Do Not Go Gentle

by Neil Astley

  Until something like this, some Harold Brodkey wandering into your mind,

  as exasperating as ever, and, oh my, as brilliant, as charming, unwound from his web

  to confront you with how ridden you are with unthought regret, how diminished,

  how well you’ll know you’ll clink on to the next rationalization, the next loss, the next lie.

  C.K. WILLIAMS (b. 1936)

  Years go by

  (FROM Poem without a title)

  Father I say. Dad? You again?

  I take your arm, your elbow,

  I turn you around in the dark and I say

  go back now, you’re sleepwalking again,

  you’re talking out loud again, talking in tongues

  and your dream is disturbing my dream.

  And none of this is any of your apples,

  and even now as the centuries begin to happen

  I can say: go away, you and all your violence.

  Shush, now, old man.

  Time to go back to your seat in the one-and-nines,

  to your black bench on the Esplanade,

  your name and your dates on a metal plate, back

  to your own deckchair on the pier, your very own

  kitchen chair tipped back on the red kitchen tiles

  and you asleep, your feet up on the brass fender

  and the fire banked, your cheek cocked

  to the radio set, this is the 9 o’clock news Dad.

  It’s time. It’s long past it.

  Time to go back up the long pale corridor

  there’s no coming back from.

  KEN SMITH (1938-2003)

  I See You Dancing, Father

  No sooner downstairs after the night’s rest

  And in the door

  Than you started to dance a step

  In the middle of the kitchen floor.

  And as you danced

  You whistled.

  You made your own music

  Always in tune with yourself.

  Well, nearly always, anyway.

  You’re buried now

  In Lislaughtin Abbey

  And whenever I think of you

  I go back beyond the old man

  Mind and body broken

  To find the unbroken man.

  It is the moment before the dance begins,

  Your lips are enjoying themselves

  Whistling an air.

  Whatever happens or cannot happen

  In the time I have to spare

  I see you dancing, father.

  BRENDAN KENNELLY (b. 1936)

  In Memory of My Mother

  I do not think of you lying in the wet clay

  Of a Monaghan graveyard; I see

  You walking down a lane among the poplars

  On your way to the station, or happily

  Going to second Mass on a summer Sunday –

  You meet me and you say:

  ‘Don’t forget to see about the cattle –’

  Among your earthiest words the angels stray.

  And I think of you walking along a headland

  Of green oats in June,

  So full of repose, so rich with life –

  And I see us meeting at the end of a town

  On a fair day by accident, after

  The bargains are all made and we can walk

  Together through the shops and stalls and markets

  Free in the oriental streets of thought.

  O you are not lying in the wet clay,

  For it is a harvest evening now and we

  Are piling up the ricks against the moonlight

  And you smile up at us – eternally.

  PATRICK KAVANAGH (1904-67)

  The Dead

  The dead are always looking down on us, they say,

  while we are putting on our shoes or making a sandwich,

  they are looking down through the glass-bottom boats of heaven

  as they row themselves slowly through eternity.

  They watch the tops of our heads moving below on earth,

  and when we lie down in a field or on a couch,

  drugged perhaps by the hum of a warm afternoon,

  they think we are looking back at them,

  which makes them lift their oars and fall silent

  and wait, like parents, for us to close our eyes.

  BILLY COLLINS (b. 1941)

  Resurrection

  Is it true that after this life of ours we shall one day be awakened

  by a terrifying clamour of trumpets?

  Forgive me, God, but I console myself

  that the beginning and resurrection of all of us dead

  will simply be announced by the crowing of the cock.

  After that we’ll remain lying down a while…

  The first to get up

  will be Mother… We’ll hear her

  quietly laying the fire,

  quietly putting the kettle on the stove

  and cosily taking the teapot out of the cupboard.

  We’ll be home once more.

  VLADIMÍR HOLAN (1905-80)

  translated from the Czech by George Theiner

  Eden Rock

  They are waiting for me somewhere beyond Eden Rock:

  My father, twenty-five, in the same suit

  Of Genuine Irish Tweed, his terrier Jack

  Still two years old and trembling at his feet.

  My mother, twenty-three, in a sprigged dress

  Drawn at the waist, ribbon in her straw hat,

  Has spread the stiff white cloth over the grass.

  Her hair, the colour of wheat, takes on the light.

  She pours tea from a Thermos, the milk straight

  From an old H.P. sauce bottle, a screw

  Of paper for a cork; slowly sets out

  The same three plates, the tin cups painted blue.

  The sky whitens as if lit by three suns.

  My mother shades her eyes and looks my way

  Over the drifted stream. My father spins

  A stone along the water. Leisurely,

  They beckon to me from the other bank.

  I hear them call, ‘See where the stream-path is!

  Crossing is not as hard as you might think.’

  I had not thought that it would be like this.

  CHARLES CAUSLEY (b. 1917)

  Inside Our Dreams

  Where do people go to when they die?

  Somewhere down below or in the sky?

  ‘I can’t be sure,’ said Grandad, ‘but it seems

  They simply set up home inside our dreams.’

  JEANNE WILLIS (b. 1959)

  Song

  Hari is a dhobi

  takes in

  all stained souls.

  In the river

  of his love,

  with the soap

  of his peace

  glowing

  iridescent in the sun

  he washes

  every one.

  No envious smear

  returns.

  The souls

  he’s done

  are like muslin

  when worn, says Meera.

  MEERA (16th century poet-saint)

  translated from the Rajasthani version of Hindu

  by Shama Futehally

  Haiku

  White butterfly

  darting among pinks –

  whose spirit?

  SHIKI (1867-1902)

  translated from the Japanese

  by Lucien Stryk & Takashi Ikemoto

  6

  Nothing Dies

  RELEASE & LETTING GO

  Your essence was not born and will not die. It is neither being nor nonbeing. It is not a void nor does it have form. It experiences neither pleasure nor pain. If you ponder what it is in you that feels the pain of this sickness, and beyond that you do not think or desire or ask anything, and if your mind dissolves like vapour in the sky, then the path to rebirth is blocked and the moment of insta
nce release has come.

  BASSUI

  Total annihilation is impossible. We are the prisoners of an infinity without outlet, wherein nothing perishes, wherein everything is dispersed, but nothing lost. Neither a body nor a thought can drop out of the universe, out of time and space. Not an atom of our flesh, not a quiver of our nerves, will go where they will cease to be, for there is no place where anything ceases to be…It is as contradictory to the nature of our reason and probably of all imaginable reason to conceive nothingness as to conceive limits to infinity.

  MAURICE MAETERLINCK

  MANY POEMS show our lives as following the natural cycles of the Earth, and when autumn comes, it is time to let go, for winter will be followed by rebirth in spring. We must believe in the possibility of resurrection at the same time as we accept the inevitability of withdrawal, for death is not only inescapable but a defining force in life itself; as American poet Louise Glück has written: ‘Human beings must be taught to love / silence and darkness.’ The poems in this section reflect a range of beliefs: for some, resurrection is followed by reincarnation: ‘Why cling to one life till it is oiled and ragged?’ asks Rumi (82); while for others it involves living on through children or spiritual renewal. That sense of letting go also informs poems which view death as a welcome release from painful illness or from the prison of old age, but death can also be welcomed when life has been lived to the full: ‘I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world,’ writes Mary Oliver in ‘When Death Comes’ (83).

  After Great Pain

  After great pain a formal feeling comes –

  The nerves sit ceremonious like tombs;

  The stiff Heart questions – was it He that bore?

  And yesterday – or centuries before?

  The feet mechanical

  Go round a wooden way

  Of ground or air or Ought, regardless grown,

  A quartz contentment like a stone.

  This is the hour of lead

  Remembered if outlived,

  As freezing persons recollect the snow –

  First chill, then stupor, then the letting go.

  EMILY DICKINSON (1830-96)

  In Blackwater Woods

  Look, the trees

  are turning

  their own bodies

  into pillars

  of light,

  are giving off the rich

  fragrance of cinnamon

  and fulfillment,

  the long tapers

  of cattails

  are bursting and floating away over

  the blue shoulders

  of the ponds,

  and every pond,

  no matter what its

  name is, is

  nameless now.

  Every year

  everything

  I have ever learned

  in my lifetime

  leads back to this: the fires

  and the black river of loss

  whose other side

  is salvation,

  whose meaning

  none of us will ever know.

  To live in this world

  you must be able

  to do three things:

  to love what is mortal;

  to hold it

  against your bones knowing

  your own life depends on it;

  and, when the time comes to let it go,

  to let it go.

  MARY OLIVER (b. 1935)

  from Song of Myself

  A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;

  How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.

  I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.

  Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,

  A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,

  Bearing the owner’s name someway in the comers, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?

  Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.

  Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,

  And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,

  Growing among black folks as among white,

  Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.

  And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.

  Tenderly will I use you curling grass,

  It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,

  It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,

  It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers’ laps,

  And here you are the mothers’ laps.

  This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,

  Darker than the colorless beards of old men,

  Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.

  O I perceive after all so many uttering tongues,

  And I perceive they do not come from the roofs of mouths for nothing.

  I wish I could translate the hints about the dead young men and women,

  And the hints about old men and mothers, and the offspring taken soon out of their laps.

  What do you think has become of the young and old men?

  And what do you think has become of the women and children?

  They are alive and well somewhere,

  The smallest sprout shows there is really no death,

  And if ever there was it led forward life, and does not wait at the end to arrest it,

  And ceas’d the moment life appear’d.

  All goes onward and outward, nothing collapses,

  And to die is different from what any one supposed, and luckier.

  WALT WHITMAN (1819-82)

  Unmarked Boxes

  Don’t grieve. Anything you lose comes round

  in another form. The child weaned from mother’s milk

  now drinks wine and honey mixed.

  God’s joy moves from unmarked box to unmarked box,

  from cell to cell. As rainwater, down into flowerbed.

  As roses, up from ground.

  Now it looks like a plate of rice and fish,

  now a cliff covered with vines,

  now a horse being saddled.

  It hides within these,

  till one day it cracks them open.

  Part of the self leaves the body when we sleep

  and changes shape. You might say, ‘Last night

  I was a cypress tree, a small bed of tulips,

  a field of grapevines.’ Then the phantasm goes away.

  You’re back in the room.

  I don’t want to make anyone fearful.

  Hear what’s behind what I say.

  Tatatumtum, tatum, tatadum.

  There’s the light gold of wheat in the sun

  and the gold of bread made from that wheat.

  I have neither. I’m only talking about them,

  as a town in the desert looks up

  at stars on a clear night.

  RUMI (1207-73)

  translated from the Persian by Coleman Barks with John Moyne

  The Creation

  Now that I know you are gone

  I have to try, like Rauschenberg,

  to rub out, line by line,

  your picture, feeling as I rub

  the maker’s most inhuman

  joy, seeing as I rub

  the paper’s slow, awful return

  to possibility.

  Five times you screamed and won

  from your short body a big boy

  or a tall girl to join

  the rest of us here,

  and now let daughter or son

  wear all that’s left of your face

  when this drawing’s undone.

  It is hard, heavy work.

  The pencil indented the grain

  of the paper, and I scour

  a long time on a cheekbone


  that doesn’t want to disappear,

  hoping my fingers won’t learn

  its line from going over and over

  it. I replace your chin

  with dead white.

  Once, in a little vain

  coquettishness, you joined

  your party late, hair down

  to your waist, and let the men

  watch you twist it around

  to a blonde rope and pin

  the richness of its coils

  into a familiar bun.

  And now I make you bald

  with my abrasion.

  The hours we had to drink

  before you’d put the dinner on!

  My eraser’s wet with sweat

  as it moves on a frown

  of long, tipsy decision:

  were we all so drunk

  it didn’t matter, or should you strain

  the Mornay sauce?

  Already we are worn,

  the eraser and I, and we

  are nearing your eyes. Your garden