© 2011 MICHAEL PATTWELL
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced in any form or by any means—graphic, electronic
or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or
information storage and retrieval systems—without the prior
written permission of the author.
ISBN: 978-1-908024-09-1
A CIP catalogue for this book is available from the
National Library.
Published by ORIGINAL WRITING LTD., Dublin, 2011.
Printed by CAHILL PRINTERS LIMITED, Dublin.
For Mairéad, my beloved wife, who believes enough in me to keep reminding me that I should publish my poems. You have been my editor, advisor, critic, chief supporter and sometimes my inspiration. I can never thank you enough.
It is also for my parents who both feature in several of the poems. I miss you both.
I cannot forget the many people, including my children, who have inspired me to write poems to, for or about them. Thank you.
Finally I want to thank all the members of my Writers Group in Ballincollig and in particular the facilitator, Bernadette Leach. Without all of you and the discipline of our weekly get-togethers many of my poems would never have been written.
FOREWORD
Michael and I are connected through marriage— Annie Pattwell, his aunt, married my uncle Christy McCarthy way back in the nineteen fifties. They were both emigrants to London and they had a daughter, Paula McCarthy, who was sent home to be raised with our family in the north inner city of Dublin. Those childhood summers we were sent to stay with Paula’s relatives, John and Peggy, on their smallholding outside Tarbert, by the banks of the river Shannon. There were the golden humps of haystacks, there was the dark river music, there were the little fields and there was the extended family of Pattwells and rounds of visits.
For us city children it was magic and terrifying in equal measure. At night by lamplight I read my way through the books in the cottage. The Tragic Story of the Colleen Bawn I read aloud to Paula by oil lamp within hearing of the river. It was too easy to imagine the ghost of the betrayed colleen, Ellen Hanley, turning and turning in the river’s roiling waters, and her desperate fate had us riveted and spooked in equal measure. Then there was the time we murdered the hens. Unwittingly. When we were left to clean out the henhouse while John and Peggy went off to Tralee we went a step further and gave the hens a shampoo. Whether from the loss of their oils, or from some chill picked up in the grooming process, the chickens died in ones and twos over the next few days.
Michael Pattwell was a tall gangly youngfellow and we loved visiting him. He was in charge of a donkey, as it happened a source of great wonder to us, and his later career as a judge of the Republic was surely foreshadowed by his scrupulous division of time so that no child had more time on the donkey’s back than any other. He showed us birds’ eggs and other mysteries of hedge and tree. The lore he shared opened a path in and through the natural world. He was a natural teacher.
Fast forward many years later and many grey hairs on both our heads. I am conducting a poetry workshop at Inch, near Dingle and this tall, well-built man comes through the door. I can see the lineaments of the younger man in the older and there’s a certain irony in the reversal of our roles, the teacher become student, and vice versa. Since then we have had a firm friendship in poetry.
And I am delighted to see that Michael, with the encouragement and urging of his beloved Mairéad, has gathered up his poems and put them together here. They form a contrapuntal accompaniment to his life and have been a tool, it is clear, for understanding and wisdom. They celebrate the daily as well as the significant joyous events in Michael’s life. They are courageous in the face of tragedy and loss, and they map the landscapes that have touched most deeply Michael’s soul.
The poems are written with love and humility and will be treasured by his children and their children to come. They preserve the flavour and the savour of a life lived with the highest ambition — an open mind, an open and generous heart.
Paula Meehan
15th November, 2010
PART I
INIS MEÁIN
Since I first visited it in 1995 I have had a love affair with the island of Inis Meáin, the middle one of the three Aran Islands. The following pages are a small collection of poems written there and about there during my many visits.
All of my life I have been fascinated by the phenomenon of shafts of light from the evening sun, hidden behind a cloud, shooting to Earth like a spotlight. These two fascinations are brought together in this first poem, 'Evening on Inis Meáin'.
EVENING ON INIS MEÁIN
Rain-clouds downwind scattered,
the land submerged in silence
but for the breeze
whispering its secrets through chinks
in stone walls to the golden glow of evening.
A skylark rising from new-flowered heather
washing the late evening sky
in a riot of mellifluous twittering.
Shadowy shapes on the hillsides
spreading like ink pooled on blotting paper,
photographic negatives of skyscapes
of undulant billowing white columns
on faint diaphanous blue
as far as eye can see.
Distant mountains an azure haze
topped by tumbling clouds of grey on grey.
Sunbeams, like obelisks of light
shot from dark evening gatherings in the west,
illuminate the karst,
turning wet rock into silver splotches
and window-panes of isolated cottages
into earthly satellites of the setting sun.
Stone on stone surrounding stone.
A patch-work quilt
of random home-spun patterns
of light and shade
giving shape and substance
to flat fields. Their permanent crops
of limestone slabs sliced
into crazed webs of irregular lines
of weeds in matted whorls, tufted grasses,
sea-pinks, ferns and delicate purple harebells.
A red cow busy beneath
a lichen-shadowed ledge
greedily grazing a lopsided patch of lea
wrest in tears from rain-pitted rock
hard pressed to keep ahead
of the cycle of survival while
her bull calf vigorously suckles
from emaciated teats beneath
a pensile folding udder.
Nightfall and a surrendering
to darkness
and the shy light of
a new moon silvering
the encircling sea.
DÚN CHONCHUIR
(A prehistoric fort on Inis Meáin)
A flock of starlings feed
on seed-heads lately plumped
by soft Atlantic rain
and flit from stem to stem
in short raucous feathery flights
round about ancient clocháns,
granite grey, giving shelter
from a wind that sweeps in off the sea
with long lonesome moans.
Is it looking for the ancient dead
no longer standing guard on the
rocky ramparts in this place
but lost in an eternity
where epic journeys -
for years the object of
their wistful earthly yearnings -
now go on and on forever,
the Heaven of the ancient warrior?
Does each man in his own time
makes his own heaven,
his personal Tír na nÓg
to shelter his discarnate spirit.
Reluctant briars grow
where heroes once strutted
or held boastful court
about blazing winter fires,
while the spirits of the past
enwrap the romantic voyager
in their memory-cloaks
of long-forgotten deeds
that prime the soul with
wondrous images
for empty evenings of the future;
for good memories are the comfort
of the disconsolate.
Toe-stepping along irregular ramparts
of stratified stone and seeing not
the desolation of the present
but wondering at the shadowy shapes
of insubstantial spectral images of the past;
seeing the dens of druids, heroes halls
and fairy forts; yet knowing
that if there is a creator He gives witness,
not in books, for books, like the men
who write them, sometimes lie too,
but in mountains and streams and trees
and in the breath in living things.
Feeling from the nerve-pulses of the past
that throb imperceptibly,
real but beyond the range
of human awareness,
from the life source in the earth's core
below that place
that it is hallowed ground
since time was yet unborn.
My father, as far as I know, coined the phrase “flaghopping.” It comes from the flagstones with which the foot-paths in our town were surfaced when I was a child and “flaghopping” was used by my father in a disapproving way for walking around the town with no particular purpose such as teenagers did when they wanted to see and be seen.
I remember seeing the old ladies in Inis Meáin taking a walk around the island on their way home from Mass and it immediately reminded me of my Dad’s phrase. He had a way with words that, in hindsight, sometimes surprises me. I was, of course, flag-hopping myself and taking in the sights and impressions of the island.
FLAGHOPPING
In Baile an Mhóthair there's a
smell of fried fish from a house on
a corner tucked into a hill
beneath the walls of Dún Fearbhuí.
A cock-robin, who must have been
very old indeed, puffed up his
faded grey-tinged breast and sang in
a potato plot below the road
beside a weed-free cabbage patch
lately planted where onions had
been harvested and now were laid to
dry under a south facing wall.
Swallows gathered on the wires and
starlings fed in noisy whirring
flocks on purple-headed thistles,
grass, yarrow and meadow-sweet
while two old ladies proud parade
in island garb their mothers wore.
Flaghopping like town teenagers
the ladies now perambulate
from evening Mass, meandering
in divers directions amongst
breast-high parallel grey stone walls
that shelter primroses and harebells
in seasonal succession.
In fissures in the stony crust
I saw discarded trappings of
modernity half hidden by
folds of once green fern turned
gold and rooted in sparse soil
trapped in crevices zigzagging
across the limestone slab now damp
and shining in the island mist,
itself a mystery medium,
like pooled quick-silver lately wrung
and spun from bright red cinnabar.
Some hydra-headed thistles grew
near Ceann Gainimh bristling like
crew-cut American tourists
in Galway while three-toed tracks of
a solitary herring-gull,
come to feed on stranded flotsam,
left a straggling trail across the
sands wet from the receding tide.
A pattern like coal-black flames
was left imprinted on the shore
formed by the rills of wave remnants
as they back-flowed across the
sloping beach washing the light layer
of silver that thinly lies
upon the blue-black grains piled up
like dust around an old coal pit.
Black-tipped feathers tumbled before
a soft breeze off the sea from whence
their source, a drowned sea-gull, was washed
ashore and left there high and dry.
Near Calamore a startled pair
of skylarks swoop up over a
stone wall and dip behind a pair
of pillars in the shape of tar-barrels.
They were clearly moulded by
them, their encircling cement ribs
leaving me wondering how they got
the barrels off again when set.
Between the two unfinished piers
a beached currach stood on its keel -
a wooden slat to save the stretched
tarpaulin in its coat of pitch -
while a pair of men in yellow
oilskins stood beside the gunwales
untangling skeins of tangled net
from fresh caught rust-coloured rock-fish,
brown pollock and shark-like dog fish
and a few pink gurnet which they
deftly skinned and gutted with short
sharp knives and the skill of surgeons
washing the harvested white meat
in the waves lapping at their feet
and discarding the inedible
to the wheeling clamorous gulls
that circled over-head and cried
in high pitched hungry calls as they swept
with swift wing-beats like cirrus cloud
in mare's tails in evening skies
across the surface of the sea
to snatch the visceral tit-bits
from the waves to swallow them
in one greedy split-second gulp.
The white moon of early evening,
ascending over Inis Óirr,
bespoke a hymenopterous
communion bread, a cotton ball
in the sky. The Cliffs of Moher
were but a dark shadow as the
sun sank behind Inis Mór and
moonlight enshrouded Inis Meáin.
The Rocks of Inis Meáin was originally written as a poem but with the help of friends of mine, Mona O’Riordan and Jim Callanan, it was put to music and recorded by them in Jim’s recording studio, Jaycee Studios, in Ballincollig, Co.Cork.
THE ROCKS OF INIS MEÁIN
A solitary black-diver
In the back-wash of a currach
And a sadness creeping through me
From the sea-mists on the shore;
A blackbird in a fuchsia hedge
That grows beyond my window sings
A lullaby to twilight's
Painted sky on Inis Mór.
Refrain: Oh I love to hear the murmur
Of the breeze from Connemara
Or to walk along Ceann Gaineamh
Writing love notes in the sand.
Oh I love to hear a robin sing
His song near Scailp na Caonaí
Or to hear the waves make thunder
On the rocks of Inis Meáin.
A caoining herring gull above
The V behind the ferry
Rides the heather breeze of evening
Bringing tidings in from Clare.
There is sadness in the surf-song
In the sound behind Trá Leitreach
Where the harebells fairy tinkle
When they tremble in the air
Sounding death-knell for the make believe
In the wisp
y mists of dawn
Making reeds from ghostly galleons
When the sun lights up the lough.
There's a place where dreams come tumbling
In the surf round Áit an Chnáimhín
To a place where dreams are shattered
On the stones along Trácht Each.
Refrain
There is music in the whisper
Of the wind around Dún Fearbhaí;
There's a single gannet soaring
Between me and Inis Óirr;
There's a sadness creeping through me
For I know not what is calling
As I store it in my memory
Of the things I hold most dear.
Refrain
THE POLE
The hypotenuse was square all right.
Squared steel
sherardized grey against the weather,
bolted to the base rock
and to the vertical,
a once-black pole
now stone-coloured by
conspiring rain
and sea salt
carried on the Atlantic wind
hell-bent on camouflaging
deliberately blemished nature.
Standing
in a vast unbroken limestone field
like the disembodied phallus of a would-be rapist,
discarnate and spectral,
erect but impotent,
contributing nothing but pain
on the instant,
despoiling the pleasures
of memories
still unborn.
STARLINGS
(Inis Meáin, An Autumn Evening)
Starlings chittering
like a symphony of mice,
urgent and discordant,
chattering to one another
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