Lost in those early morning whispers,
thinking about a childhood,
where darkness was just an illusion.
 
Hands of the dusky sunrays,
playing with the paltry foliage,
too surreal to witness
in this rational construct.
 
Muddy puddles and the earthly aroma,
both engulfing the confused, ill-tempered child.
 
Holding onto the blessed heights,
ethereal frames pass by,
too quick to realize their inherent grief.
 
Tearing up, after a lost childhood,
feels better than the sunken ship,
whose torn sails lay still.
 
A forgotten comrade confiding
in the solitude all around.
 
Those gentle strokes
on a dark, moonlit riverbank,
lost in a self that I can talk to.
 
Chills run down my spine,
while I converse with the forgotten shores.
Her eyes,
soaked in centuries of disregard,
covers her face,
in a pool of bluish-white.
 
An eternity of hiding,
away from settlements built on sinking sand.
Intoxicated by her anonymous disposition,
those sea-shells glimmer
in the midnight gloom.
 
Shallow dreams I once harbored,
oblivious to the cradle within my reach.
Building a home near the seaside,
loses her presence once and for all.
 
The green gleaming leaves on a rainy day,
seemingly confides in its private,
lonely moment.
 
Just as the waterfall in the distance,
life looks as misunderstood
as the greenish hues
on a Pacific mussel.
 
Bubbles we must cocoon ourselves in.
A world to sink in the volcanic crater,
lest we embrace the folly
we must endure.
 
In lieu of tethered feet,
few continue to fly
into the endless expanse.
Flying into the hummingbird’s nest,
she hears the cheerful chirping
turn into mournful silence of the indifferent green.
 
Well,
I guess the silence would stay.
My weary eyes looked at the moody sky,
ever so slightly covered by the frosty clouds.
 
Living into the afterlife,
often confused
between the latter

and its anonymity.

I can’t grow a poem –
I can only pick it up,
blindly
from the ground or from the ether,
writing off the heaviness that hangs about the heart.

A SOFT LANDING

​I sigh softly with the earth
her heartbeat in my centre
and when all is lost and broken she gives me
yet another in-breath!
Lights the skies in colours of love -
 
and I can’t turn her away.

FOR ÉIRE

​Ireland
I am lost in your cool damp greenery
where ancient rocks relax on big fields
and sunset is a wild card I wish to catch.
 
I’ll never truly know you
though you call yourself my turf.
I’ll never know of another place so mysterious
 
and yet so safe, so sound.

SHADOW
 
Sorry that you haven’t always seen
the sunniest side of me
sorry I’ve lately been bathed in dusk.
 
All I ask is that you see, it’s simply another side to the same
‘me’.

FORESTED
​
The spiralled vine loves a tree to climb.
 
And me, well, I am forested.
My mind plants roots
in things long past
 
grows leaves before the season.

About the author: 
Ailbhe is an emerging artist and writer from the west of Ireland. She recently completed a Masters in Authorial Illustration at Falmouth University. Her background in yoga teaching, mindfulness and living in the wild informs her current poetic practice. Through her words and art she seeks to magnify the ordinary, everyday, sublime - to find wonder in the familiar. 

​Countless chameleon faces pause briefly
blend into surreal versions of oneself.
I see Wilfred Owen
coming over the hill towards the Somme.
A crow
near a marble pillar
stares at a lycanthrope’s head, where a man and woman
are dead
in a hanging tree.
A black swan dissolves, while a woman
plays hide and seek with a lover.
The rabbit watches Pegasus in half gallop
bursting free from the banks.
A wendigo grimaces
from the cobwebbed floaters of an illusionist.