doubting soul

I have no difficulty with

the senseless

stupidity of soul

there are many

simple things

not understood.

Take this stone
piece of  

the earth
in darkness

'til Caesar
slashed her 

to pipe shit

beneath a river.

Welling-up I remember

the damp dark night

I climbed in a hole

to save this stone

it has travelled with me
eight hours around the globe
to this land where
blacker stones were hid
i love it's silence and in it see
my grandfathers face,
his blind eyes
eyes he told me Black and Tans
dripped with candle grease
to help him speak of guns

limestone of

the Shannon

simple rock
of my childhood,

grey and hard and sharp

stuff of David's sling

stuff of railway-beds and
schools and churches,
garden-walls and
Georgian homes,
soldiers-barracks, police-stations
nut-houses, cow-sheds prisons
where patriots were shot
and markers for the dead
the grey and cold

to this grey matter
Add life

Mobility

Consciousness

Danger

Daring

and

Willing.

Something wyrd

is happening

before your eyes

Jack

Jack had large fists

curled to a curve

from grasping at things and people

his fingers seldom relaxed

and never now stretched

to make his hands

visible to the world

or those that thought

they knew him.

Jacks tendons shortened

by repeated hurt and

his aversion to the emptiness

that guards relaxation

gave his body a roundness

that those who work 

sweat or slave

for others know.

Whether jack stooped

or crouched it was hard to tell

no man in the forest

in living  memory went

close enough to check,

no one touched Jack nor

witnessed Jack touching another.

things that didn't work

he fixed or kept for parts,

people that didn't work

Jack dismissed