Poetry by Shane O'Neill
Some Think It Cool
On the radio the DJ plays us elevator musak
That subsequently is announced as early
electronica –
A homage to the founding fathers of
dance music
An elbow nudging, eye winking, aren’t
we cool
We who can spot and pay respect to the
origin.
Neanderthal man stretched a piece of
hide
And accidentally dropped his crude Neolithic
tool
Bone on tautly drawn skin, music’s
original sin.
But I don’t need to revisit the
banging of a drum
To remind me where melodious harmony
sprang from.
So off with the radio and on with the
t.v.
Big Brother is beamed to us live tonight,
One can sit there for ten minutes or
more
And stare at the rain falling on well
watered plants.
I counted it, ten whole minutes I sat
there.
Disparate threads of information
In spite of their respective merits
Lose face if they remain mutually exclusive
–
So here goes, but before making any
assertions,
Before levelling accusations in the
way of today’s media
I need to check something first:
Those Flintstones, weren’t they
insatiable worshippers of t.v?
Bird Watching
Wood pigeons, watching them for a season,
on that tree that looks to the sea, an aircraft lauching
pad should I say, relay take -offs and the swoosh
of an incoming dive, matter in mouth for mouths that
will matter, the country gentry prepare their nests
with an elegance, that is understated, a latticework
of silky sugar sticks. Every season, every year, every
one of these last twenty eight, birds have laboured
unnoticed, but it is only now in the reawakening you
have awoken in me, the gift you have bestowed with
your elegant finger, that hits rewind and let's me
do all again, but this time properly…Well, now
as this second childhood nears an end, it wants to
mature and lead us to a place we both have not gone
before, to arc and to plunge in the search for building
blocks, for us to be two wood pigeons on a tree, looking
towards the sea.
About
the Author
29 year old writer of no fixed abode,
presently gathering moss in Dublin.
