white tents spread under sheltering
plane trees. Whirling windmills
crown the crest
of the ridge of Gallipoli.
Bullock carts with ungreased wheels
toil across Kodja Chai bridge.
Clean cattle with heads bent low
pull rectangular ammunition boxes,
black water buffaloes
drag flour bags, kneeling camels
untangle their necks and limbs
to prop themselves and begin
their side-wheel march.
It is not lack of rifles that worries
General Liman von Sanders
as he rides along the trenches
from the Dardanelles to the Aegean.
In the bar of the Salonika Hotel
a squad of German marines drink
Constantinople beer and sing
Fatherland songs:
the Majestic was sunk at daylight,
shaking the Sea of Marmara
with a deep prolonged roar
where an officer takes an inventory now
of the wrecked submarine.
Here and there, drab soldiers
straighten out short lengths of barbed wire—
the Turkish kind is oversharp
and thick as your little finger.
Brown-barrelled guns point south-west
where time and again I turn back
to the grey hulk forsaken
on the water. Two thousand
shells per hour fell, the battleships
splashing high fountains
till the mosque at Chanak was a ruin.
Before me cranes swing outward
and inward, a destroyer with a dark green band
flies the French flag astern.
A seaplane circles over.
The turbanned chaplain gazes past
the Red Crescent Hospital
to the plains of Troy and the hills
of Ilium, where Argive Helen
saw the brass-clad Greeks arrive
in their beaked boats. A giant
yellow balloon directs the gunfire,
and only the wounded under a rain
of copper-coated lead leave
these oddly shrinking, shell-swept
shores. And it so happened
that a fog came on, in the afternoon
the bush caught fire, forcing the troops
to move in single file
along goat tracks through the scrub.
Some strayed in search of water,
some pricked holes in the hoses with their knives.
On Hill 10 they had no artillery,
no stores, on C Beach only one
Field Ambulance. A commanding officer,
sixteen officers, and two-hundred-and-fifty
men charged into the forest,
were lost to sight or sound,
and never seen again. Many
were frozen to death as they stood,
the earth below the hospitals became infected,
before the season of the south winds,
mourning cards were sent, lamenting all five sons.
How Despair May Be Transformed into a Diamond
As payment for your colour storm
an acid sky blackens every flower.
You feel your breath touching down
and hold on to the voice you know
on each lip corner, two now frozen
hedges to your country.
You can still alight on words
or sharpen them as you wish;
you can linger and stretch them
like the skin of a birch-bark letter
read before a mirror.
How easily you get what you want!
But if you step on the spot
the fully grown mouth passes
the feather of a red-headed
Irish angel three times between you.
When you are breath-bound
it is purely breath that is stopped.
The Migration of the Nobles, 1603
Alas, the heart that devised—
alas, the mind that considered—
alas, the speech that adjudged the advice
through which that party went on that journey.
The roads were not royal roads
though daisy-covered and clover-flowered.
In a highly indulged church (no woman
ever enters by its door)
they were shown a fourth part
of the body of St George, a shoulder
of St Laurence, a tooth of Peter’s,
the forefinger of Thomas the Apostle,
the chalice out of which
John of the Bosom drank, one of the Thirty
Talents, two of the thorns, the column
of red marble from which the cock crew.
They saw also the trenches
at the river Somme
taken by three Irish companies.
There will be bitter outcries
when the corpse comes thither
at the behest of the left-handed angel.
A pity not to have Dundalk
instead of Louvain outside,
and the Cashel family on the street
instead of men who speak Dutch:
a pity that it was not young Maighréad
who was good wife in this house
last night. A pity
it is not Richard Óg
who comes with a bright cup
to O’Neill’s table.
By the Entrails of Christ
The O’Neill, or Tiron, born in Dungannon,
reared in Dundalk, despite his Pale upbringing,
addicted to Popery, spent most of 1602
on a crannóg in South Derry, outside Desertmartin.
The ship was a Frenchman and came out of Brittany,
sailing from Dunkirk, but letters brought she none
from the King of Spain or Archduke. They should remain
beyond seas upon the King’s charge,
leaving their horses on the shore with none to hold,
after the manner of the Tartars, where they best
like their pastures. He carried the sacred vessels
of Armagh to the friars of Flanders,
being met at the Ponte Milvio by the said Archbishop,
with eight coaches and six horses to each.
They worshipped at the seven privileged altars,
the Earl and his gang, they walk even now these streets,
in black weeds, after the fashion of grandees,
rapid-marching flambeaux of waxlights.
Virginia Will Become Aughanure
Wood-famine bends my shiring maps.
Only the moon’s full sleepwalking face
swelling out the walls seems fully alive,
faded indigo its standard of intangibility.
Yellow leaves lie fossilled in the roadway
where all market cries have been forbidden:
the crested lark and the Calandra lark
build lucrative niches on the bark of trees.
Each time we forded the baser river
a freshness rose from the fineness of the water,
the veins of sand. Unangeled now and colourless,
the still very bloated lough
stretching the old rounded image of the island.
The blue gorse sliced its view
into tree-abounding land parcels
whose branches pressed like moths
that filled each wasted county like a sack.
Primrose Red Orchestra
A glorious thrush has been singing on the mount
in peak foliage ever since daybreak. It has sung
three sounds of increase, while fifty years
has passed for each, back to the duelling cathedrals,
back to the physic garden, to the remains
of a small kneeling weeper
by the unr
inged cross with hollow armpits.
There are five fireplaces, one above the other,
straight up the wall of the dim-remembered war.
None with his goodwill will be called
Henry, Edward, Richard, George, Francis,
but rather Murrough, Moriertagh, Turlough,
suchlike harsh names. Your way
of working out Easter will be an English surname
of a town, as Sutton, Chester, Trim,
Skryne, Cork, Kinsale, a colour as white,
lotus white, toga white, black, brown,
art or science, as smith, or carpenter,
office, as cooke, or butler.
Accurate as the multiseasonal rose,
or a kiss that is led up to the white
eyes of the dead, only inches from women’s
faces, only minutes, I walked along
the flint shaped island as along
the half mile of Easy Red, the first wave,
to find some graves with shears,
the gems of the household, sandglass
measuring the length of a sermon
and four-hour watches, Meles meles,
the complete skeleton of a dog in a sack,
the chestnut breast of the merganser.
That moment, when the sky was darker
than the water, a tiny probe had landed
after the furthest fall, on the frozen surface
of the only moon that has an atmosphere:
its heatshield worked perfectly, its three parachutes
opened as planned. And now it is like looking
with the Earth’s original eyes
at the primitive, hallowed earth of monastery.
Santo Spirito Lands on Mars
Looking at the picture seems almost a form of trespass:
it would never have shown itself as it did,
this finely chiselled scene, a red, cobbled road,
rust-red tiles that shiver in ordinary sunrays.
It is somehow toylike, the light that plays
is unashamed like the light after heavy rain:
stark rocks in a bay, shell-headed,
terracotta roundels to be held in the palm,
all carved from the softest pietra serena,
a metalwork collage, a scattered bombardment,
the plainest of stone in a great stone chorus,
a kind of stone bouquet high in the air.
Mistily distant, they might still be moving,
on their seismic way to somewhere else,
they might be only sinking into the ground
like the piecemeal stones of a city,
an image of Florence, another Athens
or a second Rome: a mosaic
of tanned memories, shadows of Byzantium,
craggy and barren view of the afterlife
whose infinite space has been bound here
into a nutshell, a weathered floor
where we might find it easier to walk
in the radiance of another planet’s days.
White Cortina Outside Stardust Ballroom
I was seventeen years when I lost
my country and my girlish single
braid. They were completely new
days, the air above the brutalized
city was naturally trapped, dead silver
flecked with a germ-soaked beauty.
The sky under a rainbow
is lighter than the sky above it,
the way light is bent inside raindrops.
The sky between a double rainbow
is darker, the dark band
is caused by sunlight bent upwards,
a bright blue rag colour for dyeing
yarn, for glaze over silver, letters
in blue. Variations in the colour
of the sea, and longer into spring
than seemed bearable, the sky slowly
sipped away to willow ashes.
It seemed to have, I would like to say,
hands, though they were not seen,
those breathless ghosts of mine.
All cherries had taken their farewell
of their perfect cherry colour.
I could feel everyone praying for me
like a little forest bird,
the otherest. My light shone
on frost-shadows, rose-pink
on the hand, like down, such
as that of the vulture. A thick layer
of fragrances comforts the brain
and memory. I was being
distilled or simplified, like
a westernizing eye-shape. Our only
tree in more costly storms
fell into my dream’s pale field
as water that will part gold
from silver, or our grace from
lack of it. Winter takes me
deep again to where she was
already root, the death
of my dream of how to paint
wounds, with the art that hushes.
The Statement of My Right Honourable Friend
The me-ring that you buy yourself—
I want to buy a blood-bright gown
and let into its collar the satin
you gave me as a hood
which makes me think of you, day
and night. The wind is wrapped
in the longish grass, it shoots
the constant arrow of its voice
so all the time you are looking,
looking, at a moon possessed
by its planned dreaming. I cannot say
how sooner or later it must start,
it does start, in those parts of town
that mock their own seediness.
I am no longer standing in the coal
lorry, telling people anything.
I am under it, I am either under
the vehicle beside the wheel,
or behind it, beside the wheel,
my view has now dramatically altered.
I remember saying, do not run—
you say that you noticed two bullet cases
on the ground near the Saracen,
and they were split wide open
like flowers, spent, yes.
Because of the way they were open,
they were almost like daffodils—
everyone was saying that day
that if they spread like daffodils,
they were supposed to be dumb—
I know nothing about anything like that.
A Knight of Malta came to assist.
He was half-down, shaking, putting his hand
out in front of him, you know,
not fully up, crouching down, that was the way
he walked, hand out, with a handkerchief in it.
I had only a mental view, I saw nothing,
nothing is perfect in this world of riots,
there are always gawpers, hooligans, I am afraid,
on the edge of a riot.
From seventeen minutes past four,
you must have been there, Soldier S,
as we have to call you. Are you saying
something that was put into your mouth?
We can’t have that now,
can we, Private?
Things may have been altered to suit
things at the time. Can I just,
will you bear with me a moment?
If people want to have a conversation
will they please go outside, at once?
If you have noticed I have not relied
on a memory that does not exist.
You do not have a memory,
do you, do you? If you say so,
yes. No, you have said so.
I follow, it is not correct,
but I follow, yes.
The Questioning of Soldier L
This month is called a tender one:
it has proved so to me but not
in me. I have not uttered one folly,
In cloudy networks we may all
be netted together by darksome affections.
Disquietful, we lived and lived
strange moonscenes, a consider-the-lilies attitude.
Bubble-blowing Caprice with a weathervane
on her helmet, unless I see her life
branching into mine, she gives me no
ancestral help, elegant curve of fear and faith
whose arrangements of eggshells
had the ghosts of poems in them,
knowing to call back, to listen to
electric speech when the call is lost.
As Mary’s veil was said to become
luminous during night vigils, I love
internal greenness, rusty back ferns,
petals backed with pale violet.
You are asking a woman of a great
many words to recall half a dozen.
You expect me to believe you now,
I believed you then.
Me and my rhetoric should be some
where, inside my head my own
voice without any connection
to my mouth, in the feminized tea shop,
in the humming room. I saw nothing
in the hands of the man who fell.
They saw a rare and previously
protected thing, Mr Whoever Turns Up.
Note for Blind Therapists
No one knows where the winter food
is coming from. My icons and their
night light set in a recognizable
island are so paralyzingly holy
they lack the reality of reality
as our green wallpaper coloured
with arsenic of copper has adopted
some ideal white, so sweet and conscious.
A forever Marybud of which I am less sure,
in my servility to dominant interests,
text-worker, state writer, sapiential
woman with my quasi-brand name
lending my voice to others’ words
like Ovid’s Echo, who can repeat,
but not originate, speech, the depth
of dark beneath which lies our day.
I had been living so far from words
in my former wordlessness that to speak
often seems a kind of police work,
ventriloquizing the words of another.
I had been mapping the world for so long
through Hiberno-English, a hair’s breadth
departure from a crust of dead English
to the unsayable void of the Portadownians.
A silent receptacle of many echoes
so overrun, and skimmed for the scant
cream of sense, or any sediment present
Blaris Moor Page 2
