‘The Rosemary’

She said that Aisling
let her cut the sprigs.

It is 3.15 p.m, it is Thursday,
I am examining two rosemary sprigs

their blue-green,
their silver underlight.

She is stripping the small base leaves from a third,
tapping its heel,
putting it in a glass
of crystal-clear-water
for planting out with the roses in October.

I can taste lamb-stew
with rowanberries,
counting the trees–

alternating Crab-apple
Rowanberry         Crab
-apple       Rowanberry
that syncopated another’s drive—

Memory insists that I stand on a bank of the River Tolka,
 upstream from Socrates
 and his garden of roses,
 those colours we tasted–

For here is the place
that we committed him
to memory

that black water–
Glas Naíon,
the stream of the infants,

 with petals,
 with flower-heads.

© C. Murray