I've tried to get this right before, my father on his hospital bed after suffering a stroke. A moment that has stayed with me, poignant and beautiful. My wife arrived to see him and that's where the poem comes in.
When he was beyond talking,
close to dying, you visited.
For want of words he could not form
he hummed a tune,
unrecognizable, tuneless;
and never was a tune more beautiful.
Here’s the wind that brought me;
here’s the day that sang;
here’s the grass that was my mother
and there the trees that taught me.
Here are the hills that were my dreams;
there’s the river that aged me
and this is its silt upon my face.
Here’s the bay that sought me out,
the mountaintop I must climb is beneath it;
that is where I’m headed.
Bohreen*
Burgeoning spring growth,
the hedgerows of hawthorn, hazel and elder
ankle-deep in profusions
of primrose, celandine and vetch
bowing towards each other over the bohreen,
claiming the light if not the tar.
Swallows, sleek as fighter jets,
bulleting down the narrow corridor,
skimming our heads,
wheeling behind us to come again.
Bends along the way revealing curiosities:
a bed-end stopping a gap,
moss-covered walls along cow-dunged lanes,
an ivy-draped ruin, pre-famine cottage
featureless but for the fireplace,
and those potato ridges on which blight-
blackened leaves once signalled starvation
still there, grassy corrugations in destitute fields.
Cattle with chomping jaws lift their heads
to watch us pass with quizzical stares;
all around beauty crowding into our eyes
birdsong and the sounds of fields filling our ears
and yet, behind it all, even now,
there’s the held breaths of the departed.
*boreen or bohreen from the irish word ‘bóithrín’ meaning a narrow country road
