'TAOM'
The unexpected tide,
the great wave,
uncontained, breasts the rock,
overwhelms the heart, in spring or winter.
Surfacing from a fading language,
the word comes when needed.
A dark sound surges and ebbs,
its accuracy steadying the heart.
Certain kernals of sound
reverberate like seasoned timber,
unmuted truths of a people's winters
stirrings of a thousand different springs.
There are small unassailable words
that diminish caesars;
territories of the voice
that intimate across death and generation
how a secret was imparted--
that first articulation,
when a vowel was caught
between a strong and a tender consonant;
when someone, in anguish
made a new and mortal sound
that lived until now,
a testimony
to waves succumbed to
and survived.
*'Taom' is an Irish word which means "an overwhelming wave of emotion"
--Moya Cannon,
from Oar,
Salmon Publishing, Bridge Mills, Galway, Ireland.
1994.
HAZELNUTS
I thought that I knew what they meant
when they said that wisdom is a hazelnut.
You have to search the scrub
for hazel thickets,
gather the ripened nuts,
crack the hard shells,
and only then taste the sweetness at wisdom's kernel.
But perhaps it is simpler.
Perhaps it is we who wait in thickets
for fate to find us
and break us between its teeth
before we can start to know anything.
--Moya Cannon,
from The Parchment Boat,
The Gallery Press, Loughcrew, Oldcastle, County Meath, Ireland.
1997.
