Firebird 2021

After Conor Fallon’s   "Firebird" (1983) the Harbour Mountshannon, Co Clare

National Tidy Town Winner 1981

1.

Provenance from arcs of creation story

Sired by a Winged Pegasus from Athenry

Skilled ironmongery out of a Wexford farm,

and O Malley in St. Ives

Out of a feathered thing of Hope

Out of a Singing Bird

Out of old coin, fish, fowl and hare

Lineage from Daedalus’ first landing

on this shore in County Clare.

Arts Council amulet to the village

labels neither artisan or artefact.

A sculpture gifted back then,

for being the tidiest in the land

in troubled times,

untidy as always.

What kind of a bird are you?

Bathing boys ask on the lam from school

For the first of a million summer swims

Bolting ahead of the queue

They dare to dive where no angel would.

 Firebird they name your towering steel

Your story book covers open to all

Your cut-out template a shadow space

In the arc of a child’s tale

 Your steel pop –out shimmers

mirrors evening sun

2.

Firebird so I am

Chanting silently from lime green choirs:

 It all goes on.

 Stainless Dove, I never rust

 Under the silver shield of my sculpted world

I am steel –spined book opened

 to prevailing winds

Sorry and cursed with tales

of deluge and plague

My twig-less beak testament

Neither olives nor I are blessed as indigenes yet

 I sing if you will:

Angelus bells flood tidings

All Pangolins now in Cytokine storms

Minotaur thunders our new norm

Plunders and wars in a fragile labyrinth

3.

Silver squalls off the lake last weeks

Firebird ghosted the invisible

Waited out storms

for sunlight to surge.

Forlorn hopes of refugee curlews drifted

with reeds on the lough

lacing shoreline with sinews of nesting twigs

Fixed dreams watched out for emblems of ebbing water

4.

Daily I perch for Western sun

 to shed its load of light,

ward shade off the gleeful lake.

I yearn

to fly headlong ride white horses

 over Tonntine’s fiery waves

For pop out passion to burst forth

Like those diving children

Muscled and feathered for sanctuary flight

my gaze fixed for emblems of ebbing waters

yet not lift off an inch not even flinch

or fledge a wing to scout out 

an olive branch.

5.

Sci-fi caravel waxed from normal dreams

of peace.

The Thing like, the children call your figurehead

on the prow of the pier 

They hang their socks and jocks on your wings

You have known for the ages pay no heed

artifice tempered like true steel is rooted 

in the soil of our every

stainless human need.

© Kevin Chesser, March 2021