Wednesday, July 29, 2009

At the Prater Park, Vienna


Keren and crew loop the loop.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Puddles on a tandem

I felt you come alive when the wind streamed in your face
and when I tempted you with puddles something lit you like a bulb.

Three times we split the water,
sliced the mud to peals of laughter.
The shadows that had haunted you that day
fluttered ragged in the wind until they fell
dissolving in the wrinkled waters
underneath the pedals
as we passed.

I had forgotten quite how beautiful
the simple things of life
can be.

(c) A McN

It was her first time on a tandem but unlikely to be her last.

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Ornithology in Prater Park

For a heartbeat,
eighty feet above Vienna
the long arc of the swing pauses long enough to tease
then tip us backwards upside down
to face the tiny people far below.

We plummet like a gannet to the ground
but like a swallow skim the earth
and like a lark ascend the air again;

something in us singing as we go.

(c) A McN

I never normally go near a fairground, never mind a fairground ride. It was life affirming in a funny kind of way - feeling so vulnerable at the top of the scary swing.

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St Stephens House by touch.

At St Stephen's house
we felt the carvings on the walls.
Skulls grinned as we poked our fingers in their eyes.

The model (with its cold brass geometries of scale)
showed us how small and insignificant we were - as if we didn't know.

But then we stumbled
on a pattern in the rock
upon a block
of limestone in the wall.
We felt the sharp and shelly sand
with semi- rounded pebbles
from the ancient storm and flood
that rolled them into place.
We felt the smoother grains above

that told of later long
and windless weeks and water
smooth as glass.

Through several hundred million years
this memory in rock remained to
teach us how the little things
endure beyond our wildest dreams.

(c) A McN


No-one had interpreted rock strata to him before. It was a Eureka moment when he realised his fingers were touching a weather event from millions of years ago - a tactile photograph of time.

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Wednesday, July 01, 2009

The Lasts

They started slowly and invisibly at first:
the last cutting of the hedge or mowing of the lawn;
the last time winding the pondweed on a stick whilst
water skaters skit like kittens from the growing candyfloss of green.

Then time sublimating from an airy future to a solid present
made the lasts more self-aware.

The last time I cycled to this home from this station.
The last day the bookshelf had books.
The last calling in on my neighbour
or walking my boy back from his school.

Then, they fell fast like leaves from an autumn tree
and it hit me packing the boxes in the small hours of the night
when my eyes misted not with weariness
but with brokeness.

Leaving bits of myself behind,
things I had made,
trees I had planted and pruned
and loved into shapeliness,
memories I had treasured
were dissolving into history.
It is a foretaste of dying.

But it is also the raw and naked vulnerability
of the unknown leap to an uncertain future
that will never be the same.

And that (I believe)
is life.

(c) A McN


15 years in the same house. Four of our offspring passed from childhood to adulthood and the late gift of number 5 passed from babyhood to childhood. It was very hard to leave and yet the yearnings for our roots were well past their sell-by date. Change is risky but the atrophy of dreams is a bigger risk by far.