To all Ireland poets

Congratulation, Ireland!

You've chosen a remarkable man for the post of Professor of Poetry, Harry Clifton, and I hope that he will do you much good. You have perhaps one of Europe's strongest tradition in poetry-making and I hope that also future generation will benefit from this treasure trove. Poems manage to capture the second and make it memorable, and it does so in a totally other way than prose and academic writing does it.

The Approaches 

A childless, futureless road

And then nothing. . . Is that it?

Or start believing in a God

Beyond the temporal limit

Of westering skies, wide, melancholy,

Uncut fields and paced-out walls

As we drive towards it slowly,

The house that has us both in thrall.

They are gone, now, the hours of light

It took to get here. Might-have-beens,

Lost wanderyears. But that's alright—

We are trading it in, the seen

For the experienced, the car keys

For the end of the journey,

When distances have lost their power

And the heart beats slower

In tomorrow's cold, a coming weather

One degree north of yesterday.

High latitudes—as they say,

There is nothing up here

But wind and silence, passing clouds,

Light diminished half a tone,

A dish left out all night for the gods

By morning turned to stone.

So take a right, go down two gears

And stay in second, where the church is

And the pig farm. Only the approaches

Are terrible, only the years,

The getting here, which takes forever.

A boy in tears, a barren crone

On a bicycle, a man alone—

They're waving. . . It's now or never

For the final self, I assume—

For the shape of the house

On the skyline, the release

Into childhood, and the coming home.