The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

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The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 56

by Patrick Crotty (ed)

And as once her dancing body

  Made star-lit princes sweat,

  So I’ll just clack: though her ghost lacks a back

  There’s music in the old bones yet.

  PATRICK MACDONOGH

  (1902–61)

  No Mean City

  Though naughty flesh will multiply

  Our chief delight is in division;

  Whatever of Divinity

  We all are Doctors of Derision.

  Content to risk a far salvation

  For the quick coinage of a laugh

  We cut, to make wit’s reputation,

  Our total of two friends by half.

  O, Come to the Land

  O, come to the land of the saint and the scholar

  Where learning and piety live without quarrel,

  Where the coinage of mind outvalues the dollar

  And God is the immanent shaper of thought and behaviour;

  Where old ceremonious usage survives as the moral

  And actual pattern of grace, where the blood of our Saviour

  Is real as our sin, and replenishes spirit and brain

  Till they blossom in pity and love as our fields in the rain.

  No, but come to a land where the secret censor

  Snouts in the dark, where authority smothers

  The infant conscience and shadows a denser

  Darkness on ignorant minds in their tortuous groping

  For spectreless day: a land where austerity mothers

  The coldly deliberate sins, where harsh masters are roping

  The heels of the heavenly horse and blinding the bright

  Incorruptible eye that dares open in passionless light.

  O, come to the land where man is yet master

  Of tyrannous time and will pause for the pleasure

  Of speech or of sport though worldly disaster

  Pluck at torn sleeves; a land where soft voices

  Meet answering laughter, where the business of living is leisure,

  Where there’s no heart so poor but it’s kindly and quick and rejoices

  In horse or in hound or the mettlesome boy with a ball,

  Where a jibe’s for the proud, but a hand’s for the helpless from all.

  No, but come to a land where the mediaeval

  Dread of the woman mutters in corners,

  Thunders from pulpits, where the only evil

  Lacking forgiveness is love; a land where the spirit

  Withers the flowering flesh, where whispering mourners

  Crowd to the grave of romance and expect to inherit

  Great scandalous wealth to lighten long evenings and bring

  A venomous joy to harsh lips whose kiss is a sting.

  O, come to the land where imagination

  Fashions the speech of the common people

  Rich as a tenement’s shattered mouldings

  Where the wrong of defeat has bequeathed to a nation

  Ironic traditional wit, like a polished steeple

  Rising precise and clear from the huddled holdings

  Of intricate minds that, in face of Eternity, know

  Harsh humour and absolute faith their sole strongholds below.

  No, but come to a land where the dying eagle

  Is mocked by the crow and the patient vulture,

  Where nobility fails and the ancient regal

  Pride of inheritance yields to the last invaders –

  Image and hare-brained song, the scum of an alien culture

  Bubbling in village and street, where unmannerly traders

  And politic slaves have supplanted the gentle and brave,

  Where the hero will never have honour except in the grave.

  PATRICK KAVANAGH

  (1904–67)

  Inniskeen Road: July Evening

  The bicycles go by in twos and threes –

  There’s a dance in Billy Brennan’s barn tonight,

  And there’s the half-talk code of mysteries

  And the wink-and-elbow language of delight.

  Half-past eight and there is not a spot

  Upon a mile of road, no shadow thrown

  That might turn out a man or woman, not

  A footfall tapping secrecies of stone.

  I have what every poet hates in spite

  Of all the solemn talk of contemplation.

  Oh, Alexander Selkirk knew the plight

  Of being king and government and nation.

  A road, a mile of kingdom, I am king

  Of banks and stones and every blooming thing.

  A Christmas Childhood

  I

  One side of the potato-pits was white with frost –

  How wonderful that was, how wonderful!

  And when we put our ears to the paling-post

  The music that came out was magical.

  The light between the ricks of hay and straw

  Was a hole in Heaven’s gable. An apple tree

  With its December-glinting fruit we saw –

  O you, Eve, were the world that tempted me

  To eat the knowledge that grew in clay

  And death the germ within it! Now and then

  I can remember something of the gay

  Garden that was childhood’s. Again

  The tracks of cattle to a drinking-place,

  A green stone lying sideways in a ditch,

  Or any common sight, the transfigured face

  Of a beauty that the world did not touch.

  II

  My father played the melodion

  Outside at our gate;

  There were stars in the morning east

  And they danced to his music.

  Across the wild bogs his melodion called

  To Lennons and Callans.

  As I pulled on my trousers in a hurry

  I knew some strange thing had happened.

  Outside in the cow-house my mother

  Made the music of milking;

  The light of her stable-lamp was a star

  And the frost of Bethlehem made it twinkle.

  A water-hen screeched in the bog,

  Mass-going feet

  Crunched the wafer-ice on the pot-holes,

  Somebody wistfully twisted the bellows wheel.

  My child poet picked out the letters

  On the grey stone,

  In silver the wonder of a Christmas townland,

  The winking glitter of a frosty dawn.

  Cassiopeia was over

  Cassidy’s hanging hill,

  I looked and three whin bushes rode across

  The horizon – the Three Wise Kings.

  An old man passing said:

  ‘Can’t he make it talk –

  The melodion.’ I hid in the doorway

  And tightened the belt of my box-pleated coat.

  I nicked six nicks on the door-post

  With my penknife’s big blade –

  There was a little one for cutting tobacco.

  And I was six Christmases of age.

  My father played the melodion,

  My mother milked the cows,

  And I had a prayer like a white rose pinned

  On the Virgin Mary’s blouse.

  from The Great Hunger

  I

  Clay is the word and clay is the flesh

  Where the potato-gatherers like mechanized scare-crows move

  Along the side-fall of the hill – Maguire and his men.

  If we watch them an hour is there anything we can prove

  Of life as it is broken-backed over the Book

  Of Death? Here crows gabble over worms and frogs

  And the gulls like old newspapers are blown clear of the hedges, luckily.

  Is there some light of imagination in these wet clods?

  Or why do we stand here shivering?

  Which of these men

  Loved the light and the queen

  Too long virgin? Yesterday was summer. Who was it promised marriage to himself
r />   Before apples were hung from the ceilings for Hallowe’en?

  We will wait and watch the tragedy to the last curtain,

  Till the last soul passively like a bag of wet clay

  Rolls down the side of the hill, diverted by the angles

  Where the plough missed or a spade stands, straitening the way.

  A dog lying on a torn jacket under a heeled-up cart,

  A horse nosing along the posied headland, trailing

  A rusty plough. Three heads hanging between wide-apart

  Legs. October playing a symphony on a slack wire paling.

  Maguire watches the drills flattened out

  And the flints that lit a candle for him on a June altar

  Flameless. The drills slipped by and the days slipped by

  And he trembled his head away and ran free from the world’s halter,

  And thought himself wiser than any man in the townland

  When he laughed over pints of porter

  Of how he came free from every net spread

  In the gaps of experience. He shook a knowing head

  And pretended to his soul

  That children are tedious in hurrying fields of April

  Where men are spanging across wide furrows,

  Lost in the passion that never needs a wife –

  The pricks that pricked were the pointed pins of harrows.

  Children scream so loud that the crows could bring

  The seed of an acre away with crow-rude jeers.

  Patrick Maguire, he called his dog and he flung a stone in the air

  And hallooed the birds away that were the birds of the years.

  Turn over the weedy clods and tease out the tangled skeins.

  What is he looking for there?

  He thinks it is a potato, but we know better

  Than his mud-gloved fingers probe in this insensitive hair.

  ‘Move forward the basket and balance it steady

  In this hollow. Pull down the shafts of that cart, Joe,

  And straddle the horse,’ Maguire calls.

  ‘The wind’s over Brannagan’s, now that means rain.

  Graip up some withered stalks and see that no potato falls

  Over the tail-board going down the ruckety pass –

  And that’s a job we’ll have to do in December,

  Gravel it and build a kerb on the bog-side. Is that Cassidy’s ass

  Out in my clover? Curse o’ God –

  Where is that dog?

  Never where he’s wanted.’ Maguire grunts and spits

  Through a clay-wattled moustache and stares about him from the height.

  His dream changes again like the cloud-swung wind

  And he is not so sure now if his mother was right

  When she praised the man who made a field his bride.

  Watch him, watch him, that man on a hill whose spirit

  Is a wet sack flapping about the knees of time.

  He lives that his little fields may stay fertile when his own body

  Is spread in the bottom of a ditch under two coulters crossed in Christ’s Name.

  He was suspicious in his youth as a rat near strange bread

  When girls laughed; when they screamed he knew that meant

  The cry of fillies in season. He could not walk

  The easy road to his destiny. He dreamt

  The innocence of young brambles to hooked treachery.

  O the grip, O the grip of irregular fields! No man escapes.

  It could not be that back of the hills love was free

  And ditches straight.

  No monster hand lifted up children and put down apes

  As here.

  ‘O God if I had been wiser!’

  That was his sigh like the brown breeze in the thistles.

  He looks towards his house and haggard. ‘O God if I had been wiser!’

  But now a crumpled leaf from the whitethorn bushes

  Darts like a frightened robin, and the fence

  Shows the green of after-grass through a little window,

  And he knows that his own heart is calling his mother a liar.

  God’s truth is life – even the grotesque shapes of its foulest fire.

  The horse lifts its head and cranes

  Through the whins and stones

  To lip late passion in the crawling clover.

  In the gap there’s a bush weighted with boulders like morality,

  The fools of life bleed if they climb over.

  The wind leans from Brady’s, and the coltsfoot leaves are holed with rust,

  Rain fills the cart-tracks and the sole-plate grooves;

  A yellow sun reflects in Donaghmoyne

  The poignant light in puddles shaped by hooves.

  Come with me, Imagination, into this iron house

  And we will watch from the doorway the years run back,

  And we will know what a peasant’s left hand wrote on the page.

  Be easy, October. No cackle hen, horse neigh, tree sough, duck quack.

  II

  Maguire was faithful to death:

  He stayed with his mother till she died

  At the age of ninety-one.

  She stayed too long,

  Wife and mother in one.

  When she died

  The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside

  And he was sixty-five.

  O he loved his mother

  Above all others.

  O he loved his ploughs

  And he loved his cows

  And his happiest dream

  Was to clean his arse

  With perennial grass

  On the bank of some summer stream;

  To smoke his pipe

  In a sheltered gripe

  In the middle of July –

  His face in a mist

  And two stones in his fist

  And an impotent worm on his thigh.

  But his passion became a plague

  For he grew feeble bringing the vague

  Women of his mind to lust nearness,

  Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.

  So Maguire got tired

  Of the no-target gun fired

  And returned to his headlands of carrots and cabbage,

  To the fields once again

  Where eunuchs can be men

  And life is more lousy than savage.

  XIII

  The world looks on

  And talks of the peasant:

  The peasant has no worries;

  In his little lyrical fields

  He ploughs and sows;

  He eats fresh food.

  He loves fresh women,

  He is his own master;

  As it was in the Beginning,

  The simpleness of peasant life.

  The birds that sing for him are eternal choirs,

  Everywhere he walks there are flowers.

  His heart is pure,

  His mind is clear,

  He can talk to God as Moses and Isaiah talked –

  The peasant who is only one remove from the beasts he drives.

  The travellers stop their cars to gape over the green bank into his fields: –

  There is the source from which all cultures rise,

  And all religions,

  There is the pool in which the poet dips

  And the musician.

  Without the peasant base civilization must die,

  Unless the clay is in the mouth the singer’s singing is useless.

  The travellers touch the roots of the grass and feel renewed

  When they grasp the steering wheels again.

  The peasant is the unspoiled child of Prophecy,

  The peasant is all virtues – let us salute him without irony –

  The peasant ploughman who is half a vegetable,

  Who can react to sun and rain and sometimes even

  Regret that the Maker of Light had not touched him more
intensely,

  Brought him up from the sub-soil to an existence

  Of conscious joy. He was not born blind.

  He is not always blind: sometimes the cataract yields

  To sudden stone-falling or the desire to breed.

  The girls pass along the roads

  And he can remember what man is,

  But there is nothing he can do.

  Is there nothing he can do?

  Is there no escape?

  No escape, no escape.

  The cows and horses breed,

  And the potato-seed

  Gives a bud and a root and rots

  In the good mother’s way with her sons;

  The fledged bird is thrown

  From the nest – on its own.

  But the peasant in his little acres is tied

  To a mother’s womb by the wind-toughened navel-cord

  Like a goat tethered to the stump of a tree –

  He circles around and around wondering why it should be.

  No crash,

  No drama.

  That was how his life happened.

  No mad hooves galloping in the sky,

  But the weak, washy way of true tragedy –

  A sick horse nosing around the meadow for a clean place to die.

  XIV

  We may come out into the October reality, Imagination,

  The sleety wind no longer slants to the black hill where Maguire

  And his men are now collecting the scattered harness and baskets.

  The dog sitting on a wisp of dry stalks

  Watches them through the shadows.

  ‘Back in, back in.’ One talks to the horse as to a brother.

  Maguire himself is patting a potato-pit against the weather –

  An old man fondling a new-piled grave:

  ‘Joe, I hope you didn’t forget to hide the spade

  For there’s rogues in the townland. Hide it flat in a furrow.

  I think we ought to be finished by tomorrow.’

  Their voices through the darkness sound like voices from a cave,

  A dull thudding far away, futile, feeble, far away,

  First cousins to the ghosts of the townland.

  A light stands in a window. Mary Anne

  Has the table set and the tea-pot waiting in the ashes.

  She goes to the door and listens and then she calls

  From the top of the haggard-wall:

  ‘What’s keeping you

  And the cows to be milked and all the other work there’s to do?’

  ‘All right, all right,

 

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