Two Superb Poems by Robert Shanahan

CERNUNNOS

Raven plumed
Crescent orb of night transfigured
Bathed in greal sprinkling
Leafed eyes fluttering and beholding
Daemon in recurrent mystic covering
Horns and antlers stretch this hallowed guise


Crumbled stone from the facades of his effigies
Steams from his left horn acclivous
From his right horn groundward
Misting in soil and humus
Mixed ancient paint flakes
Animating from primordial blessing caves


Antlers swirl their Torcs of divine beech twigs
Hooves of the ascending beasts from the sacred herds
Carry on their backs the loss of wings
Antlers holding lofty a likeness of Moccus
Godly swine boar chanting zoolatry


Cernunnos transforming through the beclouding sacred forest
Metamorphosed to a firevined wisdom suffused oak
Drapes to another as mourning moss
Prances on in flowering steps
A semblance of atemporal ferns


The murkiness detaches air hues purple chroma psychopomps
Dusky in lunar ritual
Shapeshifter now a five winged raven pure
Riding now a seven headed stag
One antler on each interlacing decorated skull
Silver cauldron brimming with worldly gifting offerings


The horned one solemn in poise
Opens his mouth devours the moon
All illumination gleams resplendent from within his anatomy
Stars surround him and disguise in his exalted mane
He sings the praises of nature the beast deific


While the moon absconds and bounces to the firmament
Shapeshifter lotus positioned
Seasonal nature dominion of change


The horned ones fingers interweave
Juggling winter ice avalanching
Natures mind his making he opens the world
Springlike spears the seeds he has harrowed
Returns to float his longboat
A curragh sailing on animal skins


Claps his hands and thunders stampeding beatific lascivious bulls
Branchlike horns. caressing
Slitting the Sheela-Na-Gig sky


A scurry in the fallen leaves opaque rodents
Crawling out of the sod aged
Hold blooded eyes to the astral lord
Dismounting the horned one unties his celestial pouch
Places a parisii coin on each of their flickering eyes
Rodents cavort as his personage of being
Illuminates all nature
Rodents instilled calm and nimble in their preenings


Ram horned serpent twines
Corn eating between his branching legs
Shapeshifter' s legs shredding
Transmute to sloughing snakes
Hissing as one the embrace in coruscation
Rolling through the litter of the forest
His antlers scratch the side of the maternity ward
The horned one draws his image in the windows transpiration

TRANSCENDENCE 1


I in realisation of finally knowing nothing
Not knowing myself
Now reveals a thing

To portray anything

Something

Taking off all of my clothes
Following an imbedded memory
I begin to illustrate my body
Abstracted images of countries
In explosive seas
Rolling myself up as a orb

Scratching at the very idea of the ecliptic plane
Gouging with my ideas the very movement
Now to wait forty one thousand years for axis tilt

Let me fall from that purpose

And say this is where it started
Amongst these numbered degrees

I remember a globe
Always with the mass of oceans facing the sitter
In a room that I could not enter
All the countries held up by a wooden stand
I mesmerised by a crack under in the stand
Close to the South Pole
Maybe that is the reason for the chilliness of that space

I falling into my own shadow

Looked through that window
And wished craved that it would spin
All the countries in movement would be blended
And the one that kept me out of the room
Whirls away from the grief that made them cruel

All that I am obeys the circle
A worship of that globe
Stop and glare the spinning earth

A circling circumference I am
Globular shaped bulbous memories
Of standing by that window

The world the world i knew then was flat
I and my others poets
The widening of its circle

At once now my body a symbolic frond circinate
Unfurls a primal fern

Up into the firmament
Then down
Beyond the planet and globe

Tho someone now stands by that window
Someone small
A child
An entity I almost recognise

Standing just as I once stood as I stood

I beckon him
He does not acknowledge
Transfixed by that globe as was I
In that crack

He yes a he
He does not answer
He is a he
And a he I know
He is myself in my earlier form

Just as I think that he turns towards me
And my muscles retract that turn
He smiles my smile I feel my mouth moving

As he walks towards me my own legs move
While standing still
Our eyes meet our eyes

Myself as I was a child puts detergent in a bowl
Bubble wand in hand
Beyond the planet and globe
Lifts it to shared lips
Then blows

I a air traveling sphere
Enter the iridescent surface
Of my earlier self own projection
My abstracted painted countries adorned body
Reflects through the iridescence
Shows in the child's eye as a pure planet

Imprisoned inside happily
The bubble
Till
Burst

Gone

ROBERT (ROIBEARD) SHANAHAN

 

I am a poet playwright and a painter

A storyteller

For me all there really is

Is Compassion and Expression

I described myself once as a...

‘Grand Lector of Apocalyptic Utterances’

 

I live in Tasmania

I am from the Irish diaspora

My family from Cork

I have had my prose published in Australia

Ireland in ‘Outburst’ magazine

Numerous times in ‘Life Encounters’

India in ‘Setu’ poetry magazine

One of my proses was awarded high commendation

In the W. B. Yeats poetry prize

‘Violence at the Egg’

Was read out in the National Parliament of Australia