Sean Lysaght

I've been in Ireland for a week -- Moate, Athlone, Galway, Sligo, New Grange, Westport, Clonmacnoise -- the green and ruminants, water and birds and sky of it.

[from Sean Lysaght's The Clare Island Survey, 1991]

Kestrel

Took my eye into the air of himself
and threaded it,

sewing me to the sky
with his looped cycle of flight

up the gully,
then traced a noose

around a lowland belfry
and now, in the suburbs,

can needle a spot
above the apex of a gable,

draw the skein
in circles widening out,

and glide back
to the eye of his obsession.