Until they came to a bog-meadow full of bog-asphodels
Where the residents are ghosts or images of the dead.
Form
Trying to tell it all to you and cover everything
Is like awakening from its grassy form the hare:
In that make-shift shelter your hand,
then my hand Mislays the hare and the warmth it leaves behind.
The Campfires
All night crackling campfires boosted their morale
As they dozed in no man’s land and the killing fields.
(There are balmy nights – not a breath, constellations
Resplendent in the sky around a dazzling moon –
When a clearance high in the atmosphere unveils
The boundlessness of space, and all the stars are out
Lighting up hilltops, glens, headlands, vantage
Points like Tonakeera and Allaran where the tide
Turns into Killary, where salmon run from the sea,
Where the shepherd smiles on his luminous townland.
That many camp-fires sparkled in front of Ilium
Between the river and the ships, a thousand fires,
Round each one fifty men relaxing in the fire-light.)
Shuffling next to the chariots, munching shiny oats
And barley, their horses waited for the sunrise.
Ceasefire
I
Put in mind of his own father and moved to tears
Achilles took him by the hand and pushed the old king
Gently away, but Priam curled up at his feet and
Wept with him until their sadness filled the building.
II
Taking Hector’s corpse into his own hands Achilles
Made sure it was washed and, for the old king’s sake,
Laid out in uniform, ready for Priam to carry
Wrapped like a present home to Troy at daybreak.
III
When they had eaten together, it pleased them both
To stare at each other’s beauty as lovers might,
Achilles built like a god, Priam good-looking still
And full of conversation, who earlier had sighed:
IV
‘I get down on my knees and do what must be done
And kiss Achilles’ hand, the killer of my son.’
The Evening Star
in memory of Catherine Mercer, 1994–96
The day we buried your two years and two months
So many crocuses and snowdrops came out for you
I tried to isolate from those galaxies one flower:
A snowdrop appeared in the sky at dayligone,
The evening star, the star in Sappho’s epigram
Which brings back everything that shiny daybreak
Scatters, which brings the sheep and brings the goat
And brings the wean back home to her mammy.
Overhead
The beech tree looks circular from overhead
With its own little cumulus of exhalations.
Can you spot my skull under the nearby roof,
Its bald patch, the poem-cloud hanging there?
Above Dooaghtry
Where the duach rises to a small plateau
That overlooks the sand dunes from Dooaghtry
To Roonkeel, and just beyond the cottage’s
Higgledy perimeter fence-posts
At Carrigskeewaun, bury my ashes,
For the burial mound at Templedoomore
Has been erased by wind and sea, the same
Old stone-age sea that came as far inland
As Cloonaghmanagh and chose the place
That I choose as a promontory, a fort:
Let boulders at the top encircle me,
Neither a drystone wall nor a cairn, space
For the otter to die and the mountain hare
To lick snow stains from her underside,
A table for the peregrine and ravens,
A prickly double-bed as well, nettles
And carline-thistles, a sheeps’ wool pillow,
So that, should she decide to join me there,
Our sandy dander to Allaran Point
Or Tonakeera will take for ever.
Sleep & Death
Zeus the cloud-gatherer said to sunny Apollo:
‘Sponge the congealed blood from Sarpedon’s corpse,
Take him far away from here, out of the line of fire,
Wash him properly in a stream, in running water,
And rub supernatural preservative over him
And wrap him up in imperishable fabrics,
Then hand him over to those speedy chaperons,
Sleep and his twin brother Death, who will bring him
In no time at all to Lycia’s abundant farmland
Where his family will bury him with grave-mound
And grave-stone, the entitlement of the dead.’
And Apollo did exactly as he was told:
He carried Sarpedon out of the line of fire,
Washed him properly in a stream, in running water,
And rubbed supernatural preservative over him
And wrapped him up in imperishable fabrics
And handed him over to the speedy chaperons,
Sleep and his twin brother Death, who brought him
In no time at all to Lycia’s abundant farmland.
Whalsay
He fitted all of the island
Inside a fisherman’s float – his
Cosmology of sea breezes
Cooling the seabirds’ eggs
Or filling otter prints with sand:
For such phenomena, for
Sea lavender and spindrift, he –
Ravenous, insomniac – beach-
Combed the exact dialect words
Under a sky of green glass.
MICHAEL HARTNETT
Lament for Tadhg Cronin’s Children
based on a poem by Aodhagán Ó Rathaille, c.1670–1729
That day the sails of the ship were torn
and a fog obscured the lawns.
In the whitewashed house the music stopped.
A spark jumped up at the gables
and the silk quilts on the bed caught fire.
They cry without tears –
their hearts cry –
for the three dead children.
Christ God neglect them not
nor leave them in the ground!
They were ears of corn!
They were apples!
They were three harpstrings!
And now their limbs lie underground
and the black beetle walks across their faces.
I, too, cry without tears –
my heart cries –
for the three dead children.
from Inchicore Haiku
8
My English dam bursts
and out stroll all my bastards.
Irish shakes its head.
18
I push in a plug.
Mozart comes into the room
riding a cello.
37
What do bishops take
when the price of bread goes up?
A vow of silence.
78
On Tyrconnell Road,
Catholic Emancipation –
thirteen milk-bottles.
EAMON GRENNAN
(b.1941)
from The Quick of It
because the body stops here because you can only reach out so far because the pointed
blade of the headache maps the landscape inside the skull and the rising peaks with
their roots behind your eyes their summits among the wrinkles of your brow because
the sweat comes weeping from your hands and knotted nipples because your tears keep
kissing your cheek and your cheek feels the tip of another’s tongue testing your tears
because the feel of a beard along the back of a neck is enough to melt the wi
ndows in a
little room because the toes the thighs the eyes the penis the vagina and the heart are
what they are and all they are (orphan, bride, pheasant or fox, freshwater glintfish of
simple touch) we have to be at home here no matter what no matter what the shivering
belly says or the dry-salted larynx no matter the frantic pulse no matter what happens
(…)
When I see the quick ripple of a groundhog’s back above the grass, its earth-
brown pelt vanishing into a hedgerow which for a minute or two is a shaken
screen of greens and then again still, the creature melted into nature’s mouth
and sending back no sign of itself though I know it’s in there and I can sense
how its breath and broadly distributed embrace of its gaze have become so fully
what it inhabits it will even winter there, curled round its own heart beating
at quarter speed, at ease in the sphere of its own immediate knowings – then
for some reason Avon’s native comes to mind, quill-end tipping his tongue
as he takes a breath and disappears into the leaves and lavish music of another
turbulent little word-shiver for a minute, and he is all alone there, listening.
(…)
Casual, prodigal, these piss-poor opportunists, the weeds
in their gladrags and millennial hand-me-downs
of yellow and purple and pale green, are everywhere
along the highway, on every inch of waste ground
in our cultivated suburbs where they raise their families
and squinny in through lace-curtained windows, wagging
their heads at us, flaunting their speechless force, their
eager teeming in themselves, the irresistible fact that
theirs is the kingdom, the power, and the glory
of the real world smiling full and frightful in our faces.
(…)
Even under the rain that casts a fine white blanket over mountain and lake
and smothers green islands and soaks grass and makes a solid slow dripping
trickle in the sycamore; even under the rain that’s general all over the valley;
even under the steady rain measuring my life perched beside the big window;
even under the blank remorseless grind and colonizing hegemony of rain –
the bees are out among the furled or flapping scarlets of fuchsia bells, seeking
till they find a fresh one, then settling and entering, gathering what they need
in deliberate slow shudderings of the whole body shaking suddenly the honey-core,
then extracting themselves in silence, a little heavier, limb filaments glinty,
to go on cruising through this dust-fine deliquescence of damp the falling rain is.
DEREK MAHON
An Image from Beckett
In that instant
There was a sea, far off,
As bright as lettuce,
A northern landscape
And a huddle
Of houses along the shore.
Also, I think, a white
Flicker of gulls
And washing hung to dry –
The poignancy of those
Back yards – and the gravedigger
Putting aside his forceps.
Then the hard boards
And darkness once again.
But in that instant
I was struck by the
Sweetness and light,
The sweetness and light,
Imagining what grave
Cities, what lasting monuments,
Given the time.
They will have buried
Our great-grandchildren, and theirs,
Beside us by now
With a subliminal batsqueak
Of reflex lamentation.
Our knuckle bones
Litter the rich earth
Changing, second by second,
To civilizations.
It was good while it lasted,
And if it only lasted
The Biblical span
Required to drop six feet
Through a glitter of wintry light,
There is No One to blame.
Still, I am haunted
By that landscape,
The soft rush of its winds,
The uprightness of its
Utilities and schoolchildren –
To whom in my will,
This, I have left my will.
I hope they have time,
And light enough, to read it.
A Disused Shed in Co. Wexford
Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels.
—Seferis, Mythistorema
(for J. G. Farrell)
Even now there are places where a thought might grow –
Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned
To a slow clock of condensation,
An echo trapped for ever, and a flutter
Of wild flowers in the lift-shaft,
Indian compounds where the wind dances
And a door bangs with diminished confidence,
Lime crevices behind rippling rain-barrels,
Dog corners for bone burials;
And in a disused shed in Co. Wexford,
Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,
Among the bathtubs and the washbasins
A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.
This is the one star in their firmament
Or frames a star within a star.
What should they do there but desire?
So many days beyond the rhododendrons
With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,
They have learnt patience and silence
Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.
They have been waiting for us in a foetor
Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,
Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure
Of the expropriated mycologist.
He never came back, and light since then
Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.
Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew
And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something –
A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue
Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.
There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking
Into the earth that nourished it;
And nightmares, born of these and the grim
Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.
Those nearest the door grow strong –
‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’
The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling
Utensils and broken pitchers, groaning
For their deliverance, have been so long
Expectant that there is left only the posture.
A half century, without visitors, in the dark –
Poor preparation for the cracking lock
And creak of hinges; magi, moonmen,
Powdery prisoners of the old regime,
Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought
And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream
At the flash-bulb firing-squad we wake them with
Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.
Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,
They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.
They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,
To do something, to speak on their behalf
Or at least not to close the door again.
Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!
‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,
‘Let the god not abandon us
Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.
We too had our lives to live.
You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary
,
Let not our naive labours have been in vain!’
Courtyards in Delft
—Pieter de Hooch, 1659
for Gordon Woods
Oblique light on the trite, on brick and tile –
Immaculate masonry, and everywhere that
Water tap, that broom and wooden pail
To keep it so. House-proud, the wives
Of artisans pursue their thrifty lives
Among scrubbed yards, modest but adequate.
Foliage is sparse, and clings; no breeze
Ruffles the trim composure of those trees.
No spinet-playing emblematic of
The harmonies and disharmonies of love,
No lewd fish, no fruit, no wide-eyed bird
About to fly its cage while a virgin
Listens to her seducer, mars the chaste
Perfection of the thing and the thing made.
Nothing is random, nothing goes to waste.
We miss the dirty dog, the fiery gin.
That girl with her back to us who waits
For her man to come home for his tea
Will wait till the paint disintegrates
And ruined dikes admit the esurient sea;
Yet this is life too, and the cracked
Outhouse door a verifiable fact
As vividly mnemonic as the sunlit
Railings that front the houses opposite.
I lived there as a boy and know the coal
Glittering in its shed, late-afternoon
Lambency informing the deal table,
The ceiling cradled in a radiant spoon.
I must be lying low in a room there,
A strange child with a taste for verse,
While my hard-nosed companions dream of fire
And sword upon parched veldt and fields of rain-swept gorse.
from The Yellow Book
VII: An Bonnán Buí
A heron-like species, rare visitors, most recent records referring to winter months … very active at dusk.
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 65