I’ll not forget The night in the gloaming When day must surrender The light and the time To the evening, which comes With unhurried pace Seeping over the land Like turning a page I walked the gloaming That Kerry night gleaming I wore the night Like a shawl round about me I trudged the half light Bent to the incline Curved like a question, Marching to elsewhere, To other than here I tramped the borders of daylight And half-light And midnight blue seeping. I walked with purpose, Not well by the wall But out, there, where field falls, Sudden, stops being, Dissolving in sea-spray To cavernous oceans The sea’s farthest ends I watched the changing The purple of heather, and igneous greys Warm swathes of the colours That herald the night Blanket over the day as it passes To someone else, other, Some other elsewhere The darkness not dark But clear as the day I watched the spilling Of inky blue evening Cover the field Where the buialán* grow The town is a speckling Of lights far below me Blinking and hinting At life underway My breath and the wind And I stand for a moment The sea at my left hand The town far below The stars like bright thoughts Your thoughts, beyond kenning You mark where I walked Where I stopped All my ways Somewhere beneath me Down there, where the lights are A baby is dandled And held – held to cheek But here where the night Hides the sight Of waves crashing My breath and the wind Sound each wave’s retreat The vagueness of laughter A ceilidh that’s muted The clinking of glasses And crackle of peat Is a ploy of my memory For I’m too far to hear them The nestling town Couldn’t notice me gone But I’m real as the earth Shifting under my feet As real as the cut-glass Stars, dusting the heavens The uniqueness of being The very “I am” That each moment serves Each reflects something greater That maker of gloaming light Turning the earth Out here where the sea birds Cry, calling, about me Out here in the chasm Between twinkling lights To the edge of the gloaming, To the evening drawn over, To the wings of the dawn To the corners of morning, Birds fall through the gloaming Through me, to the sea.
*buialán – I think this is an abbreviation of buachalán bui, which is a yellow wild flower (or maybe weed…) – I think it’s ragwort, but is also known as a fairy flower! This abbreviation appears in a poem by my uncle Thomas Patrick MacGloin.
