What shades will enter my dark cave tonight?
Who will the moon render powerless or strong?
What shapes? The fuss and tumble
of a Hollywood battle scene?
An unshriven soul, thin and white?
Sea virgins might even now be swimming in
with those grey ancestors of the Mac Conghaile,
the seals. The toss and tangle of shawled women
settling in for the long haul is certain.

Certain the dark hours falling silently
off all the precarious roofs of dreams,
frantic in the web of dream's unquiet authority.
Those shrill or whispering ghosts
the ancestral dead, enter nightly
claiming to be heard. They thresh the straits
of broad and slender vowels, choking on words.
My mouth is wracked like a poem
stretched between spark and shape.

'Caol le caol agus leathan le leathan' mocks me.
I listen to the seals' sweet haunt
and trace its provenance. It shocks the ear.
Are these trapped voices of the drowned
or is it the strange cry of dumb creatures
longing for something more, to be human?
Like ourselves. Always we are doomed.
I cannot put English on this,
the song of unattainable things, so I hum.

I have always lived by a sea cave
where a dark man waits, incurious.
His face, half-hidden, half-seen
is like the incipient moon, unmoved
and like the moon he watches the night unfold.
Useless to expect rescue but nonetheless
we expect it. Light. A flame
slowly turned up like an oil lamp,
eyes kindled by a swell of lost radiance.

In light the shawled women shrivel,
their incessant watching requires a veil.
The dark man, illumined is unmasked.
Once would be enough. One deep kiss
of light to eclipse the last pool of darkness
in Europe and all sink back into shadow
rested, confirmed that tomorrow
will be glorious. The wait is ancient;
no God has risen from this cold sea yet.

Yet, on nights when the sky plunders
the last drops of light from the water
and waves, innocent with tangled seaweed
suck and mutter in the cave, remember
that not far from here a man broke faith;
in need of ballast for his boat
he took the chapel stones from a sacred island.
Later, heaving them overboard uneasily
he looked back and saw the stolen rocks float.