The Penguin Book of English Verse
Page 136
Hooked in a loop, timing my effort
To her birth push groans, I pulled against
The corpse that would not come. Till it came.
And after it the long, sudden, yolk-yellow
Parcel of life
In a smoking slither of oils and soups and syrups –
And the body lay born, beside the hacked-off head.
17 February 1974
SEAMUS HEANEY The Strand at Lough Beg
In memory of Colum McCartney
All round this little island, on the strand
Far down below there, where the breakers strive,
Grow the tall rushes from the oozy sand.
DANTE, Purgatorio, I, 100–103
Leaving the white glow of filling stations
And a few lonely streetlamps among fields
You climbed the hills towards Newtownhamilton
Past the Fews Forest, out beneath the stars –
Along that road, a high, bare pilgrim’s track
Where Sweeney fled before the bloodied heads,
Goat-beards and dogs’ eyes in a demon pack
Blazing out of the ground, snapping and squealing.
What blazed ahead of you? A faked road block?
The red lamp swung, the sudden brakes and stalling
Engine, voices, heads hooded and the cold-nosed gun?
Or in your driving mirror, tailing headlights
That pulled out suddenly and flagged you down
Where you weren’t known and far from what you knew:
The lowland clays and waters of Lough Beg,
Church Island’s spire, its soft treeline of yew.
There you once heard guns fired behind the house
Long before rising time, when duck shooters
Haunted the marigolds and bulrushes,
But still were scared to find spent cartridges,
Acrid, brassy, genital, ejected,
On your way across the strand to fetch the cows.
For you and yours and yours and mine fought shy,
Spoke an old language of conspirators
And could not crack the whip or seize the day:
Big-voiced scullions, herders, feelers round
Haycocks and hindquarters, talkers in byres,
Slow arbitrators of the burial ground.
Across that strand of yours the cattle graze
Up to their bellies in an early mist
And now they turn their unbewildered gaze
To where we work our way through squeaking sedge
Drowning in dew. Like a dull blade with its edge
Honed bright, Lough Beg half shines under the haze.
I turn because the sweeping of your feet
Has stopped behind me, to find you on your knees
With blood and roadside muck in your hair and eyes,
Then kneel in front of you in brimming grass
And gather up cold handfuls of the dew
To wash you, cousin. I dab you clean with moss
Fine as the drizzle out of a low cloud.
I lift you under the arms and lay you flat.
With rushes that shoot green again, I plait
Green scapulars to wear over your shroud.
MICHAEL LONGLEY from Wreaths
The Linen Workers
Christ’s teeth ascended with him into heaven:
Through a cavity in one of his molars
The wind whistles: he is fastened for ever
By his exposed canines to a wintry sky.
I am blinded by the blaze of that smile
And by the memory of my father’s false teeth
Brimming in their tumbler: they wore bubbles
And, outside of his body, a deadly grin.
When they masscred the ten linen workers
There fell on the road beside them spectacles,
Wallets, small change, and a set of dentures:
Blood, food particles, the bread, the wine.
Before I can bury my father once again
I must polish the spectacles, balance them
Upon his nose, fill his pockets with money
And into his dead mouth slip the set of teeth.
TOM PAULIN Where Art is a Midwife 1980
In the third decade of March,
A Tuesday in the town of Z –
The censors are on day-release.
They must learn about literature.
There are things called ironies,
Also symbols, which carry meaning.
The types of ambiguity
Are as numerous as the enemies
Of the state. Formal and bourgeois,
Sonnets sing of the old order,
Its lost gardens where white ladies
Are served wine in the subtle shade.
This poem about a bear
Is not a poem about a bear.
It might be termed a satire
On a loyal friend. Do I need
To spell it out? Is it possible
That none of you can understand?
PAUL MULDOON Why Brownlee Left
Why Brownlee left, and where he went,
Is a mystery even now.
For if a man should have been content
It was him; two acres of barley,
One of potatoes, four bullocks,
A milker, a slated farmhouse.
He was last seen going out to plough
On a March morning, bright and early.
By noon Brownlee was famous;
They had found all abandoned, with
The last rig unbroken, his pair of black
Horses, like man and wife,
Shifting their weight from foot to
Foot, and gazing into the future.
PAUL MULDOON Anseo
When the Master was calling the roll
At the primary school in Collegelands,
You were meant to call back Anseo
And raise your hand
As your name occurred.
Anseo, meaning here, here and now,
All present and correct,
Was the first word of Irish I spoke.
The last name on the ledger
Belonged to Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward
And was followed, as often as not,
By silence, knowing looks,
A nod and a wink, the Master’s droll
‘And where’s our little Ward-of-court?’
I remember the first time he came back
The Master had sent him out
Along the hedges
To weigh up for himself and cut
A stick with which he would be beaten.
After a while, nothing was spoken;
He would arrive as a matter of course
With an ash-plant, a salley-rod.
Or, finally, the hazel-wand
He had whittled down to a whip-lash,
Its twist of red and yellow lacquers
Sanded and polished,
And altogether so delicately wrought
That he had engraved his initials on it.
I last met Joseph Mary Plunkett Ward
In a pub just over the Irish border.
He was living in the open,
In a secret camp
On the other side of the mountain.
He was fighting for Ireland,
Making things happen.
And he told me, Joe Ward,
Of how he had risen through the ranks
To Quartermaster, Commandant:
How every morning at parade
His volunteers would call back Anseo
And raise their hands
As their names occurred.
PAUL DURCAN Tullynoe: Tête-à-Tête in the Parish Priest’s Parlour
‘Ah, he was a grand man.’
‘He was: he fell out of the train going to Sligo.’
‘He did: he thought he was going to the lavatory.’
‘Her did: in fact he stepped out the rear door of the
train.’
‘He did: God, he must have got an awful fright.’
‘He did: he saw that it wasn’t the lavatory at all.’
‘He did: he saw that it was the railway tracks going away from him.’
‘He did: I wonder if… but he was a grand man.’
‘He was: he had the most expensive Toyota you can buy.’
‘He had: well, it was only beautiful.’
‘It was: he used to have an Audi.’
‘He had: as a matter of fact he used to have two Audis.’
‘He had: and then he had an Avenger.’
‘He had: and then he had a Volvo.’
‘He had: in the beginning he had a lot of Volkses.’
‘He had: he was a great man for the Volkses.’
‘He was: did he once have an Escort?’
‘He had not: he had a son a doctor.’
‘He had: he had a Morris Minor too.’
‘He had: and he had a sister a hairdresser in Kilmallock.’
‘He had: he had another sister a hairdresser in Ballybunion.’
‘He had: he was put in a coffin which was put in his father’s cart.’
‘He was: his lady wife sat on top of the coffin driving the donkey.’
‘She did: Ah, but he was a grand man.’
‘He was: he was a grand man…‘
‘Good night, Father.’
‘Good night, Mary.’
PAUL DURCAN The Death by Heroin of Sid Vicious
There – but for the clutch of luck – go I.
At daybreak – in the arctic fog of a February daybreak –
Shoulder-length helmets in the watchtowers of the concentration camp
Caught me out in the intersecting arcs of the swirling searchlights.
There were at least a zillion of us caught out there –
Like ladybirds under a boulder –
But under the microscope each of us was unique,
Unique and we broke for cover, crazily breasting
The barbed wire and some of us made it
To the forest edge, but many of us did not
Make it, although their unborn children did –
Such as you whom the camp commandant branded
Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols. Jesus, break his fall:
There – but for the clutch of luck – go we all.
1981JAMES FENTON A German Requiem
For as at a great distance of place, that which wee look at, appears dimme, and without distinction of the smaller parts; and as Voyces grow weak, and inarticulate; so also after great distance of time, our imagination of the Past is weak; and wee lose (for example) of Cities wee have seen, many particular Streets; and of Actions, many particular Circumstances. This decaying sense, when wee would express the thing it self, (I mean fancy it selfe,) wee call Imagination, as I said before: But when we would express the decay, and signifie that the Sense is fading, old, and past, it is called Memory. So that Imagination and Memory are but one thing…
Hobbes, Leviathan
It is not what they built. It is what they knocked down.
It is not the houses. It is the spaces between the houses.
It is not the streets that exist. It is the streets that no longer exist.
It is not your memories which haunt you.
It is not what you have written down.
It is what you have forgotten, what you must forget.
What you must go on forgetting all your life.
And with any luck oblivion should discover a ritual.
You will find out that you are not alone in the enterprise.
Yesterday the very furniture seemed to reproach you.
Today you take your place in the Widow’s Shuttle.
¶
The bus is waiting at the southern gate
To take you to the city of your ancestors
Which stands on the hill opposite, with gleaming pediments,
As vivid as this charming square, your home.
Are you shy? You should be. It is almost like a wedding,
The way you clasp your flowers and give a little tug at your veil. Oh,
The hideous bridesmaids, it is natural that you should resent them
Just a little, on this first day.
But that will pass, and the cemetery is not far.
Here comes the driver, flicking a toothpick into the gutter,
His tongue still searching between his teeth.
See, he has not noticed you. No one has noticed you.
It will pass, young lady, it will pass.
¶
How comforting it is, once or twice a year,
To get together and forget the old times.
As on those special days, ladies and gentlemen,
When the boiled shirts gather at the graveside
And a leering waistcoat approaches the rostrum.
It is like a solemn pact between the survivors.
The mayor has signed it on behalf of the freemasonry.
The priest has sealed it on behalf of all the rest.
Nothing more need be said, and it is better that way –
¶
The better for the widow, that she should not live in fear of surprise,
The better for the young man, that he should move at liberty between the armchairs,
The better that these bent figures who flutter among the graves
Tending the nightlights and replacing the chrysanthemums
Are not ghosts,
That they shall go home.
The bus is waiting, and on the upper terraces
The workmen are dismantling the houses of the dead.
¶
But when so many had died, so many and at such speed,
There were no cities waiting for the victims.
They unscrewed the name-plates from the shattered doorways
And carried them away with the coffins.
So the squares and parks were filled with the eloquence of young cemeteries:
The smell of fresh earth, the improvised crosses
And all the impossible directions in brass and enamel.
¶
‘Doctor Gliedschirm, skin specialist, surgeries 14–16 hours or by appointment.’
Professor Sargnagel was buried with four degrees, two associate memberships
And instructions to tradesmen to use the back entrance.
Your uncle’s grave informed you that he lived on the third floor, left.
You were asked please to ring, and he would come down in the lift