Winnepeg Lights, A.D. 2000

This Warmest March
for all those years, yet winter
has not finalised retreat.
Snow deposits linger
round the butts of trees
before the Legislature.
On still naked boughs above,
electric bulbs festoon like blossoms.
Come the night, they’ll blaze
morale exciting light.
Out along the avenues,
as though attempting parity,
hundreds of detached houses
will join in,
blinking, flashing all the festive forms,
the colours of a passed on Christmastide.
What was then a votive exercise
should have little season now.
Could all those windowed schemes
have been the fruits of some anarchic apathy?
More positive to cut a little slack –
find in them new life as talismans,
assuring spring’s eventual rebirth.

Song for Niagara

A sense of our position
in a scheme is here.
The water thunders over
with a voice
for past and coming centuries.
Through a sworling space of mist,
Horseshoe, Rainbow, Bridal Veil:
names form into entities.
Brave in the cauldren’s eye
a "Maid" is bobbing,
curtseys, dipping
close and closer
to the torrent’s wide embrace.
Her compliment of souls
accept a while discomfort, damp,
a seeming risk to limb;
small cost
to live a lasting moment
at the interface
with one of earth’s perfections.
The famous rainbow dances,
fitful diadem
about the brows of majesty –
such found here as shades
a passing dignity of kings.
The mist enfolds, a cool caress:
the heart is lost, yet still remains
unfettered as the flow.

Niagara Two

Where else on earth
absorbs as here, embracing all
unto its dolomite heart.
Tour guides pumping out statistics,
give the water’s volume; How it makes
three million watts of power,
while it churns
from Erie to Ontario;
massaging legends
of First Nation gods;
stressing how it’s been like this
for centuries.
When Assher, Thebes and Ur
stood in their time, here, the water
fumed near Rainbow Bridge.
Thirty thousand years to come,
all will have worked
right back up to Buffalo, and to
finality!
Warming now, perverted comfort
in the knowing that like all,
Niagara too,
may not escape the sting of transcience.

^

Biography

Seamus Ua Trodd is a member of the Dublin
Writers Workshop. His poetry has appeared in a
number of journals and periodicals.