COBH

zoom

Green like dawn among the oaks

green I am – and my throat

thick with moss and heather –

opens to the flush of greenish words.

Green is my smile and leaf-like is my skin

my fingers green grass leaves.

My eyes – a wave – lost in translucent waters

melt into currents and wriggling  sands –

travel beyond  the bay – flooded with stars –

Flatland –where long rows of preying seagulls

keep time beyond the line of time.

The time that fills me, that fills up the banks

of twin skies – reflecting a blue shyness –

bringing together – interlaced fingers – moon and tide.

Around me  dripping of archaic waters

ebullient flashing words.

In their rolling – the clouds – melting the hills

burst with green froth of rhyming waves.

Ogham signs carved into the stone of heaven.

High is the sky and higher still

When I set on my quest – searching the limit

For its primeval sign.

The well of my new path –

gleaming already in its triple spiral.

Listening  – open-eyed – to the song of the light

to the lightning that sets rainbows on fire.

The green sacred Isle that is buried inside –

Sphere of desire.

Nothing will win you back

If not a running – melting sky.

(C) 2007  Francesca Diano. All rights reserved

Author’s Note

My name is Francesca Diano. I’m a writer, poet and literary translator living in Italy. For more than twentyfive  years now I have been studying Irish Folklore and oral tradition. I lived in Cork, where I taught in UCC and was the curator, for The Collins Press, of the facsimile of the original first edition of T.C.Croker’s “Fairy Legends and Traditions of the South of Ireland”, published in 1998 to celebrate the bicentenary of Croker’s birth. This is a most rare edition I proudly own. I translated (adding a long introductory essay) this book into Italian. The book was unknown in Italy and I’m happy to say it became a best seller. I also wrote a novel “The White Witch”, set in Ireland (Cork, Cobh, Dublin, Kerry). This poem is part of  a short collection I wrote in English.