Patrick’s Return

I sensed at once the yearning for release.
March mists dispelled the coloured countryside
And hung in curdled webs from ragged trees.

Soft rain soaked fields of stationary bulls
Where gangs of crows were cackling like the druids
Who came to curse me, clacking jaws of skulls.

I sensed the people crying out in sin;
The eyes of severed heads still globed their hell
Of blood and fire, gluttony and drink.

My prayers were sucked from me and overnight
God’s love descended like a snowfall.
The blackthorns opened up their petalled light

And everywhere I tapped my staff, my wand,
The fields and trees leapt up to green the land.
 

James Harpur’s fourth collection includes intimate responses to love, birth and death, and explores faith and vision in searching and unsentimental terms. His powerful poetry gives a new perspective on the travels and travails of early Irish saints and on the Syrian pillar hermit St Symeon Stylites. In these and other poems – about the Book of Kells, a monk and his ‘star-timetable’, and translations from Boethius – Harpur’s lyric gift finds moments of illumination and grace in the ordinary as well as the miraculous.