Hugh Maxton
Along Other Lines
Great planes roar down Palestrina.
Give us a chance, the mountain cries.
Men-burners rove pacific Averna
Pressing enemies to future armies.
Black ash calcifies to armour.
The pits of civilization gape.
Men-burners rove in corridors:
O Fortuna, they roar, inflict our pains.
Their helmets roar with rock,
Flesh with after-grass. Give us a shock.
Great planes roar above the great plains,
Marshpath and desertscape.
After Dorthy Molloy
For Andrew
Earls or eagles,
The unruly boast
A high clatter of kin.
As every dove does
Hers alighted from
A dove above.
When the Virgin Mary
Would be wed
A carpenter
Nothing happened either
From the ordinary.
As she began it
Life just skeetered:
No pearls, no beagles.
Less flying swan,
More diving gannet
With the Holy Ghost
In oilskins.
Hugh Maxton: born in 1947 outside Aughrim, County Wicklow. His first collection was Stones (1970), followed by The Noise of the Fields (1975) which was a Poetry books Society Choice. Subsequent collection have often involved an element of translation, from German or Hungarian. A prose memoir, Waking, appeared in 1997. His most recent collection is Poems 2000-2005 (published by Carysfort Press).