WHOSE WOODS ARE THESE ?

Curraghchase Forest Park

(pic by Padraic Charlton)

Curraghchase Cathedral

Here is where
my children and I go
to create an interactive prayer,
where the walls
are of oak, chestnut and willow,
where there are no rows
of uncomfortable benches,
just the easy undulations of the land
and our unending spire is the sky.
Our choir is birdsong
and the intricate hum
of some humans being.
Here there is no glass
to stain the light, so
it can give such glorious life
to so many colours
that they look like
Nature’s language written.
Here we walk and talk
and at the altar
of our abstract consciousness
no sacrifice is ever made
and from there can cascade
so many thoughts
concerning life and birth.
Here is one of the few places on earth
where even a single word of prose
can evolve and become poetry.
Here we make our celestial noise
and know it will be echoed through eternity.

Gerard Sheehy

Gerard Sheehy reading at Cuisle

A Sacred Stillness

Cuisle is really casting its spell as poems cascade like autumnal leaves at readings and gatherings in various city hostelries.The latest offering to gently flutter into my lap is the above piece by Gerard Sheehy, about a favourite haunt of mine the Curraghchase forest park just 10 miles outside the city. This once stately home was the residence of Aubrey De Vere, a man known to turn the odd verse himself back in the nineteenth century, and now accessible to the public ,is a greeny woodland oasis set in the heartland of west Limerick.Gerards poem which (like all his work) he recited from memory ,perfectly captures the almost sacred stillness of the place where prose easily becomes poetry and ‘celestial noise’ has that far reaching echo beyond our time and space.He conveys well the unchurched grandeur of creation where there ‘is no glass / to stain the light’ and ‘ our unending spire is the sky’. No wonder this is the chosen spot for him and his children to go and ‘create an interactive prayer’, indeed the poem itself , it seems to me, could well be read in that same prayerful context.

- Gerard O'Shea-