I want to say to my friends of thirty years ago
And to daughters and a son that Belfast is our home,
Prose a river still – the Liffey, the Lagan – and poetry
A fountain that plays in an imaginary Front Square.
When snow falls it is feathers from the wings of Icarus.
MICHAEL LONGLEY
Dreams of a Summer Night
The girls are quiet now in the house upstairs.
Still bright at ten with no need of music
on local habitations, tile and brick,
as the moon rises like a magic lamp
hung in a thorn bush and the sun retires
beyond the Bandon River; but I put on
young Mozart’s Oboe Concerto, K.314,
the opening bit, in search of a nice tune –
and find it straight away, quick and exact,
the broken silence of the creative act.
Strangely, after the gold rush and the slump,
what remains is a great sense of relief.
Can we relax now and get on with life?
Step out and take a deep breath of night air
in peace, not always having to defer
to market forces, to the great hegemony,
the global hurricane, the rule of money?
High over Innishannon a single star
on the woods of this unthickly wooded shore.
Can we turn now to the important things
like visible scents, how even silence sings?
How we grew frolicsome one sunny June
some sixty years ago at Cushendun
in our young lives of clover, clock and cloud,
the first awakenings under a northern sky
heartbreaking in its extremity? ‘One day
the old grow young,’ as the old rock star said.
The first movement – aperto, open, frank –
declares its candour with a lively run
of oboe riffs; adagio, and we think
of the proactive soul in wind and wood
before revisiting the original mood
though more maturely, having lived meanwhile.
It’s far from what Said meant by late style
since it was written by a twenty-year-old;
but I’m late listening, taking it all in
like a dreamt ‘gentle concord’ in the world.
Drilling for oil and war we seldom register
the resilient silence strewn about our toes
and under our very noses: thyme and sage,
mushroom and violet, briony, briar rose
and other elfin species. Soppy, I sniff
inchoate presences in the dim, substantive
trance of a summer night, its peace and quiet,
remembering poetry is a real mirage
in an unreal world of cash and babble,
ringtone and car alarm, and remains ‘a point of
departure not from reality but to it’ –
wherein lies one function of the poet,
to be instrumental in the soul’s increase.
During the May rising they used to say
«Prenez vos désirs pour la réalité;
l’imagination au pouvoir!» These very reasonable
demands are even more urgent for us today
trying to save ourselves from corporate space,
from virtuality with its image crime,
and Mozart from the ubiquitous pop sound:
fiddle and flute, soft oboe and clarinet,
the next best thing to silence in the mind,
that scarce but still renewable resource.
The young produce the liveliest work of course
but soon enough it’s Wild Strawberries time,
age and experience, the lost summer house,
girls on a jetty, ‘the old sunlit face’.
There was a week of dreams for some reason,
some Kafkaesque and some more seasonable:
a concrete labyrinth with no obvious exit,
a maze of corridors, little natural light,
gruff notices prohibiting this and that,
no eating, drinking, smoking, and don’t laugh,
surly administrative and security staff.
Alarms went off at intervals. Doors were shut
and windows, where there were windows, unopenable;
from secret offices a mysterious mumble
qualifying the air-conditioned silence:
Genetics, Human Resources, Behavioural Sciences.
Someone had proved the soul doesn’t exist
and wiped out any traces of the past;
all were in danger but it faded fast
at the last minute, only to be replaced
by animations, eyes in a twitchy forest,
oak limbs outgrabbing, knuckles whitening, rock
speaking, Rackham púcas at face and neck.
These vanished too; then an erotic bower
snowed in by a warm leaf-and-petal shower
around the long ears and the bristling back.
She lay there in soft focus, her bright eye
moist with provocation; but just as I …
So many quiet shores ‘bleared, smeared with toil’,
there’s nowhere for a sticky duck to hide
from the unchecked invasion of crude oil
dumped on the sand by a once friendly tide;
and if they drill here what else do we gain
but a bonanza for an acquisitive crowd
of blow-hard types, determined, garish, loud?
Would we ever get our old lives back again?
Gossip is history, history is gossip –
the locals talking in a hardware shop
about Tom Barry, James II, Marlborough
or that torpedo from a German sub,
the opening wine bar and the closing pub,
the pharmaceutical giant at Dunderrow,
its ethics, working conditions and so on,
a proposal to dig the whole town up again
for fibre optics and more ‘information’
now on the table at the Kinsale borough
council and more than likely to go through.
‘All politics is local’, right where you are.
Communities are the real vehicles of power
not merely its last points of application
or they should be, says Amit Chaudhuri;
water and gas have first consideration
as every pre-Socratic thinker knew.
You hear a different music of the spheres
depending where you sit in the concert space,
so this is the centre of the whole creation:
important or trivial, it all finishes here
on your own starlit doorstep. It could be worse.
A boreal sun, white nights of Petersburg!
The never fading gleam of Tír na nÓg!
But you can have too much of shiny things.
The dark has its own wisdom, its own owl wings,
for this is when the spirits come out to play
and the grim ghosts we daren’t admit by day.
Nacht und Träume: geese dreaming of maize,
old Siggi’s youngest crying out for ‘stwawbewwies’
the entrepreneur with his elaborate schemes,
love dreams, exam dreams and anxiety dreams
‘over-interpreted as they need to be.
I had a patient once …’ But even he
granted the mystery of autonomous art,
those strange impulses circuiting the brain,
the plays of Shakespeare, symphonies of Mozart.
Eleven and still light. No more music now
except for night and silence round the place.
Gazing into the past I hear once more
fathers and uncles back from a won war
and see ‘the ice-cream on the pier’, the rain
and windy
picnics laid out under the brow
of the Cave Hill, Belfast laid out below –
then jump-cut to the dreams, vivid but short,
scaring us as they did when we were ten:
child murder in Macbeth, wolves at the door,
the dizzying height and the obscure disgrace,
indictments for a guilt we seldom face.
Sometimes you’re hauled before a midnight court,
women presiding, to face charges of
failure in generosity, patience, love
and finer feeling. Often the chief judge
condemns you roundly to a change of heart
and sends you down abruptly for an age
of solitary. Read me the riot act again
in the grave, measured tone you used to restrain
my frantic idiocies. The least I can do
is praise your qualities the one way I know
now that I mourn, as here, your grace and poise,
your pungent wit, the laughter in your eyes,
the buoyant upbeat, the interior light
and those odd melancholy moments when
your head would close down with fastidious pain
at a world too coarse and tragic to be borne.
Aspiring spirit, late in finding rest
and harmony, may you have peace at last.
Today in a freak of thought I wondered if
the conservation-of-energy law applies
to souls and promises us eternal life.
At times like this we let ourselves imagine
some substance in the old claim of religion
that we don’t die, not really. Don’t light residues
commingle with the other starry dead
when our cold ashes in the earth are laid
or scattered on the waves at Port na Spaniagh
and the mad particles begin to spin
like sand grains in the night? Our contribution:
a few good books and a few words of caution.
You the unborn, the bright ones who come later,
remember we too sparkled in the sun,
burst on the shingle, perished underwater,
revolved our secrets in the vast oceans
of time, and live on in our transmigrations.
And you, old friend, Brancusi’s ‘Sleeping Muse’,
who saved me when I’d nothing left to lose,
I can still wish for what you wish for too:
‘the amazing truth ’tis no witchcraft to see’,
refreshed tradition, lateral thought, a new
world politics and a disabused serenity.
These summer mornings I get up at five,
biro in hand, surprised to be still alive,
grateful for all the clichés and beguiled
by the first birdsong, the first light, the wild
relationship of water and cloud kingdoms
shaping our wishes and our waking dreams.
It’s late, so lights out even as a last glow
still lingers on the gardens, on roof and rock:
mid-June now and it’s never completely dark
but vague, ambrosial, metamorphic, slow
as if some happy mischief is at work
in the mist-pearly undergrowth below,
transfiguring the earth from dusk to dawn.
The moon floats from a cloud and two dogs bark;
the anthropomorphic trees are trees again,
the human forms recover their wood-grain
and the prehensile skins of hand and groin
revert, the limbs to branches, hair to leaves
as they resume their old arboreal lives.
The girls are fast asleep in the rooms above.
Back here from dreamland with a dewy leaf
to keep me right and ward off disbelief,
I await the daylight we were born to love:
birds at a window, boats on a rising wave,
light dancing on dawn water, the lives we live.
DEREK MAHON
Extra Helpings
In our primary school
Set lunch was the rule
Though in Scotland we call that meal ‘dinner’.
We tucked in like starvelings,
Inchinnan’s wee darlings,
And it didn’t make thin children thinner.
But what I liked best
Was disliked by the rest,
Rice pudding with raisins and bloated sultanas,
Stewed fruit and dumplings
In big extra helpings
And hooray for first post-War bananas!
It was very good scoff
So I polished it off
A very dab hand with a spoon,
a spoon,
A very dab hand with my spoon.
Detested mashed turnip
Gave most kids the pip
While cabbage was much the same tale.
No shortage of roots, and no hardship of greens –
After mine I ate Harry’s, then Elspeth’s, then Jean’s,
O a glutton for turnips and kail.
It was very good scoff
So I polished it off
A very dab hand with a fork,
a fork,
A very dab hand with my fork.
I used to be slim.
I used to be slim!
‘Look!’ they say now. ‘There’s at least three of him!’
To which I reply
With a daggerly eye,
‘Well, that’s better than three-quarters you!’
But my clothes don’t fit
I’m fed up with it
And the sylph in me’s guilty and blue.
Semolina and sago with jam,
with jam,
Oh dear, what a pudding I am,
I am,
Oh dear, what a pudding I am.
But I’m longing for lunch
And something to munch
Though I wish it was back in that school
When the dinner-bell rings
And all good things
Await to be guzzled until I am happy and full.
Dear God, I’d die
For Shepherd’s Pie
In 1949 or 1950
When the dinner-bell rings
And all good things
Draw children on the sniff and make then nifty.
It was very good scoff
So I polished it off –
Oh dear, what a pudding I am,
I am,
Oh dear, what a pudding I am,
But a very dab hand with a spoon,
a spoon,
And a very dab hand with a fork.
DOUGLAS DUNN
Swineherd
When all this is over, said the swineherd,
I mean to retire, where
Nobody will have heard about my special skills
And conversation is mainly about the weather.
I intend to learn how to make coffee, at least as well
As the Portuguese lay-sister in the kitchen
And polish the brass fenders every day.
I want to lie awake at night
Listening to cream crawling to the top of the jug
And the water lying soft in the cistern.
I want to see an orchard where the trees grow in straight lines
And the yellow fox finds shelter between the navy-blue trunks,
Where it gets dark early in summer
And the apple-blossom is allowed to wither on the bough.
EILÉAN NÍ CHUILLEANÁIN
gaelic is alive
in memoriam caitlín maude
let’s put aside
today’s work
and dance to
the wind’s port-à-beul
‘gaelic is alive’
despite all arrows
she climbs the hillside
sapling of oak in her arms
her defiant eyes
reaching the far-
off horizon
she aims for the far-off horizon
a bright lasting star in her breast
defend her from too bold a leap
but be dancing be dancing
it is work to be dancing
AONGHAS MACNEACAIL
translated by the author
When I Grow Up
When I grow up I want to have a bad leg.
I want to limp down the street I live in
without knowing where I am. I want the disease
where you put your hand on your hip
and lean forward slightly, groaning to yourself.
If a little boy asks me the way
I’ll try and touch him between the legs.
What a dirty old man I’m going to be when I grow up!
What shall we do with me?
I promise I’ll be good
if you let me fall over in the street
and lie there calling like a baby bird. Please,
nobody come. I’m perfectly all right. I like it here.
I wonder would it be possible
to get me into a National Health Hospice
somewhere in Manchester?
I’ll stand in the middle of my cubicle
holding onto a piece of string for safety,
shaking like a leaf at the thought of my suitcase.
I’d certainly like to have a nervous tic
so I can purse my lips up all the time
like Cecil Beaton. Can I be completely bald, please?
I love the smell of old pee.
Why can’t I smell like that?
When I grow up I want a thin piece of steel
inserted into my penis for some reason.
Nobody’s to tell me why it’s there. I want to guess!
Tell me, is that a bottle of old Burgundy
under my bed? I never can tell
if I feel randy any more, can you?
I think it’s only fair that I should be allowed
to cough up a bit of blood when I feel like it.
My daughter will bring me a special air cushion
to hold me upright and I’ll watch
in baffled admiration as she blows it up for me.
Here’s my list: nappies, story books, munchies,
something else. What was the other thing?
I can’t remember exactly,
The Map and the Clock Page 39