combing and stroking
the landscape, till
the valley gleams
like the pile upon
a mountain pony’s coat.
Herbert Street Revisited
for Madeleine
I
A light is burning late
in this Georgian Dublin street:
someone is leading our old lives!
And our black cat scampers again
through the wet grass of the convent garden
upon his masculine errands.
The pubs shut: a released bull,
Behan shoulders up the street,
topples into our basement, roaring ‘John!’
A pony and donkey cropped flank
by flank under the trees opposite;
short neck up, long neck down,
as Nurse Mullen knelt by her bedside
to pray for her lost Mayo hills,
the bruised bodies of Easter Volunteers.
Animals, neighbours, treading the pattern
of one time and place into history,
like our early marriage, while
tall windows looked down upon us
from walls flushed light pink or salmon
watching and enduring succession.
II
As I leave, you whisper,
‘Don’t betray our truth,’
and like a ghost dancer,
invoking a lost tribal strength,
I halt in tree-fed darkness
to summon back our past,
and celebrate a love that eased
so kindly, the dying bone,
enabling the spirit to sing
of old happiness, when alone.
III
So put the leaves back on the tree,
put the tree back in the ground,
let Brendan trundle his corpse down
the street singing, like Molly Malone.
Let the black cat, tiny emissary
of our happiness, streak again
through the darkness, to fall soft
clawed into a landlord’s dustbin.
Let Nurse Mullen take the last
train to Westport, and die upright
in her chair, facing a window
warm with the blue slopes of Nephin.
And let the pony and donkey come –
look, someone has left the gate open –
like hobbyhorses linked in
the slow motion of a dream
parading side by side, down
the length of Herbert Street,
rising and falling, lifting
their hooves through the moonlight.
Mount Eagle
I
The eagle looked at this changing world;
sighed and disappeared into the mountain.
Before he left he had a last reconnoitre:
the multi-coloured boats in the harbour
nodded their masts and a sandy white
crescent of strand smiled back at him.
How he liked the slight, drunk lurch
of the fishing fleet, the tide hoist-
ing them a little, at their ropes’ end.
Beyond, wrack, and the jutting rocks
emerging, slowly, monsters stained
and slimed with strands of seaweed.
Ashore, beached boats and lobster-
pots, settled as hens in the sand.
II
Content was life in its easiest form;
another was the sudden growling storm
which the brooding eagle preferred,
bending his huge wings into the winds’
wild buffeting, or thrusting down along
the wide sky, at an angle, slideways
to survey the boats, scurrying homewards,
tacking against the now contrary winds,
all of whom he knew by their names.
To be angry in the morning, calmed
by midday, but brooding again in
the evening was all in a day’s quirk
with lengthy intervals for silence,
gliding along, like a blessing, while
the fleet toiled on earnestly beneath
him, bulging with a fine day’s catch.
III
But now he had to enter the mountain.
Why? Because a cliff had asked him?
The whole world was changing, with one
language dying; and another encroaching,
bright with buckets, cries of children.
There seemed to be no end to them,
and the region needed a guardian –
so the mountain had told him. And
a different destiny lay before him:
to be the spirit of that mountain.
Everyone would stand in awe of him.
When he was wrapped in the mist’s caul
they would withdraw because of him,
peer from behind blind or curtain.
When he lifted his wide forehead
bold with light, in the morning,
they would all laugh and smile with him.
It was a greater task than an eagle’s
aloofness, but sometimes, under his oilskin
of coiled mist, he sighs for lost freedom.
She Cries
She puts her face against the wall
and cries, crying for herself,
crying for our children, crying
for all of us
in this strange age
of shrinking space, with the needle
of Concorde saluting Mount Gabriel
with its supersonic boom, soaring
from London or Paris to Washington,
a slender, metallic, flying swan
and all the other paraphernalia, hidden
missiles hoarded in silos, bloated
astronauts striding the dusty moon,
and far beyond, our lonely message,
that long probe towards Venus
but most of all for her husband
she cries, against the wall,
the poet at his wooden desk,
that toad with a jewel in his head,
no longer privileged, but still
trying to crash, without faltering,
the sound barrier, the dying word.
BRENDAN KENNELLY
(b.1936)
from The Book of Judas
prades
ozzie is stonemad about prades
so he say kummon ta belfast
for de 12th an we see de orangemen
beatin de shit outa de drums
beltin em as if dey was katliks’ heads
so we set out from dublin
an landed in belfast for de fun
it was brill
dere was colour an music an everyone
was havin a go at sumtin i dunno
what but i’ll never forget ozzie in
de middul of all de excitement
pickin pockets right left and centre
on de train back to dublin he was laffin his head
off, dere shud be more fukken prades he said
from The Man Made of Rain
21
There’s no edge, only a new place with
one side veering away into nothing and
Mary Moroney is kindness itself, all care
loving care, turns over that body anytime
day or night.
Colours of the left leg, cut from ankle to groin
or groin to ankle if you prefer, I like
ankle to groin for reasons I’ll not go into here,
invade the head and capture
three major cities
with the convinced skill of Oliver Cromwell
my old foepal for whom I received
a whack on the jaw on O’Connell Bridge
the night after I mentioned to Gaybo
Oliver had a lot going for him
and we could do with a visit now.
He’d show the killers h
ow to behave so he would,
he’d take the shine off their bliss,
he’d lay down the law, the Lugs Branigan.
Black yellow red brown and
a vaguely disgusting white
are the colours of my left leg.
They hurtle into each other like dirty footballers,
you’d swear my colours wanted to knock each other out,
I was white once, or as white as the next Paddy,
the only thing to do when you’re backward is
let yourself fly, I’m blueredblackyellowbrown
and I don’t mind it at all
so don’t give it a thought if you see me cry.
I never thought I’d see the day
when I’d cry like the rain
and not begin to know why.
Truth is the tears I can never explain.
Say I’m buried, say I’m on show somewhere,
on exhibition in Merrion Square,
a postmodern explosion of latent rebellions,
Handy Andy from New York would enjoy me
and I haven’t even been bombed
or expelled from my province
to become a sly colonizing refugee
with a genius for eliciting sympathy.
I haven’t cut off my ear
or jumped off a bridge
or distinguished between essential and obvious
because here you could take these labels
turn them upside down for a laugh
and find the battle of the colours
going on in my skin
in that room in the Gallery
where they hang masterpieces
like Judas moving in for the kiss
discovered in old Jesuits’ bedrooms
or Big Houses down the country
the I R A forgot to burn
or was it the other lads?
Someone will burn them some day,
don’t worry your head.
Black yellow brown red
blood on the pillow
a woman in my bed
where did she come from?
It was like a tractor going over your body,
says Shirley Love
with the angeltouch.
Massey Ferguson was my favourite tractor,
treacherous bastards tractors are,
plough you into the ground in no time at all
when you wouldn’t be looking
with nothing but the green green
grass of home for company
and a trickle of red, you wonder
a moment what is the source of red,
red red who called it red,
woman nowoman in my bed?
Eyelids fall.
The colours are even clearer now
and a few new ones
have joined the company.
These new ones were born in the mind of snow
but they never honoured me till now.
O the colours of pain
are enough to make me dance
at a feis in a field
between Asdee and Ballybunion.
Dance, sing the colours, dance
till he comes, man of rain
whose colours the rainbow envies.
He looks at the colours of my left leg,
touches them, they start to change
into the colours of each other,
Jews into Arabs, Arabs into Jews,
Ulster Protestants into Ulster Catholics
and vice versa, making new colours,
no words for them, not yet, no words
needed they flow
like trout like eels in the Feale,
there is no edge, only this new place
where I am real, real
as my colours
in late October
with leaves falling
and Dermot Gillespie
in the next bed
breathing,
against all the evidence
breathing.
SEAMUS HEANEY
Broagh
Riverbank, the long rigs
ending in broad docken
and a canopied pad
down to the ford.
The garden mould
bruised easily, the shower
gathering in your heelmark
was the black O
in Broagh,
its low tattoo
among the windy boortrees
and rhubarb-blades
ended almost
suddenly, like that last
gh the strangers found
difficult to manage.
The Tollund Man
I
Some day I will go to Aarhus
To see his peat-brown head,
The mild pods of his eyelids,
His pointed skin cap.
In the flat country nearby
Where they dug him out,
His last gruel of winter seeds
Caked in his stomach,
Naked except for
The cap, noose and girdle,
I will stand a long time.
Bridegroom to the goddess,
She tightened her torc on him
And opened her fen,
Those dark juices working
Him to a saint’s kept body,
Trove of the turfcutters’
Honeycombed workings.
Now his stained face
Reposes at Aarhus.
II
I could risk blasphemy,
Consecrate the cauldron bog
Our holy ground and pray
Him to make germinate
The scattered, ambushed
Flesh of labourers,
Stockinged corpses
Laid out in the farmyards,
Tell-tale skin and teeth
Flecking the sleepers
Of four young brothers, trailed
For miles along the lines.
III
Something of his sad freedom
As he rode the tumbril
Should come to me, driving,
Saying the names
Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,
Watching the pointing hands
Of country people,
Not knowing their tongue.
Out there in Jutland
In the old man-killing parishes
I will feel lost,
Unhappy and at home.
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 roadblock?
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.<
br />
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.
Song
A rowan like a lipsticked girl.
Between the by-road and the main road
Alder trees at a wet and dripping distance
Stand off among the rushes.
There are the mud-flowers of dialect
And the immortelles of perfect pitch
And that moment when the bird sings very close
To the music of what happens.
The Harvest Bow
As you plaited the harvest bow
You implicated the mellowed silence in you
In wheat that does not rust
But brightens as it tightens twist by twist
Into a knowable corona,
A throwaway love-knot of straw.
Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks
And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of gamecocks
Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent
Until your fingers moved somnambulant:
I tell and finger it like braille,
Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable,
And if I spy into its golden loops
I see us walk between the railway slopes
Into an evening of long grass and midges,
Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 63
