The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

by Patrick Crotty (ed)

  We neither sleep nor sing nor talk,

  But look to the land where the men are mowing.

  What will the islanders think of our folly?

  The whispering spontaneous reception committee

  Nods and smokes by the calm jetty.

  Am I jealous of these courteous fishermen

  Who hand us ashore, for knowing the sea

  Intimately, for respecting the storm

  That took nine of their men on one bad night

  And five from Rossadillisk in this very boat?

  Their harbour is sheltered. They are slow to tell

  The story again. There is local pride

  In their home-built ships.

  We are advised to return next day by the mail.

  But tonight we stay, drinking with people

  Happy in the monotony of boats,

  Bringing the catch to the Cleggan market,

  Cultivating fields, or retiring from America

  With enough to soak till morning or old age.

  The bench below my knees lifts, and the floor

  Drops, and words depart, depart, with faces

  Blurred by the smoke. An old man grips my arm,

  His shot eyes twitch, quietly dissatisfied.

  He has lost his watch, an American gold

  From Boston gas-works. He treats the company

  To the secretive surge, the sea of his sadness.

  I slip outside, fall among stones and nettles,

  Crackling dry twigs on an elder tree,

  While an accordion drones above the hill.

  Later, I reach a room, where the moon stares

  Through a cobwebbed window. The tide has ebbed,

  Boats are careened in the harbour. Here is a bed.

  Girl at the Seaside

  I lean on a lighthouse rock

  Where the seagowns flow,

  A trawler slips from the dock

  Sailing years ago.

  Wine, tobacco and seamen

  Cloud the green air,

  A head of snakes in the rain

  Talks away desire.

  A sailor kisses me

  Tasting of mackerel,

  I analyse misery

  Till Mass bells peal.

  I wait for clogs on the cobbles,

  Dead feet at night,

  Only a tempest blows

  Darkness on sealight.

  I’ve argued myself here

  To the blue cliff-tops:

  I’ll drop through the sea-air

  Till everything stops.

  THOMAS KINSELLA

  (b.1928)

  Chrysalides

  Our last free summer we mooned about at odd hours

  Pedalling slowly through country towns, stopping to eat

  Chocolate and fruit, tracing our vagaries on the map.

  At night we watched in the barn, to the lurch of melodeon music,

  The crunching boots of countrymen – huge and weightless

  As their shadows – twirling and leaping over the yellow concrete.

  Sleeping too little or too much, we awoke at noon

  And were received with womanly mockery into the kitchen,

  Like calves poking our faces in with enormous hunger.

  Daily we strapped our saddlebags and went to experience

  A tolerance we shall never know again, confusing

  For the last time, for example, the licit and the familiar.

  Our instincts blurred with change; a strange wakefulness

  Sapped our energies and dulled our slow-beating hearts

  To the extremes of feeling – insensitive alike

  To the unique succession of our youthful midnights,

  When by a window ablaze softly with the virgin moon

  Dry scones and jugs of milk awaited us in the dark,

  Or to lasting horror, a wedding flight of ants

  Spawning to its death, a mute perspiration

  Glistening like drops of copper, agonized, in our path.

  First Light

  A prone couple still sleeps.

  Light ascends like a pale gas

  Out of the sea: dawn-light

  Reaching across the hill

  To the dark garden. The grass

  Emerges, soaking with grey dew.

  Inside, in silence, an empty

  Kitchen takes form, tidied and swept,

  Blank with marriage – where shrill

  Lover and beloved have kept

  Another vigil far

  Into the night, and raved and wept.

  Upstairs a whimper or sigh

  Comes from an open bedroom door

  And lengthens to an ugly wail

  – A child enduring a dream

  That grows, at the first touch of day,

  Unendurable.

  from Nightwalker

  2

  The human taste grows faint, leaving a taste

  Of self and laurel leaves and rotted salt.

  And gardens smelling of half-stripped rocks in the dark.

  A cast-iron lamp standard on the sea wall

  Sheds yellow light on a page of the day’s paper

  Turning in the gutter:

  Our new young minister

  Glares in his hunting suit, white haunch on haunch.

  Other lamps are lighting along a terrace

  Of high Victorian houses, toward the tower

  Rising into the dark at the Forty Foot.

  The tide drawing back from the promenade

  Far as the lamplight can reach, into a dark

  Alive with signals. Little bells clonk in the channel

  Beyond the rocks; Howth twinkling across the Bay;

  Ships’ lights moving along invisible sea lanes;

  The Bailey light sweeping the middle distance,

  Flickering on something.

  *

  Watcher in the tower,

  Be with me now. Turn your milky spectacles

  On the sea, unblinking.

  A dripping cylinder

  Pokes up into sight, picked out by the moon.

  Two blazing eyes. Two tough shoulders of muscle

  Lit from within by joints and bones of light.

  Another head: animal, with nostrils

  Straining open, red as embers. Google eyes.

  A phantom whinny. Forehooves scrape at the night.

  A spectral stink of horse and rider’s sweat.

  The rider grunts and urges.

  Father of Authors!

  It is himself! In silk hat, accoutred

  In stern jodhpurs. The Sonhusband

  Coming in his power, climbing the dark

  To his mansion in the sky, to take his place

  In the influential circle, mounting to glory

  On his big white harse!

  A new sign: Foxhunter.

  Subjects will find the going hard but rewarding.

  You may give offence, but this should pass.

  Marry the Boss’s daughter.

  *

  The soiled paper settles back in the gutter.

  THE NEW IRELAND …

  Awkward in the saddle

  But able and willing for the foul ditch,

  And sitting as well as any at the kill,

  Whatever iron Faust opens the gate.

  It is begun: curs mill and yelp at your heel,

  Backsnapping and grinning. They eye your back.

  Beware the smile of the dog.

  But you know the breed,

  And all it takes to turn them

  To a pack of lickspittles running as one.

  5

  A pulse hisses in my ear.

  I am an arrow piercing the void, unevenly

  As I correct and correct. But swift as thought.

  I arrive enveloped in quiet.

  A true desert,

  Sterile and odourless. Naked to every peril.

  A bluish light beats down,

  To kill every bodily thing.

 
; But the shadows are alive.

  They scuttle and flicker across the surface,

  Searching for any sick spirits,

  To suck at the dry juices.

  If I stoop down and touch the dust

  It has a human taste:

  massed human wills.

  I believe

  I have heard of this place. I think

  This is the Sea of Disappointment.

  *

  It is time I turned for home.

  Her dear shadow on the blind.

  The breadknife. She was slicing and buttering

  A loaf of bread. My heart stopped. I starved for speech.

  I believe now that love is half persistence,

  A medium in which from change to change

  Understanding may be gathered.

  Hesitant, cogitating, exit.

  JOHN MONTAGUE

  (b.1929)

  The Trout

  for Barrie Cooke

  Flat on the bank I parted

  Rushes to ease my hands

  In the water without a ripple

  And tilt them slowly downstream

  To where he lay, tendril-light,

  In his fluid sensual dream.

  Bodiless lord of creation,

  I hung briefly above him

  Savouring my own absence,

  Senses expanding in the slow

  Motion, the photographic calm

  That grows before action.

  As the curve of my hands

  Swung under his body

  He surged, with visible pleasure.

  I was so preternaturally close

  I could count every stipple

  But still cast no shadow, until

  The two palms crossed in a cage

  Under the lightly pulsing gills.

  Then (entering my own enlarged

  Shape, which rode on the water)

  I gripped. To this day I can

  Taste his terror on my hands.

  All Legendary Obstacles

  All legendary obstacles lay between

  Us, the long imaginary plain,

  The monstrous ruck of mountains

  And, swinging across the night,

  Flooding the Sacramento, San Joaquin,

  The hissing drift of winter rain.

  All day I waited, shifting

  Nervously from station to bar

  As I saw another train sail

  By, the San Francisco Chief or

  Golden Gate, water dripping

  From great flanged wheels.

  At midnight you came, pale

  Above the negro porter’s lamp.

  I was too blind with rain

  And doubt to speak, but

  Reached from the platform

  Until our chilled hands met.

  You had been travelling for days

  With an old lady, who marked

  A neat circle on the glass

  With her glove, to watch us

  Move into the wet darkness

  Kissing, still unable to speak.

  What a View

  What a view he has

  of our town, riding

  inland, the seagull!

  Rows of shining roofs

  and cars, the dome of

  a church, or a bald-

  headed farmer, and

  a thousand gutters

  flowing under the

  black assembly

  of chimneys! If

  he misses anything

  it might be history

  (the ivy-strangled

  O’Neill Tower only

  a warm shelter to

  come to roost if

  crows don’t land

  first, squabbling;

  and a Planter’s

  late Georgian house

  with its artificial

  lake, and avenue of

  poplars, less than

  the green cloth of

  our golf-course where

  fat worms hide from

  the sensible shoes

  of lady golfers).

  Or religion. He may

  not recognize who

  is driving to Mass

  with his army of

  freckled children –

  my second brother –

  or hear Eustace

  hammer and plane

  a new coffin for

  an old citizen,

  swearing there is

  no one God as the

  chips fly downward!

  He would be lost,

  my seagull, to see

  why the names on

  one side of the street

  (MacAteer, Carney)

  are Irish and ours

  and the names across

  (Carnew, MacCrea)

  are British and theirs

  but he would understand

  the charred, sad stump

  of the factory chimney

  which will never burn

  his tail feathers as

  he perches on it

  and if a procession,

  Orange or Hibernian,

  came stepping through

  he would hear the

  same thin, scrannel

  note, under the drums.

  And when my mother

  pokes her nose out

  once, up and down

  the narrow street,

  and retires inside,

  like the lady in

  the weather clock,

  he might well see

  her point. There are

  few pickings here,

  for a seagull, so

  far inland. A last

  salute on the flag

  pole of the British

  Legion hut, and he

  flaps away, the

  small town sinking

  into its caul

  of wet, too well-

  hedged, hillocky

  Tyrone grassland.

  SEAMUS HEANEY

  (b.1939)

  Death of a Naturalist

  All year the flax-dam festered in the heart

  Of the townland; green and heavy-headed

  Flax had rotted there, weighted down by huge sods.

  Daily it sweltered in the punishing sun.

  Bubbles gargled delicately, bluebottles

  Wove a strong gauze of sound around the smell.

  There were dragonflies, spotted butterflies,

  But best of all was the warm thick slobber

  Of frogspawn that grew like clotted water

  In the shade of the banks. Here, every spring

  I would fill jampotfuls of the jellied

  Specks to range on window-sills at home,

  On shelves at school, and wait and watch until

  The fattening dots burst into nimble-

  Swimming tadpoles. Miss Walls would tell us how

  The daddy frog was called a bullfrog

  And how he croaked and how the mammy frog

  Laid hundreds of little eggs and this was

  Frogspawn. You could tell the weather by frogs too

  For they were yellow in the sun and brown

  In rain.

  Then one hot day when fields were rank

  With cowdung in the grass the angry frogs

  Invaded the flax-dam; I ducked through hedges

  To a coarse croaking that I had not heard

  Before. The air was thick with a bass chorus.

  Right down the dam gross-bellied frogs were cocked

  On sods; their loose necks pulsed like sails. Some hopped:

  The slap and plop were obscene threats. Some sat

  Poised like mud grenades, their blunt heads farting.

  I sickened, turned, and ran. The great slime kings

  Were gathered there for vengeance and I knew

  That if I dipped my hand the spawn would clutch it.

  The Peninsula

  When you have nothing more to say, just drive

  For a day all round the penins
ula.

  The sky is tall as over a runway,

  The land without marks, so you will not arrive

  But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

  At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

  The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

  And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

  The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

  That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

  The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

  Islands riding themselves out into the fog,

  And drive back home, still with nothing to say

  Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

  By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

  Water and ground in their extremity.

  Requiem for the Croppies

  The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –

  No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –

  We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

  The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

  A people, hardly marching – on the hike –

  We found new tactics happening each day:

  We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike

  And stampede cattle into infantry,

  Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

  Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.

  Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

  The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

  They buried us without shroud or coffin

  And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

  Bogland

  for T. P. Flanagan

  We have no prairies

  To slice a big sun at evening –

  Everywhere the eye concedes to

  Encroaching horizon,

  Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

  Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

  Is bog that keeps crusting

  Between the sights of the sun.

  They’ve taken the skeleton

  Of the Great Irish Elk

  Out of the peat, set it up,

  An astounding crate full of air.

  Butter sunk under

  More than a hundred years

  Was recovered salty and white.

  The ground itself is kind, black butter

  Melting and opening underfoot,

  Missing its last definition

  By millions of years.

  They’ll never dig coal here,

  Only the waterlogged trunks

  Of great firs, soft as pulp.

  Our pioneers keep striking

  Inwards and downwards,

  Every layer they strip