for Lunasa

who I saw last night, at the Lensic. This doesn't begin to do them justice, or to what the music did for me. Only a shadow of an effort to convey...


For those of us not Irish
but made for that deep cycle of celebration
of elation and of ache
of the highest and of deepest depths
your music helps to set the heart
back in its orbit once again

For those of us not Celtic
who shudder yet when the green world turns
who never learned to drink the pain away
or play it out on some enabling instrument
the sea of sounds in which you wave
can bear those riptides back into healing oceans
an air or reel can turn them round
just as sure as lunar beckoning
moves the visible sea

I am not Irish
in fact I own no culture to speak of
have known as mine no embracing heritage
am not wound around (or wounded)
by ancestral ties or rootpaths
I am a free traveller on this worldsea
but an hour floating on your mellow incandescence
your aquiescence of unmaking and rethreading into Life
finds me in the kinship of the living
with an moment's invitation to the inheritance
of those who yearn and breathe and travel oceans wide
and although it near drowns me with sorrow
deeper than time, deeper almost than my soul can bear
still ever deeper yet I hear and know
a home, a belonging place, in joy