Dicing with the Devil

The local men outside the church interested me as a youngster. On a point of doctrine, did it qualify as attendance at mass if you joined them outside the church or was it a matter of being inside the porch door? I suspect it must be the latter. But why did they bother at all? Does God make these sorts of distinctions? One way or the other they had the best time at mass with the exception, probably, of the priest and altar boys who as far as I was concerned always performed to full houses.

The After-mass Men were these men with the addition of a particular strain of ‘inside the door’ man, a type who appeared to me to be taking the same risk as marijuana smokers who hang out with heroin addicts. Anyway, morally,they all constituted a dodgy breed, endangering each Sunday their eternal living conditions.

These clusters of men arranged themselves in ways that would have excited a sculptor. Dark clothes and, I suspected, dark conversations reigned. They were a dangerous influence, to be avoided by such as myself, to be looked down on, to be prayed for like you’d have prayed for the conversion of Russia;and every boy risked joining them at least once.

The After-Mass Men

Remember those figures by the church wall
Sculpted in after-mass conversations:
Blather-tattooed men
That hung there by their jackets;
Museums with pockets,
Pockets full of knives,
pipes and matches.

Stone men:
Pre-Christians defiling Sabbaths
With their Saturday conversations.
Gargoyles:
Coats would be wrapped against them
As though they were sudden showers of hail.


from Sunfire (Dedalus Press)

Country Childhood

There is no doubt that my Roscommon childhood has been idealised in this poem, but yet, I honestly believe that I had a very privileged upbringing. It was a good time in a safe place among great people. Behind our house countryside stretched off into the unknown; we had complete freedom to disappear for hours on end into that vastness.For any child with a lively imagination, that was  freedom of the universe.

From the front we saw Roscommon town across three fields. From front to back contained all the world I needed, and I was happy in it.

       The Country Child.

The country child

runs in and out of rain showers

like rooms;

sees the snake-patterns in trains,

the sun's sword-play in the hedges

and the confetti in falling elder blossoms;

knows the humming in the telegraph poles

as the hedgerow's voice

when tar bubbles are ripe for bursting;

watches bees emerge from the caverns

at the centres of buttercups,

feels no end to a daisy chain,

feels no end to an afternoon;

walks on ice though it creaks;

sees fish among ripples and names them;

is conversant with berries

and hides behind thorns;

slips down leaves, behind stones;

fills his hands with the stream

and his hair with the smell of hay;

recognizes the chalkiness

of the weathered bones of sheep,

the humour in a rusted fence,

the feel of the white beards that hang there.

The country child

sees a mountain range where blue clouds

are heaped above the horizon,

sees a garden of diamonds

through a hole scraped

in the frost patterns of his bedroom window

 

and sees yet another world

when tints of cerise and ochre

streak the evening sky.

He knows no end, at night

he sneaks glimpses of Heaven

through the moth-eaten carpet of the sky.

Roscommon

A few years after deciding I was finished writing a collection of poems called A Midland Town A Country Town which I undertook after seeing John Minihan’s photographs of Athy, I find I’m back in the middle of it again changing and fining and searching for more in those faces and more in my past. And my Roscommon past is turning out to be a rich source of untrampled poetry, but how much do I want to use it, or to be more precise how much do I want to use the people of the town.
The two towns being midland country towns would have had a lot in common; mind you the river and canal bring an extra layer of colour to Athy. Then again Roscommon’s county GAA pitch became an arena for rafting in the winter when the stand’s seats ( railway sleepers) would be arranged two along, two across and the boys from Ciaran’s Park became gondoliers.
Growing up in a town like Roscommon in that time (60’s/70’s) had huge advantages, it was safe, it had the benefits of a county town while being knee-deep in countryside, it had its fair share of historic buildings, (an impressive castle and abbey) which we had the run of, and was close enough to river and lake for sweltering July afternoons. On top of that my family came from there, or half of, and so it was home.
I have no doubt that it was those roots that are the roots of my writing too. And that brings me back to the collection A Midland Town A Country Town and how much I want to use it.


The Boy Who Watched For Apparitions.


Goodnight to the twin moons
stretched along the railway tracks
outside Roscommon.
My night-time window halved
with those trains rushing across the glass,
strips of film filled with their own lives:
adventurers and bon-vivants,
whose strings of lights recreated as they passed
the grassy slope, the elder bushes,
the buffer with the hole in the side;
strangers oblivious to such little worlds
and to the boy who watched for apparitions
from his bedroom window.
And in a moment they were gone,
leaving the darkness darker and the boy listening,
trying to gauge where the sounds
finally disappeared into the wind.


What lay beyond that window-world ?

The station to the right,
the white gates to the left,
and then..........


Now I remember those film strips
sailing through that pitch emptiness;
sometimes they were only ruffed impressions
when the window was full of pouring rain.
I remember how my imagination filled like a can
when all that was left was the headlight's beam
over the trees of Bully's Acre.
And there is often disappointment in these poems;
the disappointment of that place beyond
where the rhythms of trains were reclaimed by the wind.

from Sunfire (Dedalus Press)

Roscommon Writers

Now that the O’Dea house in Roscommon is no more - my mother died two years ago and the house has since been demolished – I feel quite eager to put together an event comprising Roscommon writers and musicians to take place in Dublin, Roscommon, and anywhere else that would stage it. The suggestion was put to me some years ago; lately it has been on my mind again. I launched my first collection Sunfire in Roscommon and it proved to be a marvellous occasion.

I am also weighing up an anthology of writings by Roscommon writers, eg Douglas Hyde, Percy French, John Waters or alternatively, writers with Roscommon connections. The two lists would make interesting reading. Writers belonging to either or would include John McGahern, Patrick Chapman, Jack Harte, Patsy McGarry, Kieran Furey and..... I must investigate.

If this question still interests me tomorrow morning; I’ll take the first step.