Blaris Moor

by Medbh McGuckian

  I took out our little pillow

  which had lost half its feathers,

  and next to it I folded over

  many times my one and only dress.

  Halina cut out a blouse for me

  and some underwear from a pillowcase.

  I sewed them up quickly.

  We tried using our tongues

  to wet each other’s lips

  with the fresh surface of water.

  On the third day

  we looked through our Lilliputian window

  at a field of mute bricks.

  Yes, he said, with his woven band

  à la Tirol, this train belongs to me.

  Armed with a pistol, with the safety off,

  for the last time I fired a few shots

  at the nouveau-riche smugglers

  frequenting the coffee shops.

  Antipersonnel Mine

  Only 19-years-old, but I was called ‘Father’

  by a dying German soldier. He was old and fragile,

  he did not have a weapon.

  He lay twisted around his right leg

  but when he saw the red crosses on my arms and helmet

  his mouth stretched as if shrieks

  were coming out, he reached for me

  and cried ‘Vater!’

  I bared the wound at mid-thigh,

  put sulfa powder on the exposed bone,

  covered it with a compress, tied a loose

  tourniquet. He was greying fast.

  I stuck morphine in, he wasn’t eased,

  I gave him another eighth of a grain

  and watched him lapse into shock.

  I felt as if I too had been shot

  and yearned to be dead.

  *

  Gordon got ripped by a machine gun

  through the right waist. We were cut off

  in foxholes by ourselves.

  I tried to knock him out.

  I took off his helmet, held his jaw up,

  and whacked it as hard as I could.

  I hit him with his helmet

  but that didn’t work. Nothing worked.

  He slowly, slowly, froze.

  *

  I knew of shelters built inside

  transformer housings covered

  with metal-plated doors marked

  with warning signs featuring

  a skull and crossbones.

  The people would drape

  high-voltage cables over the iron doors,

  in front of which they would place wet leads,

  they were warm enough for someone to lie

  on the floor even during sub-zero weather.

  *

  We don’t have water. Everyone wants to drink.

  People are simply burning up.

  By chance I found a litre

  while I was clearing away rubble.

  Edka and I each had a little bit,

  and then I took it back, practically full,

  to our room for the others.

  Lana came over—she is terribly thirsty.

  I gave her the bottle and said,

  ‘You drink first.’ Marius came over.

  Lana drank a third and asked him,

  ‘Do you want a little water? Drink some and leave

  some for Rena.’ He drank

  and put down the bottle.

  There was not a drop left.

  Skirt of a Thousand Triangles

  It was minus 27. The city was drowning in flags.

  We closed our still normal windows in order

  not to hear the bells. All around the Market Place

  enormous white poles had been planted

  every one and a half metres, from which fluttered

  bloody banners many metres long,

  embroidered with a white circle. That same night

  more than sixty persons were registered

  as having committed suicide.

  Having quickly sat down with my back

  to the window I could only count the shots,

  not the unravelled scarves. While I was binding

  bandages, with my common-or-garden nerves,

  she told me how precisely to knock upon the door

  when a house was ‘liberated’.

  The first two days we spent

  sitting on our suitcases.

  When the porcelain isolators spaced at intervals

  began to gleam white over the same forest-in-spring

  she suddenly stopped addressing me as ‘Sister’

  and, looking desperately English, began kissing

  both my hands alternately at high speed:

  near perfume, the flowering

  of my hands and fingers …

  Her dress contains many skirts, one in-between skirt

  of upside-down shapes, and geometrically

  red endings—long, leafy, earthy ends.

  At times she picks up to her northern shoulder

  whole armfuls of her skirt to free her feet,

  its soft, ladylike materials, its deceiving sash.

  We exchanged a short, almost rough,

  kiss on the march. You have to back out

  of the cell as you leave, and tread on a rag

  on the splintering floor, to draw the others

  after you. To truly rebuild flowers of globe mallow,

  hands outstretched towards the camp.

  Notice

  People selected for transport must leave their homes

  in complete order. One piece of luggage

  weighing sixty kilograms, and hand baggage

  of a maximum of ten kilograms, will be allowed

  per person. The remaining effects must be left

  where they are in the home, e.g. curtains,

  carpets, table lamps, wall mirrors, wash basins,

  pieces of furniture, tablecloths, two towels,

  and on the beds, mattress, bed linen,

  and at least one pillow and bedcover,

  all freshly made up.

  Luggage must not be wrapped in carpets

  or coverlets. If on inspection

  it is observed that these instructions

  have not been obeyed the person concerned

  will not be taken on the transport

  but will be sent to the interior to work.

  The military has requested me to make it known

  that under no circumstances may food supplies

  be assembled among the local inhabitants

  in order to deliver them to the prisoners of war.

  Those who violate this command and nevertheless

  try to circumvent this blockade

  to allow something to come to the prisoners

  place themselves in danger of being shot.

  Special individual cases, contributions of near

  relatives, will be negotiated through the commander.

  I request you accordingly to make every effort

  to stop possible collection and to explain

  to the local inhabitants in suitable terms

  about the facts of the matter—by order,

  signed,

  The President of the Government, May 1945.

  District Behind the Lines

  I carefully arranged the mask of buckram

  curtains on my swan-pit features

  like a blue-collar archangel who has turned

  herself into a pet heron.

  My father’s old tied flat shorn of its partitions—

  Mama reading, lamplit, sitting by the rose—

  the necessary table set for six people—

  a sip of two days’ ago’s tea:

  fellow-traveller, the content may be ours

  but the voice is theirs—‘Northern Elegies’—

  books interleaved with crumbled rice paper,

  never-ending marks of uncomradely respect.

  What difference in touch, white on green,

  between the fur smell and the moss smell,


  the flower value and the rose relaxed,

  had you in mind? The hedge of clipped maple

  as yet unringed with winter wreaths.

  Black Re-partition

  The black bird that has been with me all my life

  comes and sits on my shoulder and whets its beak

  like a woman with perfume, always adding touches.

  Touches of red, all stillborn.

  I always had a set of dayclothes by my bed.

  Our look is what kept the icy-cold pages unread.

  Tie the petticoat tighter, as I was kissed yester e’en

  by a man from whom pure spirit flashes from time to time:

  taking a kiss outside time, a small fence of kisses.

  Moon, bird and flower watcher, I picked out his rooftop

  on the wrists of each day, all the rooms but one

  without light, far more threatened than birds.

  They call September the part in the hair, they call

  the season ten, depending on how the joints

  of the year are going. From a single family

  of lightly travelled streets, from the guncotton

  dried there, a second thread moon

  in a sky of German blue falls on the elbow

  of our opened river. Is cuma liom.

  I walk impossibly uphill

  with the collar hurting my decayed aura.

  Our mothers thought by eights instead of tens.

  Rowe’s Fawn

  When Ireland was a cloud in the west

  that could flex with the waves it was not

  unknown for women to keep the Host

  in their mouths in order to win a kiss:

  falls of high-protein manna,

  much of it gnaws at Ireland from afar.

  Make of your left hand

  not two triangles stitched together

  but a throne for your right,

  like the darnel—like the arm

  of St Gertrude emerging from her shrine

  to receive offerings.

  Honeycross

  The clouds set immediately after the sun,

  that merchant of astonishment, leaving the lower

  branches scorched. The moon like the hand

  of earth’s clock, unlocked an innermost door

  into a past garden.

  Fifteen years ago, on Holy Thursday,

  they left his corpse on a lonely road. The bloodier

  newspapers showed the exact spot in his throat,

  greyness of heaped paving stones, triangular danger-signal,

  a confessional turned on its side, nicely exposing

  his heart, red carnations dropped there.

  I have more than once

  ducked my head from the sound, it seemed incredible

  that a woman was hanging linen up to dry

  where rifles dipped their cranes in salute

  like ill-groomed palm trees across the faded

  vermilion roofs of the thickset city. Grandmother

  back from the longer rigmarole of vespers.

  Holy Trinity approaching, yet nowhere was there sign

  of paint on shutters, weathered to a silver.

  The earth was being pulled through some undrawn line

  of rose-coloured farms and pearl-grey villages

  to plants in their unhurried flow beneath the land,

  standing on tiptoe: Christmas flowers that only seem

  to live in moonlight, bruisewort, or common daisy,

  the Warden pear, now our Black Worcester,

  sweet woodruff for Corpus Christi, narcissi

  which folk call ‘Laus Tibi’, rosemary, husband

  of lavender, the seven spotted ladybird, Our Lady’s

  Bird, all guarded by Saint Dorothy of the Cherries,

  a German garden saint.

  At the Hand and Pen

  The large river the city does not have

  but would be stopped by nothing flowed

  towards the jail at the edge so everyone could

  tell themselves, I went.

  How many times had they closed the university,

  shut down the lecture series? The horizons

  had all been pleated like doubt-peacocks

  shooed away. Like Fay,

  cut in two by bombs, holding her little girl

  low-breaking by the hand, or the ones shot

  at crossroads. She sprinkled holy water

  where the pavement was uneven.

  He took his ballot out of his pocket,

  raised it to his forehead, then traced

  the sign of the cross with it over his chest

  and placed it in the box.

  Telltale

  The city was covered as if by a spider’s web.

  To get to the centre one had to go past

  at least fifty street sentries.

  A simple trip required as much

  as two hours through barricades,

  checkpoints and tank traps.

  A leg, its foot in a boot still attached,

  a vast pool of dark blood

  washed over the back of the market,

  coursing around the cabbages, potatoes

  and shopping bags. Cars doubled

  as ambulances.

  Pedestrian walkways were riddled with cavities

  left by mortar and artillery strikes.

  And after the war some were filled

  as a telltale, with bright red plastic.

  The Makeover

  Four thousand acres of roses and carnations

  leave the upgraded airport within hours

  of being picked. The connectivity

  of the most connected city is the television

  sitting like an eyesore covered

  with a global garment.

  Private, non-world, three-speed city, to meet

  and be seen, for whose beautification

  perfume the colour of urine is sold

  at traffic lights, whose vehicles slide

  through vast excavations and monsoon-stains

  for the under road flyover that will cut

  the ring road’s travel time.

  On grilled balconies and languid seafronts

  we sip Singapore Slings as though

  the carnage had nothing to do with us.

  The car he drove was so big it couldn’t

  come anywhere near where we live.

  Everybody knows who killed him.

  I know. If someone falls ill at night

  there is a birdsong of mobile phones

  in which I am always listening for her,

  a serious girl who does not know her age.

  My Angelism

  Our fifty-year-old linden trees

  have put on another sign—

  in smooth weather a blizzard

  of red snowflakes, red cockerels.

  In this landscape of untended woods

  the oddly regular pattern

  of young pines, flowerless

  but trembling, bristles and turns

  over a floor of field

  where their trunks are drilled

  into an avenue. The navy blue

  police with their white armbands

  without the number of life

  square their fists off the outlawed

  pavement. Sea stings the wall bearing

  the mural and shallow-floods the rice.

  The decayed sun closes its eyes,

  a golden wash-beetle:

  I’ll praise the girl’s slow looks

  with the yellow of the gorse.

  The Barns of Joseph

  Normalization: the square’s new polished look,

  the light as it passes between the buildings

  moves parallel to the ground’s honeyed marble

  and fir-green mottling, finding themselves

  on the street together. Sudden double red

  of a cloud separates the losses to blue,

  a second brown u
nderlies the conceiving

  black opening between the leaves.

  This half-peace war is here

  showing its peaceful face.

  It has its front line of souls hovering

  at knee-height in the indistinct dawn,

  only two-thirds divine,

  crozier-shaped wind heads.

  The Goddess of Smallpox

  It’s all-the-year-round Christmas

  and, oh, come let Him adore you,

  the astral linkings of the house

  cooling, leaving the one superghost.

  What with the magnificent art

  of living, in the doubt of the extreme

  game, the shroud of language

  brings a silence full of certainty

  pretending that language caused

  the world—such an afternoon

  world, poised between the crisis

  of yesterday’s sunset and the dying

  snowflakes, festivals of the mind.

  Death, they say, is not even winter,

  a mere punctuation mark, as we listen

  for her fragrance in the ice which her breath

  has become. In some complete history

  a universe might have these instant

  meadows, might de-flesh or dress in new

  bodies if dew in fact covered

  both sides of their leaves.

  But this slow-release enchantment,

  from eternity’s claustrophobic organic

  spaces, must be God and his mental

  events, his unconstrained imagination

  and choice. Waking Him up

  might make her vanish with her lime-

  topped sword, her bedraggled peacock whisk.

  House Private

  Single rose,

  simplicity,

  single dahlia, treachery and instability.

  The entire clothing used about the person

  should be put into a tub of cold water

  and kept outside the house for twenty-four hours.

  Ladder fern, sincerity and sorrow,

  holly, foresight,

  ivy, attachment.

  The house floors and woodwork

  should be cleansed with hot water,

  the walls limewashed, and every apartment

  fumigated with chloride and vitriol.

  Climbing roses,

  unfailing love,

  wild geranium, steadfast piety.

  The personal clothes should be dried

  before a strong fire, the bed,

  if of straw, chaff, or shavings