Friday

Here’s a poem from Michael O’Neill’s, ‘Return of the Gift’ which my friend bought for my birthday in early December. He died on 21st December and this is his last very elegiac volume.

Janus

1
Scimitar in the January sky -
it starts again,

the moon as resurgent emblem.
‘Renewal’, so it’s tacit lunar hum

might be saying with mirthless irony,
‘beckons’.
Well, why not wax as well as wane?

2
...Scimitar in the frost-free clear sky
seeming to cut its own shape stroke by stroke

until it hangs there, above
us, staring down like

a painting by a cold-eyed master-monster
who has forseen more

than we can, without flinching, bear
to contemplate the thought of.