Random small bits

Your Crying

 

Your crying:

The silver streams

Of your eyes,

The radiant red cheeks,

The choking on words,

The gullish. 

Somehow

I think of a voice

Curling up

From inside a hollow oak.

…………………………………………………………..…………………………….

 

We were a fire;

only our sparks

had direction.

 

………………………………………………………………………………………………………

The Viewing.

Dead: the colour of old cream,

his eyes shuttered shut;

so neat, be-suited and slim,

weight he lost dying. 

 

They made a basket of his fingers

with a rosary spilling down;

everyone said he looked lovely

but when I touched his face,

it wasn’t him at all.

……………………………………………………………………………..…..........………

Seeing through this patterned pane

your face,

whole but distorted

like our love.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Beacon lights' eccentric twitches

electrocute the night;

a lighthouse beam swimming round

swallows them in flight.

 

………………………………………………………………………………........…………….

In The Park

 

I met an old man

with seawater eyes

 

sweeping together

the leaves of his life;          

 

into a sack

went each golden one.

Two New Books by John F. Deane

This notice arrived by email; I have a great deal of regard for John Deane's work.

 

“Give Dust a Tongue : A faith and poetry memoir” from Columba Press

 “Semibreve”, a new collection of poems, from Carcanet Press.

Music, a stony, damp and deeply alive landscape (both Ireland and the Holy Land), a passionate and searching engagement with God – specifically with the local and physical God that is the central figure of the gospels – these are poems with all of John Deane’s familiar richness. A deeply welcome collection. – Rowan Williams

 The memoir traces Deane’s progress from childhood on Achill Island, his upbringing in an unquestioned Catholic faith, through schooling and seminary life to a realisation that faith appears to be a matter of will and understanding; after leaving the seminary, Deane goes on to discover poetry, founds Poetry Ireland, the national poetry society, and its journal, Poetry Ireland Review, and makes poetry his life and finds, through it, new approaches to faith. The book includes many of Deane’s best-known poems and a new, major poetry sequence, “According to Lydia”. The title of the book, Give Dust a Tongue, comes from a poem by the 17^th century poet, George Herbert.

The blurb on the new collection of poetry reads: “The poems in Semibreve combine lyric grace with a fiercely questing intelligence, pushing against the mysteries of faith in a fractured world, paying tribute to the value of human life and love. Running through the book is a thread of elegy for the poet’s brother, who died of cancer in 2010. The collection concludes with a sequence describing a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. Throughout, Deane gives poetic voice to the paradox of human existence as simultaneously ‘blessed and broken’.”

Both books will be presented together at a reading in The Loyola Institute, Trinity College, Dublin on Wednesday 29^th April, at 7.30 p.m., introduced by author and abbot of Glenstal Abbey, Mark Patrick Hederman O.S.B., and again on Achill Island as part of the Heinrich Böll weekend, on Sunday 3^rd May at 2.30 p.m. in the Cyril Grey Hall, Dugort, Achill Island.

Douglas Hyde Conference 2015

For the second year running I'm convening and will be chair the Conference, which will be held on Thursday July 16^th 2015 in the BMW Conference Room, Ballaghaderreen, Co. Roscommon.  This year it is entitled "Protectors of our Heritage: saving the notes of nationality, our footsteps, language and customs".

After last year's conference, which highlighted  aspects of heritage that are suffering from neglect, this year we are drawing attention to the efforts of individuals or groups who are at forefront of preserving our heritage.

From a spectacular example such as Cultúrlann McAdam Ó Fiaich, the heart of Belfast's Gaeltacht quarter in Belfast, (surely it's time for Dublin to get the finger out on this one); to, (a favourite of mine), the preservation of holy wells around the country; to story-telling, a centuries-old Irish specialty. I'm especially looking forward to hearing how the local 'Lakes and Legends Tourism Group' are progressing in their drive to bring attention to the extraordinary archaeological and historical sites that are local to Ballaghaderreen itself. (Visit Lough Gara Lakes and Legends website  http://www.loughgaralakesandlegends.ie/}

Clogher Stone Fort near Ballaghaderreen, may be 2,500 years old.

                                       
I will post more information on this later, but if you've free time in July, or you're a visitor to Ireland, this is an entertaining, informative day in the unspoilt heart of  the country.

 

Loss

Music is a key to memories, similarly smells, maybe  a voice.   Sometimes it's not just the visuals that return but the whole experience complete with emotions like a particularly vivid dream.

 

There are some sadnesses I wish I could revisit; I was too self-absorbed, too selfish. Too soon the people involved were gone, a whole world with them.  

And so, a piece of music lands you back in the moment, with all the regret of the years since, and nothing you can do but relive it once again.

 

     Those Marches

 

When they play those marches

and the drums tip away,

 

I think of Brendan,

alone in his sitting room,

flicking channels,

news to news;

dinners collecting on the table.

 

When they play those marches

and the drums tip away,

 

I think of Peter

who hated cameras;

his reflection

in the mirror

between the bottles.

 

When they play those marches

and the drums tip away

 

I think of Tom

who asked for a present

on his death bed;

we didn’t have one,

no one else came.

 

When they play those marches

and the drums tip away

 

I think of John

who asked me to visit,

the gentlest man

I’ve ever known;

I didn’t.

 

When they play those marches,

when they play those marches,

when they play those marches,

the drums tip away.

Were you going to write me a love-letter?

It's a golden rule, a poet should never rush a poem into public view. It's not unusual to think a piece  well done, (even a masterpiece if you've been on the town),  only to find, a few days later, that it's a pile of crap. Many poets have the urge, (like those who cannot  hold off gratification), to publish too soon; I'm prone to doing that myself. So here's a poem I've just written, and if there is no poem here, you will know that I' have fallen prey to the weakness, and have already removed it. 

 

Were you going to write me a love-letter? 
 

Did your fingers falter above the keys?

Or was there the cacophony of grid-lock on the page;

maybe there were lines of off duty taxis,

words refusing to carry love? 
 

At this juncture, I, in the past, have let my fingers

tap-dance away from a love-letter,

tap out a stammer,

the sentences refusing to form.

 

 

Kitty Fenlon's Last Day

          

 

          That day Kitty Fenlon,

 

propped up in her bed,

was staring at the bedspread.

 

Snow melting in her eyes

fell, tiny bells,

into the valley far below.

 

Suddenly, arms spread wide,

a blizzard of hair,

she swept outward

 

off  her ledge,

into the sky

across the room.

 

We stared at her

non-plussed face,

the four pillows tucked behind her.

Happy

 

In the morning she opens,

bay windows to the sun

 

and dances

on the brim of the day.

 

All day long flying,

jets for feet;

 

at night-time snuggles up,

a cockle shell with dreams.

Trains in a Child's Night-time

  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.

Waiting in the car

Rain Street  is probably 80% Main Street, Roscommon  and I'm a child waiting in the car while my mother is 'getting the messages'; 20% some Dublin street back in the 60's.

I've tried to catch the scene a number of times in different poems, but have never succeeded. There are differences between  then and now,  mainly in the lighting. Back then a fairly basic pub might have a bare 100 watt bulb lighting the bar, it gave a tea-coloured glow through the rain, a single customer might be hunched over a pint of Guinness. A barber's might have a neon strip light; through the window you would see the barber clipping away in hard enamel white.

And, of course, most parking was on the street, a street of small shops, so a number of shopkeepers could be watched going through their paces: the butcher in bloodied white, grocer in his  brown coat, the be-suited, hush-puppied draper. 

For a while the rippling reflections of  neon signs and street lights  would  engage a 10 year old, people flashed from doorway to doorway, collars up like Hollywood gangsters; as a local, I knew the cast, I knew the conversations, rain threw them into an altogether new focus. Later, however,  the fogged up windows reduced the view to a peep hole in the condensation, and boredom was never far behind that.

   Rain Street

   Down the street

   rain lights running

   drizzling concrete        

   sizzling lake.

   Flashes red flashes

   running in rivulets

   yachting cartons

   crowd in a grate.

   Umbrella shadows

   with foot halo splashes

   shirt collar drippings

   shoes under siege.

   Gutters play bongos

   for galvanize tappers

   tyres make clashes

   spangling streams.

   And faces in windows

   unravel down panes

   their cigarettes burning

   their signature stains.

   Then squinting bus queue

   like socks on a line

   become runaway legs

         legs like twine

Marrying the Sea

'Marrying the Sea', Declan O'Rourke's haunting ballad: a beautiful acapella rendition by Elaine O'Dea.

In a Bog Hole

The chill scenery of an Irish bog in Winter is unexpectedly moving. When the sky's artic colouring appears, reflected in a bog hole, and I see myself  in pristine sharpness, I am suddenly engulfed in melancholia.

There,

 

laid out on water;

preserved to sharpness in  the December chill.

 

Fluid mosaic of sky and cloud,

Michael shivers like a flag.

 

Evening, extinguishing the bog cotton,

will find him alone,

 

treading visions  in this bog hole’s bottomless black.

A Famine Scene Remembered

 

November, month of charcoal cloud

slung low to the earth;

labourers hunched double,

grubbing for the bright potatoes

that scuttle, like mice, back into the sodden soil.  

Scrabbling fingers chase each fugitive light

 with the desperation of the starving. 

I rest a moment on the spade,

my fingers on the shaft  

now rough with working the same soil;

my fingers with their DNA inside them.

Weather and Landscape are One

In this poem I  have, (not for the first time), exaggerated the amount of rainfall we get in Ireland; I tend to for its evocativeness. It creates a sense of the ethereal, lifting the earth into the clouds,  thereby releasing all the spirits of the air onto the land. And I do believe that that closeness to the clouds has fuelled the famous imagination of  Irish writers and story-tellers over the millennia. (Those wraith-like shapes of clouds drifting slowly across fields, through lonely valleys, tangling in stunted hawthorns, could hardly fail to impress lively, often superstitious imaginations).  I also believe that the meeting of earth and sky, its ever-changing panoramas, contributes hugely to the spectacle and beauty of  Irish scenery.

Here, weather and landscape are one:

the squall-flayed hills,

wind-warped thorns,

lightless grey limestone.  

Even in summer

the fluke-ridden fields,  

drizzle-drowned hillsides,

midge-infested boglands  

groan beneath sagging clouds;

and if there are spells

of sun-burst in the furze,

they are too quickly muzzled with rain.

Island-hopping on the West Coast of Ireland

 

My best holiday ever was spent island-hopping down the west coast. Tory, Clare, Inishbofin, Inis Meain, Cape Clear and Skellig Michael. It’s awhile ago now, but each year since, I have thought about repeating it; now I have made up my mind, this is the year.

But what a decision: I want to see the islands I haven’t seen, and revisit those I have, but there’s not enough money to do it all. Apart from those listed above, I’ve also visited Inis Óirr, Inis Mór , Arranmore, Achill and the islands in Ceantar na nOileán in Connemara.High on the wish list of those not  visited are, Inishmurrray with its wonderful monastic and archaeological remains, Inishturk, Scattery Island in the Shannon estuary and, of  course, the Blaskets ( I’m amazed I haven’t been there yet).

It was August, that last time on Skellig, the gleaming gannets seemed to waft on air currents like fantastic mythical birds, however we managed  to miss the puffins which we would have caught  had we arrived two weeks earlier,  before the end of July. It is hard to imagine that there could be a more glorious excursion on a fine blue July day. And then there’s the other worldly atmosphere of walking between the stone walls on Inis Óirr, the excitement that being in such an unusual  landscape brings. It beggars belief that you are looking into fields that would, sometimes, barely accommodate a standing heifer. Moving up the coast, I have the best of memories of the ‘Club’ on Clare Island very late at night, and the great hospitality we received there; I promised myself I would be back much sooner than this.

Given the wild craggy landscape sculpted by a heaving, often angry Atlantic ocean, the openness of that landscape,the unending skies, the curious constructions left by generations stretching back to prehistory, the ancient culture less damaged  by modernity than elsewhere in Ireland, the special ecologies associated with that strange mix of karst limestone and climate modified by the Gulf  Stream and the particular nature of the people  that live on the  islands, It is not surprising that I should have such an urge to go again.

This poem from ‘Turn Your Head’ refers to a holy well on Inis Óirr. The clear rings on the rock under the water testified to someone’s alternative ‘cash-stream’.

 

At Naomh Einne’s Well 

 

Kneeling down, the jacket off,

shirt sleeves rolled to the oxter,

he slipped his arm into the water,

scooped out the price of a pint,

then thought the better of it

and decided he’d have two.

 

Then again the following Tuesday

and the following Tuesday too

till there were only clear circles

and coppers on the green bottom,

a bowl in a gap in the wall,

a cross in another with a ladder

of matchsticks and thread.

 

 

 

 To  see some beautiful photographs of Inis Óirr  visit

 http://www.photojournale.com/categories.php?cat_id=156&sessionid=463f712c16a4224e9ddcd707a3ecf72f&page=2

Click on the slideshow and enjoy, the well is in there too.