Flaghopping

by Michael Pattwell

  Yours

  is an Easter memory.

  Sunlight and showers;

  rainbows and clouds;

  primroses

  and the last days of daffodils;

  cherry trees in bloom;

  swallows returning;

  blackbirds warbling in new-green hedgerows;

  sweet singing in churches

  and too-short days.

  FROM GALWAY'S BRIDGE

  (For M., my wife. Remembering the day we met.)

  From Galway’s Bridge we tiptoed through the fern,

  The ancient oaks, the acorns gone to root.

  When woodlands swayed the sun danced in salute

  A stately stag stood still, without concern.

  A blackbird sang; the cliffs rang in return;

  Across the lake we heard a day-owl hoot.

  There swam majestic swans and white shield coot,

  There strode with measured step the stalking heron.

  A bridge, a flooded path, a helping hand.

  You called my name, it echoed round the vale

  From mountain side to peak to water-land;

  Its music drowned the thrush and nightingale.

  A smile, a touch, a quick intake of breath.

  Life’s journey started there the day we met.

  SHARING A KISS IN KILLARY

  When mountain streams come tumbling white

  Through mountains robed in winter brown;

  When mountain heathers fade from sight

  And reeds by lakes are beaten down;

  When skylarks sing no more on high

  As driven grey obscures the sky

  I'll think of you in Killary.

  For then my mind will exercise

  To rainbows weave through silver drops

  That float unseen in autumn skies

  Above the cloud-clad mountain tops

  And kiss the trees with golden rays

  To thin the mist and fade the haze

  And I'll think of you in Killary.

  For 'though 'twas but a fleeting time

  - A week a day; each day but hours -

  It's memories will ever prime

  - Like summer rain the summer flowers

  -Good dreams that one day soon we will

  My fondest ever wish fulfil

  To share a kiss in Killary.

  KNOCKNAFALIA

  Standing yesterday

  On Knocknafallia

  I saw

  The two sides

  Of Agnes Smedley's mother's

  Crazy quilt. *

  I saw the happy side

  When the late evening sun

  Of early winter

  Lit up the patchwork fields

  Of green and brown

  And yellow.

  Shafts of light

  Like the fingers of God

  Were shed

  From behind

  A cloud

  And fell on Melleray Abbey

  And the winding Blackwater.

  I stood

  Resting against the wind

  And I thought I heard

  A faint sound of vespers

  And I felt

  I was close

  To Heaven.

  But the other side

  Of Agnes Smedley's mother's

  Crazy quilt

  Was not far away.

  Looking inwards

  I thought of you

  And I found

  The side

  Of solid blue.

  It was rising

  From within

  Myself

  Footnote

  * From the novel “Daughter of Earth” by Agnes Smedley in which the author’s mother makes a “crazy quilt” which is multicoloured patchwork on one side and just plain blue on the other.

  LIGHT AND DARK

  A candle flame in the dark void

  of my aloneness, bright burning

  in the new air of you having

  been within my life's awareness.

  Glad memories of you dance into

  the aura of my new found light;

  flame fingers make shadows shimmer

  on distant walls and I reach out

  but you waft into the dark night

  of my nothingness and dance away

  with fairy steps on fairy feet

  to magic tunes the fairies play.

  In this world there are those for whom

  every hour is a new day and

  every day a new beginning

  with few days left for clouds to lift

  so that shadows can hold hands

  and race on mountain tops.

  I long for even a glimmer

  of the fire my life could have been

  and wonder at the reasons why

  children are afraid of the dark

  and adults are afraid of the light,

  why time cools sunbeams

  and then time dies.

  SUNBEAMS

  Like a dawn sunbeam

  Timidly creeps from behind an easterly hill

  And burns away the morning mists

  Opening up the beauty and excitement of a new day

  You came into my life.

  My dark clouds of sadness soon were pierced

  And your sunny warmth gave life

  To a heart which had almost forgotten how to beat.

  Just as advancing time

  Gives the sunbeam growth

  It loses itself in the midst of its myriad companions

  To become a full-grown morning sun

  So too did your sunbeam grow.

  With each passing day as sunbeam met sunbeam

  And each suffused itself in the other it became

  A new whole. You became my sun.

  A source of life and joy to me.

  Soon more and more the mists of sadness disappeared,

  Evaporated by your warmth.

  And I laughed. Oh God! How I laughed.

  I had a new life, a new hope, a mighty love.

  As the morning sun climbs into the sky

  To reach its highest point at noon

  Our hours together lead us too.

  Oh yes! We had our noon.

  We reached a peak where nothing mattered but us two.

  When the world was naught but a place

  Made by God for lovers such as us;

  Where nothing was impossible; where hearts,

  Like sunbeams, reached out and touched each other

  Melting all reserve until they

  Yielded to a mighty power of love

  And were soon entwined

  Like ivy branches on a mighty oak

  To become one, inseparable,

  For a brief moment.

  But all too soon the noonday sun

  Gives way to evening and shadows return.

  Little clouds drift across it's face and light breezes

  Break the stillness causing leaves to gently dance.

  Our time together was but a sheltered meadow in a troubled world.

  Like the evening breeze ripples the near ripe grass

  And whispers in the trees that night must soon approach

  My sun declined. Your heart I knew I could not keep.

  As they grow together in the morning so now at evening

  Each sunbeam separates one from the other.

  It drifts apart and puts itself to sleep

  And I, alone, am left to weep.

  UNDERSTANDING LOVE

  Grieving for what I hoped yesterday

  Might be mine tomorrow

  I was standing with strangers

  Looking across an open grave

  At you weeping.

  I learned that love is

  Needing to be involved

  In your life

  And wanting to take on

  Your pain.

  THE WATERSHED

  When you kissed me

  your hair fell around my face

  and I felt<
br />
  I had slipped

  behind a waterfall,

  a rust-red cataract,

  into a secret place

  of you and me,

  warmed by our breaths

  and lit by your eyes.

  All my life

  led to that moment

  when I fell in love with you.

  Now

  all the days that follow

  lead nowhere at all.

  WOULD OAK TREES TELL THEIR SECRETS

  A boat-house by a ragged shore,

  Two new-found lovers strolling;

  Two soaring gannets folding wings

  And sea-ward sleekly diving.

  The lovers smile,

  The gannets plunge,

  While waves of passion washing

  Create within an autumn day

  A storm of breakers crashing.

  An oak-wood near a ravaged shore,

  Two linked-arm lovers kissing

  Are whispering secrets of the past,

  Perhaps a future wishing.

  The sky awash

  With skylark song,

  Two lovers' arms are pressing,

  And lovers' hands on lovers' cheeks

  Are tenderly caressing.

  When swirling leaves all holding hands

  On forest floors are dancing

  To autumn wind-played doleful

  airs Like faery tunes entrancing

  Two lovers sigh

  And parting pray,

  No longer arms entwining,

  Would oak trees tell their secrets if

  The east wind came enquiring?

  PART VII

  FAMILY AND RELATIONSHIP

  I have left this part of my book to last; I could say deliberately but in reality it is because I find it the most difficult to deal with. I just kept putting it off. Some of these poems deal with painful episodes in my life; a life that led me along a path I would have never, ever, have expected to follow.

  The poems deal with, among other things, my father’s death, my mother’s Alzheimer’s Disease and her death. They touch on my separation and divorce and, most painful of all, some consequential fallout. I also include some poems inspired by the loss of a grandchild by a cot-death and by my wider family, including my grandmother and a much loved cousin, John O’Donovan, who died too young.

  I begin this section with the first poem I wrote (apart from some juvenilia which, thankfully, no longer survive.) It was written in January 1993, about a month after my father had died, and it formed in my head as I was driving to Dublin very early on a Monday morning. I had no paper to hand so I pulled into a McDonalds’ in Clondalkin, ordered a breakfast bap and wrote out the draft of the poem on a McDonalds’ serviette. The poem, 'The Clothes Line', is, I think, self-explanatory.

  THE CLOTHES LINE

  (i.m. M.P., My father)

  With a snap

  the dead ivy was torn from the old garden wall

  that it had clothed for three score years and ten.

  Bare stone unseen by light in living memory

  starkly stood exposed and bare.

  Tee-shirt and towel lay - a twisted tangled heap

  -upon the bare black earth which He had dug last Fall

  with plans to plant in Spring

  a fresh green grass with shrubs and flowers all round.

  But plant He never would.

  On a mid-winter day He thought He'd stroll a while.

  The slanting sun inspired hope of coming spring.

  He walked to town - She hung her washing out to dry.

  Then, suddenly, He died.

  We mourned Him, we missed Him and we wept for Him.

  On sunny days we thought

  how He'd have loved

  those lengthening brightening cheerful days

  to stroll the beach and feel the sun upon His face.

  And then the clothes-line broke.

  "My line came down,” She said.

  Some fifteen years before He'd tied it to the ivy

  until He got the time to do a better job.

  I pulled a brand-new cord through pulleys placed on high

  and felt His over-seeing presence near to me.

  Through tears I whispered low

  "You should have known that ivy does not live forever."

  THE BIRTH OF LOVE

  (For M.P. - My Father)

  We

  were like any father, any son.

  Had lived the three Rs of relationship.

  Revered in childhood;

  resented in teens;

  respected as an adult.

  Until

  travelling to the funeral of someone you loved

  all barriers were suddenly sundered

  and we talked. Oh! really talked.

  The tree-tunnels of summer

  had cast their cover and

  were pierced by Autumn light.

  Leaves lay by the roadside,

  brown and crimson and yellow

  and danced before us

  a merry dance

  to the tune of passing traffic

  when I heard you weep

  and I saw your tears

  and I loved you.

  Sown by death,

  nu rtured by tears,

  my true feelings for you

  were brought to birth.

  STALKING A CANARY

  (Remembering M.P. – My Dad)

  My mother was angry

  when,

  in that small room,

  without her leave,

  my father cleared everything off the dressing table

  and set up the breeding cage

  he had been building

  every night

  for over two weeks.

  When the hen had four eggs

  he

  had saved one-by-one

  he put them all back

  in a neat cluster in a moss-lined man-made nest

  where she sat and carefully hatched

  four tiny downy chicks

  she tended,

  warmed, cleaned and fed.

  Till one night he forgot

  to lock

  the cage.

  She had flown.

  She had stretched her sunshine wings and taken off

  through the open bedroom window .

  The call to freedom

  she had never known

  was too strong.

  Then I see my father,

  stalking,

  on a roof

  on all fours

  astride the ridge on an early summer morning

  and dragging an old coat.

  He opened it out, paused

  and pounced.

  My mother smiled and clapped.

  ALRIGHT

  (for D.)

  Like rapier-armed duellists

  we circled each other

  with our eyes. Wondering

  when the other would make a move,

  on a grey autumn evening

  when straggling cobwebs

  dangled from trees

  in sodden cords,

  no more a golden filigree

  of jewelled dewdrops

  backlit by the rising sun

  of a summer dawn.

  Cold lips on cold cheek

  turning the warmth of a kiss

  into the perverted formality

  of a difficult greeting.

  I needed to ask you so much.

  You wondered what I would ask

  and we talked a lot

  about the nothings in our lives.

  Courage beating stomach storms

  I reached across,

  touched your worker's hand

  and the frost was gone.

  You told me of your love for him

  and you smiled with your eyes.

  Leaving, when I hugged you,

  your little girl's arm

  curved around my waist

  and lingered there and we knew


  it would be alright.

  APPLE-WOOD

  (Reflections of a wood-turner)

  Spinning on a lathe

  a block

  of rough-hewn apple-wood

  cut from near the root

  of a diseased old tree

  that lately yielded

  only mis-shapen cankerous fruit,

  inedible, useless.

  The well-honed gouge

  stripped the bark and

  the soft sap-wood beneath.

  It clicked and juddered

  on split knots - the last remains

  of fine old branches

  that once had sprouted

  pink and white apple-blossom and

  shiny red fruit

  fit to tempt

  any Eve in any Eden.

  The useless cast aside

  in mounting piles of wood-dust

  the singing chisel

  cut the solid wood.

  Shavings shot back over shoulders

  in steady streamers

  with the sweet smell of apples.

  The cob-webbed corners of the work-shop

  smelled like a cider-mill

  re-incarnating and breathing life into

  memories long since faded

  of children picnicking under its shade

  or apple-picking for sport

  on Hallowe'en.

  I saw you,

  my grown-up sons,

  my beautiful daughters,

  children again, happy and laughing,

  as I finger now

  the smooth polished wood

  of my apple-wood bowl

  and I remember you.

  CHIPPING AT THE COALFACE

  Looking back there was a childhood

  And then a wife and children

  And I laboured at the coal-face in between.

  There were work days, there were glad days

  There were play days, there were sad days

  And nothing seemed to happen in between.

  There were tears and there were kisses,

  Success and some near misses

  And still nothing seemed to happen in between