“In off the moors, down through the mist beams, god-cursed Grendel came greedily loping.”

“By God, the old man could handle a spade.Just like his old man.”

“To work, her dumb lunge says,is to move a certain mass...through a certain distance,is to pull your weight and feelexact and equal to it.Feel dragged upon. And buoyant.”

“Once off the bushThe fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.I always felt like crying. It wasn't fairThat all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.-Blackberry picking”

“Meanwhile, the swordbegan to wilt into gory icicles, to slather and thaw. It was a wonderful thing, the way it all melted as ice melts when the Father eases the fetters off the frostand unravels the water-ropes. He who wields powerover time and tide: He is the true Lord.”

“It is said that once upon a time St. Kevin was kneeling with his arms stretched out in the form of a cross in Glendalough. . . As Kevin knelt and prayed, a blackbird mistook his outstretched hand for some kind of roost and swooped down upon it, laid a clutch of eggs in it and proceeded to nest in it as if it were the branch of a tree. Then, overcome with pity and constrained by his faith to love all creatures great and small, Kevin stayed immobile for hours and days and nights and weeks, holding out his hand until the eggs hatched and the fledging grew wings, true to life if subversive of common sense, at the intersection of natural process and the glimpsed ideal, at one and the same time a signpost and a reminder. Manifesting that order of poetry where we can at last grow up to that which we stored up as we grew.”

“Human beings suffer,They torture one another,They get hurt and get hard.No poem or play or songCan fully right a wrongInflicted and endured.The innocent in gaolsBeat on their bars together.A hunger-striker's fatherStands in the graveyard dumb.The police widow in veilsFaints at the funeral home.History says, don't hopeOn this side of the grave.But then, once in a lifetimeThe longed-for tidal waveOf justice can rise up,And hope and history rhyme.So hope for a great sea-changeOn the far side of revenge.Believe that further shoreIs reachable from here.Believe in miracleAnd cures and healing wells.Call miracle self-healing:The utter, self-revealingDouble-take of feeling.If there's fire on the mountainOr lightning and stormAnd a god speaks from the skyThat means someone is hearingThe outcry and the birth-cryOf new life at its term.”