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Canal Walk – Winter

Once again I walk by Srah Castle, its gable-length
cracks still unsettling; yet so it has been down
generational memory, the fissures permanent,
its anonymous history continues.

Over the iron railway bridge the silver-green
commuter train ambles in modern rumbling tones
towards Athone thickening
the canal path’s winter stillness.

I lean over the bridge at Ballydrohid and remember
the summer heron stately gliding to its grassy nest,
and swallows darting and swooping over
self-contained moorhens.

And, unexpectedly, my eyes glimpse snowdrops
by the water’s edge; blooms of winter encased
in a cot of sleep held within the delicate
momentum of on-sapping-spring;

they may emerge into uncertainty, or, like all
this before me, remain as memorials,
encotted within planetary earth’s
ever whirling dirge to death and spring and death

and the silent music of the unquieting universe,
ever convulsed in the certainty of its
own chartered movement
onwards and towards and onwards.