Scarecrows

We are two scarecrows: rags and string;

what the rain softens the wind picks clean.

 

We are two scarecrows: sticks and straw;

crows fly out from underneath our jackets.

 

We are two scarecrows: nails and wire;

each day drowning as the corn grows higher.

 

We are two scarecrows: sacks and hay;

nodding toward eternity, we tip toward clay.

The Irish Soldier in World War One

On the 9^th December 1916, Thomas Kettle was killed at the battle of the Somme in Belgium at the age of 36. He was extraordinarily gifted, here’s a piece from The Work of T.M. Kettle, published by Robert  Lynd in 1919:

To have written books and to have died in battle has been a common enough fate in the last few years. But not many of the young men who have fallen in the war have left us with such a sense of perished genius as Lieutenant T. M. Kettle, who was killed at Ginchy. He was one of those men who have almost too many gifts to succeed. He had the gift of letters and the gift of politics : he was a mathematician, an economist, a barrister, and a philosopher : he was a Bohemian as well as a scholar : as one listened to him, one suspected at times that he must be one of the most brilliant conversationalists of the age. He lived in a blaze of adoration as a student, and, though this adoration was tempered by the abuse of opponents in his later years, he still had a way of going about as a conqueror with his charm. Had he only had a little ordinariness in his composition to harden him, he would almost certainly have ended as the leading Irish statesman of his day.  (from  XXIII. ‘The Work of T.M. Kettle’ in ‘Old and New Masters’, Robert Lynd, 1919)

A  quotation included in this article gives a sense of Kettle’s eloquence:  Meditating on life as " a sustained good-bye," he writes : Life is a cheap table d'hote in a rather dirty restaurant, with Time changing the plates before you have had enough of anything.

Kettle, though a staunch and very active Irish nationalist, (member of the Irish Volunteers and the United Irish League, Irish Parliamentary Party MP), still found it incumbent on him to join the British forces:

For my part, I am fighting for Ireland. Against what are we fighting? The philosophy to which modern Germany has committed herself can be adequately described only as the gospel of the devil. It is a creed in which domination is the one dogma and cruelty the one sacrament.

This quotation encapsulates in just three lines why it is right that, at last, we are giving honour to the patriotism of so many Irishmen who died under a British flag in World War 1.

This view and the spirit in which he fought is beautifully caught his poem To My Daughter Betty, The Gift  Of God

 To My Daughter Betty, The Gift Of God

 In wiser days, my darling rosebud, blown

To beauty proud as was your Mother’s prime.

In that desired, delayed, incredible time,

You’ll ask why I abandoned you, my own,

And the dear heart that was your baby throne,

To die with death. And oh! they’ll give you rhyme

And reason: some will call the thing sublime,

And some decry it in a knowing tone.

So here, while the mad guns curse overhead,

And tired men sigh with mud for couch and floor,

Know that we fools, now with the foolish dead,

Died not for flag, nor King, nor Emperor,

But for a dream, born in a herdsmen shed,

And for the secret Scripture of the poor.  

 

.

 

 

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

 

 

 

A Beautiful Face

I have been wanting to write something about Murillo’s ‘Two women at a window’ for a long time. I’m so taken by it, in particular the maid-servant’s expression. It is so natural; so accurate in its depiction of her pleasure and humour, the spontaneity in the moment, in catching her status in relation to the younger woman  ̶  close, very knowing of the young  woman’s life and mind, but subordinate  ̶  .

 

 

There’s no point writing; there’s nothing I can write that would convey the beauty of the image and the moment more eloquently than time spent gazing at the picture.

The first day of 2015 came windy and wet

The first day of 2015 has come wet and windy. I’m looking out at the Bluestacks, their colours, shades of straw, duns and browns, muted in today’s mist; their heads stuck in dusty-looking cloud.

 Whatever the weather, this view is beautiful. On sunny blue days the mountains bridge the void between sky and earth. The low sun on crisp, shiny, winter days throws all the undulations on the mountainside into relief, bright swathes of sunlight are trimmed with rasher-shaped patches of shadow while broad expanses of dead  bracken gleam burnished bronze. Other parts of the mountains planted with larch, spruce and fir, have each tree sharply defined, steeples standing in serried ranks, bottle green, grey-brown rusting red. Lower down the slopes, a few angular fields, still clear, are traces of meagre living long gone.

This side of the valley is different. Ragged fields dotted with houses, mountainy sheep and rocky outcrops. If there was a logo for this side, it would be the hawthorn.

The hawthorn, more than any tree, evokes the character of this place. Rugged, resilient, sculpted through hardship; if the grey lichen-covered outcrops could grow into trees, they would be hawthorns. They are scattered up and down the humpy fields, ash-grey or black against the leaden sky. Sometimes their shapes are human-like, cries for help with starved limbs extended or stubborn resistance in the face of razor-edged winds.

But yesterday, the clouds were running, and spokes of smoky yellow sunlight radiated down on Donegal like God’s smile. In the distance Ben Bulben looked mythical in a warm, straw-coloured glow. The clouds were blue-tinted charcoal, some torn, others barrel-shaped; they had their own wars to contend with. Down here the hawthorns, standing bold on the curve of the hill, were transfixed like myself gazing westward, towards those lands of ancient legend. 

The world is beautiful. Happy new year.

Angry

Among the blocks of the establishment

a flawless rise bolted your trust; 

success was cement,

all loose notions were pebble-dashed.  

Now you revise:

the establishment, its self-righteous system:  

how many bodies like you

have fallen from the sides to point the pyramid?  

And how many times did you skate over principles,

that I remember, you once held dearly? 

Loughcrew

 Loughcrew, Co Meath

 

While Newgrange understandably draws  thousands of tourists from Dublin, I would highly recommend a one-day circuit that many visitors might not have heard too much about.

For a great mix of archaeology, history, scenic beauty and a little bit of magic too, I would suggest heading to Trim, to see the castle and take the wonderfully presented river walk; onward to Fore, a real hidden gem in the Irish countryside; come  back via Loughcrew, and if there's still light in the day, have a stroll up the Hill of Tara.

 

The Cairns at Sliabh na Caillí (Loughcrew)

 

It was weather that carried the Cailleach onto the hills,

a swirl of graphite anger from above the plains of Westmeath. 

Once over the summit of Carnbane West, she opened her apron to the earth

and all about resounded to the tumbling of tipped boulders; 

then again at Carnbane East and Sliabh Rua too. At the fourth hill,

she turned a moment towards me, and as her glance flashed she slipped. 

I saw brilliant trails from the whites of her eyes as she plummeted;

the instant she hit earth, her body was a smouldering oak.

Old Houses, Children Gone

A Stranger In The Townland.


In Autumn the farmhouse
with the sun-folded field beneath its chin,
traps the daylight in its spectacles,
then flashes it away.

A swing hangs among the orchard's arthritic trees
without stirring;
without remembering
a frantic liveliness now reduced
to the occasional commotion of a falling fruit.

Once songs of apples filled the farmhouse;
but the children became photographs,
the dust settled on their frames
and soon Autumns were flying uncontrollably by.
Today, between its curiosities, a bluebottle drones.

Now that the conversation with the hillside
is ended, the farmhouse
with the sycamore stole
has become an eccentric;
a stranger in the townland.

from Above Ground, Below Ground

The  series of  poems for my collaboration with artist Elaine Leigh, Above Ground Below Ground, is getting its  final brush up.

This poem refers to the spookiness of the clusters of trees that often grow  around stone circles; even now the old superstitions weigh on those who would trespass after dark.

Inside the trees

is another place: unlit, uncharted.

At night even braggers refuse to enter

those grotesque tunnels.

 

At night boulders walk,

boughs flex their biceps;

high up, screeching necks

toss slicks of hair;

 

even the summer wind

squeals through like a hunted pig.

After dark  the trees stir cauldrons

of brains and guts.

 

When all the world was young

            Oh for the days of childhood, when the sun was always in the sky, ice-creams came in wafers, we skated on the pond all winter long, men whistled on the way to work, Christmases were  knee-deep in snow and the neighbours invited you in for orange squash and bikkies. Nightime was curl up cosy in front of the blazing turf fire. Oh dear, if only!               

 

 

 

                            Eleven

 

          I am eleven;

my eyes are overflowing with light

from the spangling stream,

ears brimming with its chattering

sprays and runs,

my back lush with the magnificence 

of  Summer sun. 

 

I am in a field of cowslips,

the colour butter ought to be;

in the distance a bell is chiming

but I have no duties.

I’m lying on my stomach on a wooden bridge,

my eyelids shut, my fingers fishing for splinters.

 

The Wind Claps The Slates.

 

 

The wind claps the slates;

all night they are hooves running berserk,

all night the wind is inciting them;

all night.

 

At twenty past two and twenty past three

and twenty past four I am looking at you;

how I would love to have hooves to come

crashing through your sleep, to burst into

your solitude.

 

And there I would, for better or worse,

demolish the muzzled years with as much

violence as reverberates beneath iron shoes,

as  causes such a frenzy in stone that slates

stampede.