch them down on scraps of parchment, blackbird’s blood drooling off a
quill, in rare night-time moments, with only candles for company.
We’re men in need of myths, after all.
We’ll go mad without a vicelike story to rouse us.
For now we are leaderless, grown men sobbing religiously, our boots falling apart.

*

Biography

Daniel Wade is a 24-year-old poet and author from Dublin. He is a graduate of Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, where he studied English and Journalism. His poetry has been published in Optic, Limerick Revival, Wordlegs (e-publication), The Stony Thursday Book (ed. Paddy Bushe), HeadSpace Magazine, the Seven Towers 2014 Census, the Bray Arts Journal, The Sea (charity anthology in aid of the RNLI), Sixteen Magazine (e-publication), The Bogman’s Cannon, Iodine Poetry Journal, Zymbol, The Runt, and the Hennessey New Irish Writers’ page of the Irish Times.

 
He has also featured as a guest on Dublin South FM’s Rhyme and Reason poetry
program, as well as on Near FM’s Writer’s Block. In June 2015, his radio drama, ‘The Outer Darkness’, was broadcast on Dublin South FM. A prolific performer, he has also read his work at various festivals, including the Electric Picnic, Body and Soul, Noeliefest and the West Belfast Festival. In March 2016, ‘The Collector’, his first stage play was staged at the New Theatre in Dublin as a rehearsed reading.

Patron Saint of Lunatics

He remembers a time when moonlight

adorned her silken flesh; her lustrous

hair spun webs around him.

She was an infusion of delicate flowers.

An elixir for his lips alone. Intoxicating.

By day, she wandered the cloistered garden

gathering foxglove and forget-me-nots.

By night, she mixed potions to help erase

the deep-seated fear, they both shared.

When the witch rediscovered her whereabouts,

she jealously turned her heart to stone.

Leaving him with an insatiable thirst.

His tune turned to the ranting of a madman.

Years liquefy, seep beneath

the cobblestone footpath

which once led to their fairytale tower.

He clutches a rope of Rapunzel’s hair;

yearns for its scent of poetry in rain.

Moans into an empty glass,

when he finds truth at the bottom of it.

*

Biography

1.

New Wave Canute

He says that money is no object

and all the breached defences

can be rebuilt immediately.

He is not on the seashore

running into a monstrous wind

with laughing children who

are pushed back by a gale

that causes grown-ups to doubt

their ability to stay upright.

He is not taking tea in the kitchen

with a woman who is glad

she still has electricity.

‘But it’s hardly ideal’ she says

as the toxic water laps at the ankles

of her wellington boots.

He is speaking from a dry location.

Not a hair out of place, and nothing,

thus far, has shaken his belief

in this force called money

that he can wield in the face

of weather systems:

that can hold at bay

every destructive thing,

should he so wish.

2.

Hunting Unicorns

Hear the song of the arctic flood.

Look for them, a pod of narwhals

tusks raised in the open water,

before they submerge again

to places least known in the universe.

Mostly imaginary creatures

these sea unicorns, whose

appearance is a gift, whose

lives are a mystery – who

surely have magical properties.

An unfathomable defence against death

– is that what magic is?

You may see them

in your mind’s eye, in stories,

in photographs by determined

explorers who always speak

about the wonder of the experience,

the sense that all is well –

or even better than expected.

All of that is held in those rare sightings;

nothing more. They move on.

Their tusks, in reality, are teeth

and hollow as horns that

may, in fact, serve to amplify

the music they bring to their cold oceans.

But coming to a point – slender as a bayonet –

sharp like every archetypal spear,

they speak of enemy.

The world is a dangerous place

if you carry a gun.

*

Biography

Verseshape Neomythica

Etain Dinschencha, Loring of Places

The beginning was primordial ooze

Until where land met sea emerged a hero,

A warrior who sharpened her verse

To a point edge-graceful enough to graph

Stars and friendships, hilling up land,

Careening greens into the versescape.

Historicising spacetime with each

Demarcating swing, mythographing

Relevance into the verdant cosmic

Strings. Breaking supersymmetry,

Unleashing four million perturbations

Of individuality, then deterministically

Shifting back to harmony.

Setanta Forosnai, Warp Spasm Insight

He knew each portion as a mistranslation,

That the verses which poetried his form had

Miscalculated, sheared off what should be there,

Moulded what should not. Lyrical lesions

Filling mirrors with lies. Storming lies into

Others’ eyes. The Truth came in hazelnut

Knowings, freestreaming from Connla’s Well.

And this was a time where metaphor and material

Had not so deeply untwined, so he sharpened

A sword of light with limerick and rhyme

And it was enough just to try, the world met

Him in stride, and the topography of his self

Unfurled, untied. It was always there, as present

As air.

*

Biography

Luka McDonagh Valentine is an Irish-Romani poet, born in Galway, based in Dublin.

1.

Petrosmatoglyphs 

This footprint marks the landing of an incredible hulk

of a saint who bounded, centuries ago, clear

across the bay.  Or there’s the devil’s hoof stamped

on granite, the sandal of a warrior king’s horse,

the hollow left by a hermit’s hand, the divot of kneecap

or elbow plunging him into the gear of his prayer.

Life, we agree, must have felt larger then, the wilderness

greening a path to every door, the cave or mountain

conceivable as the first child, the oldest mother.

But tonight, with hay and tar smells pricking the air,

and moon making for the only clock, we find ourselves

yielding to traceries – lip, ear, breast, buttock –

left by two long-lost, runaway lovers on a bed of rock.

2.

Werewolf 

This thin pale man, this poor gom who could pass

for one of us, sees through his window

the full moon sail in an optical illusion above clouds

and river and half-built hotel accommodating

only a stumped crane.  The moon’s eyeful

works on him, building and bundling his ailment

into a dream of a super animal.  He exits

to the street, craving delectation beyond the sensation

of the news ‘as it happens’ on-screen, the ravages

of flood, fireball, earthquake contending

in slow motion.  He inhales the dregs of living in all

its shallow burials.  The wind gusting seeds

and freshness tickles his face with a promise

to overcome everything – traffic smoke, oil-slick, even

the river’s chlorinated conscience.  His fingers

send up a manhole cover for the moon’s laugh.

He teeters on the edge of astonishment,

of scaring himself, whose pelt – if we could touch it –

seems flecks, seems shivers, seems gentleness.

A thunderstorm starts him zig-zagging.

His odoriferous delights scatter; his limbs slobber

and steam.  The moon abandons him.  Long-horned

lorry lights close.  Knocked clear, he stiffens,

curled naked in the ditch where he will be found

in time to make the early edition.  Snapped, captioned

‘The man who thought he was a werewolf’,

with just a few specks of blood freckling his nose.

*

Biography

Patrick Deeley is a poet and children’s writer born in Loughrea, County Galway.  Groundswell: New and Selected Poems, is the latest of his six collections with Dedalus Press.  His memoir, The Hurley Maker’s Son, is published by Transworld/Doubleday in April 2016.