Linda misses you,
Claire from Waterside House misses you.
You wanted to fathom the world
but your legs were tired,
you had two months left.
Cookie and Jillian miss you.
You talked about the dark hole
you often found yourself in,
you were happy when you got out
but when you were in it,
there was no talking to you,
you had weeks to go.
The Rinnmore gang miss you.
You got a bad ’flu
and the ’flu got you
the Millennium Bug,
your days were numbered.
Depression and the ’flu didn’t travel
but you did and you never came back.
On December the 9th 1999
you hanged yourself.
Paddy L. and Michael Flaherty miss you.
Your mother rings from your grave
I say where are you?
She says, I’m at Michael’s grave
and it looks lovely today.
CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH
(b.1956)
A Runaway Cow
for Liam Ó Muirthile
I’d say he’d had too much
of the desolation that trickles down
through the glens and the hillocks
steadily as a hearse;
of the lifeless villages in the foothills
as bare of young folk as of soil;
of the old codgers, the hummock-blasters
who turned the peat into good red earth
and who deafened him pink year after year
with their talk of the grand sods of the old days;
of the little white bungalows, attractive
as dandruff in the hairy armpit of the Glen;
of the young people trapped in their destinies
like caged animals out of touch with their instinct;
of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling
in the pity of unemployment, of low morale,
and of the remoteness and narrow-mindedness
of both sides of the Glen;
of the fine young things down in Rory’s
who woke the man in him
but wouldn’t give a curse for his attentions;
of clan boundaries, of old tribal ditches,
of pissing his frustration against the solid walls
race and religion built round him.
He’d had too much of being stuck in the Glen
and with a leap like a runaway cow’s one spring morning
he cleared the walls and hightailed away.
PC
Lament
in memory of my mother
I cried on my mother’s breast, cried sore
The day Mollie died, our old pet ewe
Trapped on a rockface up at Beithí.
It was sultry heat, we’d been looking for her,
Sweating and panting, driving sheep back
From the cliff-edge when we saw her attacked
On a ledge far down. Crows and more crows
Were eating at her. We heard the cries
But couldn’t get near. She was ripped to death
As we suffered her terrible, wild, last breath
And my child’s heart broke. I couldn’t be calmed
No matter how much she’d tighten her arms
And gather me close. I just cried on
Till she hushed me at last with a piggyback
And the promise of treats of potato-cake.
Today it’s my language that’s in its throes,
The poets’ passion, my mothers’ fathers’
Mothers’ language, abandoned and trapped
On a fatal ledge that we won’t attempt.
She’s in agony, I can hear her heave
And gasp and struggle as they arrive,
The beaked and ravenous scavengers
Who are never far. Oh if only anger
Came howling wild out of her grief,
If only she’d bare the teeth of her love
And rout the pack. But she’s giving in,
She’s quivering badly, my mother’s gone
And promises now won’t ease the pain.
Seamus Heaney
GREG DELANTY
(b.1958)
The Cure
to my father
I drop into the printers and graft
to you with my hangover on hearing
the tall drinking tales of your craft
from an apprentice of yours, latching
on to the old typesetter days like myself.
He swore he could write a book.
I thought of how you were partial yourself
to a jorum or two, but you would look
down on my pint-swaggering and remind me
you kept your drinking to Saturday night,
barring births, weddings, deaths and maybe
the odd quick one if the company was right.
And for the most part I keep to that too,
but last night was a night I broke
and went on the rantan from bar to
bar, jawing with whichever bloke,
solving the world’s problems drink by drink
and cigarette by cigarette, swigging
and puffing away the whole lousy stink.
You nagged away in my head about smoking
and how the butts did away with you.
But I swear the way I stood there
and yaketty-yakked, slagged and blew
smoke in the smoke-shrouded air,
coughing your smoker’s cough,
I thought that you had turned into me
or I into you. I laughed your laugh
and then, knowing how you loved company,
I refused to quit the bar and leave you alone
or leave myself alone or whoever we were.
I raised my glass to your surprise return.
And now I hear you guffaw once more
as your apprentice continues to recount
printers’ drink lore and asks if I know
comps at Signature O got a complimentary pint.
I joust our way out the door repeating O O O.
To My Mother, Eileen
I’m threading the eye
of the needle for you again. That is
my specially appointed task, my
gift that you gave me. Ma, watch me slip this
camel of words through. Yes,
rich we are still even if your needlework
has long since gone with the rag-and-bone man
and Da never came home one day, our Dan.
Work Work Work. Lose yourself in work.
That’s what he’d say.
Okay okay.
Ma, listen, I can hear the sticks of our fire spit
like corn turning into popcorn
with the brown insides of rotten teeth. We sit
in our old Slieve Mish house. Norman is just born.
He’s in the pen.
I raise the needle to the light and lick the thread
to stiffen the limp words. I
peer through the eye, focus, put everything out of my head.
I shut my right eye and thread.
I’m important now, a likely lad, instead
of the amadán at Dread School. I have the eye
haven’t I, the knack?
I’m Prince Threader. I missed it that try.
Concentrate. Concentrate. Enough yaketty yak.
There, there, Ma, look, here’s the threaded needle back.
PETER MCDONALD
(b.1962)
The Hand
1
A flat right hand: four fingers and a thumb,
and poised, as though to strike an instrument,
fend off a blow, or maybe stop the waves.
Each evening, it would blatter on the glass
of our front window like a th
underclap,
not breaking it, stretching our nerves past breaking.
2
Thirty years on, and I can’t not drive
in this direction, just to see the place.
There’s nothing much here, nobody about:
Stormont up in the hills, unearthly white
as ever, new houses eating up the fields;
but I forget more now than I remember.
Leaving, I see the parti-coloured kerbstones
with paint from last year or the year before
that fades into this almost-constant rain,
then, on one gable-wall, a raised right hand.
3
It took a full two minutes to run down
from the bus terminus to our front door:
in the last year, I skipped and swerved and darted
all the way back, with tiny ricochets
of stones at my legs and heels. All spring
I ran, and ran so fast I couldn’t stop.
4
We lived in 44A Woodview Drive,
across the road, and just a few doors down
from an apprentice murderer, who learned
his trade in town, and then came home for tea.
The hard skin in my palm is like soft stone:
as I look at it now under the desk-light,
calloused and scuffed and bitten and worn-in,
this part of me is guiltless flesh and bone,
whatever it has done or might yet do.
5
Leaving means going away for the last time,
unnoticed now, hardly worth noticing:
up in the distance, Stormont, unearthly white.
I forget more than I remember – how
this road connects to that, the way to town,
the names of people who lived there, or there.
As I move faster, everything speeds up:
I make the rain stop by raising my hand,
and sunlight loses itself on the Castlereagh hills.
COLETTE BRYCE
(b.1970)
Self-Portrait in the Dark (with Cigarette)
To sleep, perchance
to dream? No chance:
it’s 4 a.m. and I’m wakeful
as an animal,
caught between your presence and the lack.
This is the realm insomniac.
On the window seat, I light a cigarette
from a slim flame and monitor the street –
a stilled film, bathed in amber,
softened now in the wake of a downpour.
Beyond the daffodils
on Magdalen Green, there’s one slow vehicle
pushing its beam along Riverside Drive,
a sign of life;
and two months on
from ‘moving on’
your car, that you haven’t yet picked up,
waits, spattered in raindrops like bubble wrap.
Here, I could easily go off
on a riff
on how cars, like pets, look a little like their owners
but I won’t ‘go there’,
as they say in America,
given it’s a clapped-out Nissan Micra …
And you don’t need to know that
I’ve been driving it illegally at night
in the lamp-lit silence of this city
– you’d only worry –
or, worse, that Morrissey
is jammed in the tape deck now and for eternity;
no. It’s fine, all gleaming hubcaps,
seats like an upright, silhouetted couple;
from the dashboard, the wink
of that small red light I think
is a built-in security system.
In a poem
it could represent a heartbeat or a pulse.
Or loneliness: its vigilance.
Or simply the lighthouse-regular spark
of someone, somewhere, smoking in the dark.
The Poetry Bug
is a moon-pale, lumpish creature
parcelled in translucent skin
papery as filo pastry
patterned faint as a fingerprint
is quite without face or feature
ear or eye or snout
has eight root-like
tentacles or feelers, rough
like knuckly tusks of ginger
clustered at the front.
Invisible to the naked eye
monstrous in microscopy
it loves the lovers’ bed or couch
pillow, quilt or duvet
and feeds, thrives I should say
on human scurf and dander
indeed, is never happier
than feasting on the dust
of love’s shucked husk
the micro-detritus of us.
DAVID WHEATLEY
(b.1970)
Sonnet
stretch pants
cashback
pound shop
store card
hubcaps
tailfin
souped-up
Escort
breakbeat
ringtone
dole day
cheques cashed
loan shark
small change
rat boys
bag snatched
tin can
tomcat
backstreet
dosshouse
TV
late lunch
warmed-up
Chinese
black dog
tongue stud
real nails
fake tan
red light
road rage
brain-dead
Leeds fan
handbrake
wheelspin
pub crawl
big screen
spiked drink
lift home
knocked up
sixteen
knocked up
knocked out
well gone
all gone
all day
all week
stay home
what’s on
chat shows
pig out
hard stuff
hard case
hard luck
fuck life
fuck off
now please
Drift
In Whitby, through its gaping jaw,
I entered the whale, was swept from shore,
began to drift and smuggled my way
in a used coffin to Robin Hood’s Bay,
my one endeavour to route my calls
through a satellite phone at Fylingdales
to where you stood on Whitby sands,
an ice cream cone in both your hands.
*
From Scarborough prom where donkeys roamed
I fled in a dodgem and made for home
until sparks flew and I came to grief
bumped up against Anne Brontë’s grave,
and went to ground in a B&B,
where I watched the tide and bade goodbye
with a postcard and an unpaid bill
and jumped on a trawler, drifting still.
*
In Bempton of the guanoed cliffs
I lived on gulls’ eggs and dry leaves,
the puffins made me a laughing stock
and heckled and pecked me off their rock
to Brid where I won you a teddy bear.
You get my drift. I was drifting far
but only in search of a tidal spate
to wash me up, washed up, at your feet.
*
In Withernsea, taking care to shun
a nightclub called Oblivion
I shaved on a wind farm’s turbine blade
and watched the last of the coastline slide
to where land gave itself up for lost,
threw itself off itself in disgust,
on Spurn, long dreamt-of vanishing point,
<
br /> end of the line, of the world: the end
*
of nothing, as it turned out. I went down
once, twice, thrice, and woke up thrown
on a beach that could only be Skegness.
All that coastal drift and mess
had merely relocated south.
I jumped back into the whale’s huge mouth
to drift back north and start again.
You’d left me my ice cream. But you were gone.
SINÉAD MORRISSEY
(b.1972)
Pilots
It was black as the slick-stunned coast of Kuwait
over Belfast Lough when the whales came up
(bar the eyelights of aeroplanes, angling in into the airport
out of the east, like Venus on a kitestring being reeled
to earth). All night they surfaced and swam
among the detritus of Sellafield and the panic
of godwits and redshanks.
By morning
we’d counted fifty (species Globicephala melaena)
and Radio Ulster was construing a history. They’d left a sister
rotting on a Cornish beach, and then come here, to this dim
smoke-throated cistern, where the emptying tide leaves a scum
of musselshell and the smell of landfill and drains.
To mourn? Or to warn? Day drummed its thumbs
on their globular foreheads.
Neither due,
nor quarry, nor necessary, nor asked for, nor understood
upon arrival – what did we reckon to dress them in?
Nothing would fit. Not the man in oilskin working in the warehouse
of a whale, from the film of Sir Shackleton’s blasted Endeavour,
as though a hill had opened onto fairytale measures
of blubber and baleen, and this was the money-
god’s recompense;
not the huge
Blue seen from the sky, its own floating eco-system, furred
at the edges with surf; nor the unbridgeable flick
of its three-storey tail, bidding goodbye to this angular world
before barrelling under. We remembered a kind of singing,
or rather our take on it: some dismal chorus of want and wistfulness
resounding around the planet, alarmed and prophetic,
with all the foresight we lack –
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 74
