Anam Cara

THE TRANSPARENT BORDER

There is a strange edge to the wind today,

Some irritation with the patient strain

Of trees, the ‘willing to bend with anything’

Trick of the rushes, the shoals of shadow

Perplexing the lake and all the silent

Aloofness of the stones, something

Very old, perhaps, resentment towards

These bog fields, each rooted in its dark

Continuum and known to people by name

And season, from which many stones

Have been claimed to make houses

Where they grow warm with human echoes,

And the lake, to which the mountains come

To mirror themselves, where twilights linger

Before night sends everything to rest;

A resentment at the way they all somehow

Slipped across the transparent border

From idea into individual thing,

Glistening with name, colour and form

At the beginning, when the wind would have

Felt breath was where presence lived.