Poem of the Week: Turning the Tune (for Steve Cooney)

Sweet antipodean, you turn the globe of music
Upside down, sprinkling abundant grace notes
As your fresh footprints trace old songlines.

When you close those absorbent eyes, your guitar
Tightens itself into the strings of a blind harper
Whose music offers its hand across centuries.

Da mihi manum. Give me your hand. And now
Hemispheres spin into the mirrors of themselves,
Their tunes and turnings handed on, handed down

The long meridians of memory, across the latitudes
Of kinship. Here is where we choose our equator,
And align the axis on which our world will spin.

Tabhair dom do lámh. Here's a universe of hands
Turning tunes. Uni versus. Towards the one turning.

Paddy Bushe's latest collection, On a Turning Wing (Dedalus Press), won the 2017 Irish Times Poetry Now award

A new poem by Paddy Bushe