Poetry by Craig Hanley
NEW YORK SEPTEMBER 11, 2001
There's a hole in the sky
That echoes with screams of fear
And 18 minutes have changed the world
Forever.
The quick glance up to towers
That echoed a nation's pride
Will forever be visions of pain.
There's a hole in the sky
And the weapons,
Travellers sealed forever in tombs of hate
Aimed in terror at their own.
There's a hole in the sky.
The day will be remembered forever
In all the tongues of the world
And fear lives closer to our hearts.
There's a hole in the sky.
SONGLINE
A songline stretches
From Weskusko To Sasagui
Crossing muskeg
River, forest and lake
And the melody and timbre
Imparted to the land
By glaciers and wave
Have made beauty undeniable
Unremittent intonation
That echoes miles in ether
To know the line
With deferent act and greeting
To know the history of the heart
Is to delve deep
Into the continent
The fire-borne strength of the Shield
So that your ancestor - whoever
May answer
The moving instant
Recognized in silence
And felt by the heart
As the sympathetic vibrations
Of your own heart
Pulling at the string
The line that stretches
From Sasagui to Weskusko
A MEMORY OF FINE WINE
Sit alone in a cantina
The wraith of Edith Piaf
On your left
Lenny Bruce to your right
A glass of Beaujolais
Cradled gently
In your polished hands
A razor
A noose
(Implements of enchantment)
And listen to the sounds of dancing
Shuffling
Whispers
Friends embracing strangers
Fashioned on memories of acquaintances
Long-since forgotten
DISTANCE DESCRIBES A CIRCLE OF SNOW
The road laughs with wildness
At our approach
Giving an indulgence of distance
Nothing more than this:
Miles separate -
Reiterate the miles between us
The powdered snow
Forced horizontal through spruce
Softens the echoes of laughter
Traps the moment in your eyes
To savour
As you pass
Past the spit of land
Frozen waves have ceased to touch
The snow sifts softly
Hiding earth beneath it
ORION BOREALIS
Orion
Parade yourself
Hunter of Borealis
Tundra miles before us
The black spreading away
Lonely miles to nowhere
And we
More isolated than
A slender rail
Connecting civilization To civilization
All that binds us
So far removed from your
Natural world, Orion
So far from those men
First seeing in your belt
A great hunter
Spread against the sky
Using Borealis as a pathway
Hunting down the stars
PAST THE HORIZON
Can I look past the horizon?
Take that one extra step
Past the limits of white
That would actually reveal
The hold such barren land
Has on our soul
Why I expect to see wolves
Loping in test against the train
Plodding from The Bay
On its rhythmic way home
Why the feel of white on white
Stretching jagged to blue
Stretching wide to other shores
Touching a string in me
Sends echoes ringing deep
Why a whistle in the morning
Dark
Sends a shiver
And why my room, so small
Seems intruder in this wilderness
And yet in loneliness
A part of it all
THE HERO
"I can only do what is right for a man"
The rest is hearsay heresy
He didn't cry at the thought
He didn't hide for the ghosts
He faced his mind
With as much strength
As a sinner faces Satan, defiant
He was certain, proud
Did not deny his own and yet
He creaked an empty death
From unwomanned man
There would have been a time for him,
For all those men who see,
In their own reflections
The sentinel wolf of fear
WORLD POEM
The world is poem enough
For the songs I have to sing
My dreams have made enough
Of my mad wanderings
From here to there and again
Have made it pleasure and joy enough
To fill my tunes for years to come
And to write lyrics
For a thousand songs
That touch the heart's soft core
I have seen the mountains sing
In the twilight and the sea
Strum a chord on rock and sand
And seeing this hearing
I have known the only words
That ears can ever know
And know the answer
To the question that's asked
And the world is poem enough
LET THEM DIE
Let old men die
Let their bones whither
The sun away
With their passing
And in years to come
When peasants weep at graves
Not marked yet known
In the heart where all knowing lies
Let the rhymes sung over
And again become hymns
That wing ways to the stars
And leave the praises quiet
To become eulogies for faces
That never really passed the byre
Let the old men die
Let their bones whither
Away in dust
That forms the voices
Of mourning generations
A KISS
Lately I've been going crazy
Every five or ten minutes
Something grabs me from behind
And pushes me over backwards
I collide with morning sparrows
Flying to evening and in the afternoon
I meet night hawks with tiny parcels
In their mouths to kiss me with
THE FLAMING NEPHEW
The flaming nephew rises
for his morning bath
and laughs with his eyes
and screams of reality
and talks of hairdos
He doesn't realize
the flame's unclean
the needle won't cure him
neither will the binary chant
cause no matter how many ways
there are really only two words
and that's not enough for a prayer
The flaming nephew walks out
in the morning just after dawn
and smells a primrose by the path
and feeds a sparrow his extra raisin
and pets the head of a lonely wolf
and takes off his pearl white shoes
and walks barefoot in the grass
and the grass is sparkled with dew
and the nephew smokes as his fire dies
But who ever said he was on fire?
SILVER PIN-WHEELS
I've found him alone
Secretly conspiring to be mad
By whispering all he knows
Or has ever or will know
Into a milk bottle
Intending to set it adrift
In the pond behind his house.
Found him in a crowd speaking to no one
In German which he does not know
And answering in Gaelic which he has forgot
And he came to me one day
Dressed in gold and blue
Like a king he once knew
Singing a Medieval roundelay
La-la, la-lay
Trembling in the remoteness of his mind
I've found him alone
Silent and smiling
While playing jacks
With silver pin-wheels and a pure rubber ball
He's conspired to be mad by himself
And with everyone he's ever met
And I've finally decided
To secretly conspire with him
I WILL THIS FOR THE DOVE THAT CRIED
I screamed the lake to obedience
On my Easter Sunday long ago
The loons and whippoorwills mated
Together on the empty lake and foam
The pines and clouds wept tears
For me in the morning storm
Above the grey straight grey angled cliffs
They leered, peered down on me
But the lake obeyed command
Relinquishing claims to violence
What swept me away then
When standing lone my back
Facing island brush and rock
My mouth staring out, again
At the empty water spaces still
What swept me away then
The cry from the stars
The ageless weeping voice
That spoke to me then, alone
That echoed and turned to burn
With me and gather me
All together in her arms there
Ivory white I could not feel
The mating rose and the weeping clouds fell in
What swept me away then?
When I heard the dove's warm sob
In the stillness when the lake stopped?
The voices from within above.
The water cried to still.
THOUGHTS ON THE FOOTSTEPS OF TIME
Sandra - I heard the footfalls of time
In the corridors of this institution
And shuddered at the thought
Of endless streams of minutes
Shooting past our lives
Into the places past tomorrow
Squirmed at the idea
That our minutes of being together
Are actually movements towards its end
And cried at the thought which echoed
With the footsteps of crushing memory
Sandra - I laughed at the complexity of thought
At the juxtaposition of time and memory
Realized that the minutes of being together
Are the past and future converging on the present
Existing in conversations between us
And that your eyes - smiling
Are the wells of time
And that the footsteps from those wells
Are actually memories becoming real
Maturing into emotions
Of flowers and music in the air.
LA BOHEMIENNE ENDORMIE
Lie down my lovely
On the pale sand
Having sung the night away,
A bottle of wine and a lute,
To break the immediate silence
Crying to the mountain peak
With your clear sweet voice
And sleep, sleep the moon to rising
Embracing your striped robe and ebony skin
And if your staff is not enough
Remember your saviour in whatever voice
He hears
And the lion is peaceful enough
His tawny skin is curious of colour
As he sniffs your head
That broke his sleep
He will pass on if real
And vanish if a dream,
When you wake
A statement of you and him
Simple in the desert
And yearning for peace
And lonely contentment
SEAMUS - AN INTERVIEW
Drawing words from the earth
Seamus
Setting your spade deep
Into the fertile ground of memory
Your words glisten
Hang
Like moments of rain
In the air
And you may be wrong
There may be too much entertainment -
Electric - in the air
To ever speed the echo
Of the name of a poet
Abroad
Especially in these western lands
In deference to the bards, however,
And the minstrels who sang
Your mother's memories into our lives
To become real for us all
We have a too too easy recreation
Ringing in our ears to ever hear
The spoken name of "POET"