too like someone at rest in their own bed.
The pale-grey spots of its markings
just showed through the white belly-bristle,
and on the sands were blooms of flattened weed
and gutted crabs and broken shells
and the long line
of the small, low waves, running in.
It was like those Impressionist views
of beaches in Northern France
in the white, morning light –
the people strolling in pale clothes,
the navy ribbons on the boaters flapping,
the sun, trying to break through.
The crow stood on the tide-stretched strand,
surveying its handiwork.
Attentive, but also indifferent.
Like the Vikings.
Like the painter
when the whitish light is in the painting.
NUALA NÍ DHOMHNAILL
(b.1952)
The Shannon Estuary Welcomes the Fish
The salmon’s leap
In the darkness –
Bare blade
Silver shield;
And me welcoming, net-
Draped and slippery
Full of seaweed
Of quiet eddies
And eel-tails.
All meat
Is this fish
Almost nothing of bone
Less of entrail
Twenty packed pounds
Of tensed muscle
Straining
Towards its nest among the neat mosses.
And I sing a lullaby
To my darling
Wave on wave
Verse after verse,
My phosphorescence a sheet beneath him
My chosen one, drawn from afar.
PC
The Language Issue
I place my hope on the water
in this little boat
of the language, the way a body might put
an infant
in a basket of intertwined
iris leaves,
its underside proofed
with bitumen and pitch,
then set the whole thing down amidst
the sedge
and bulrushes by the edge
of a river
only to have it borne hither and thither,
not knowing where it might end up;
in the lap, perhaps,
of some Pharaoh’s daughter.
Paul Muldoon
My Father’s People
I am still with you, my father’s people,
On the cold flags of the kitchen before dawn of day,
Waiting for the cock’s first cry, barefoot on the cold stone,
Waiting for the ghosts to scatter so you can go out and start working
Earth too poor to feed you, a living fit for snipe –
But what choice have you but to go on hammering at it,
What keeps you going but a taste for work and the sharp edge of struggle,
The proverb your war cry, ‘Rent for a landlord or food for a child.’
Mickey the Skinner was put out on the side of the road
During the Land War. The neighbours built him a cabin of sods;
The gable is visible yet beside the bridge of Gleann na hUaighe.
Cattle were put on his farm, their leg-tendons were slit in the night.
After seven years his case came on at the Assizes in Tralee
And he walked the whole twenty-six miles in there in his nailed boots;
He couldn’t pay a lawyer, he pleaded his own case in English
And won. His rent was slashed from six pounds a cow down to two.
And his father before him again, that they called Seán of the Women,
Who fell down dead as he worked out in his field.
The coroner came along driving his pony and trap
From Castlegregory, took the one look at him
And said, ‘This is the body of a man seventy years old.’
‘No,’ said the neighbours, ‘he was only fifty years of age.’
‘No matter,’ said the doctor, ‘whatever age he was, this is an old man’s body’ –
Worn out with perpetual labour, with the wet damp and the cold.
His son after him, Seán Caol the schoolmaster
Never soiled his hands with any kind of farming work.
He spent all his days in the struggle with heroic tasks of the mind:
The teaching of grammar or solving enormous algebraic or geometrical problems.
Learning and teaching were his eternal preoccupations,
And hammering mountains of English into the heads of his pupils.
Well he knew that all their portion and capital for life
Would be sound learning, as they faced the emigrant ship to America.
He warmed their hands, he made them dance without music,
He wielded his stick so memorably that at this day
in South Boston they say of anyone slow or ignorant,
‘Easy to see he never spent any time with Seán Caol.’
He married a beautiful, gentle, pleasant woman,
Nano Rohan, but if so she had a hard time with him.
Six living words in English was all she’d get from him in the morning:
‘Water, Towel, Soap, Pinstuds, Breakfast at eight’ and ‘Polish me boots.’
What wonder then that his own son couldn’t stand him,
My Grandad, who joined the Irish Volunteers to get away from him,
And from the Collège des Irlandais in Paris where he was supposed to be studying for the priesthood.
It was thirty years before he could face going home to his father.
In the meantime he became an Inspector of Schools, much against his nature,
A kind, gently spoken man (who had his dark side too,
A thirst for drink that could take him on the tear for weeks)
– A man who wrote dark poems full of gloom and self-loathing.
Eily, the one sister that he had in the world,
Was afraid neither of God nor man nor beast.
Her one terror on earth was the lightning would strike
The house, and she in it. She had a lead lightning-rod down through the chimney
As thick as a man’s neck. I remember seeing it myself.
Any day that she would be raging round the house, whistling
With fury and bad temper, the boys needed only
To look up at the sky and suggest that there might be thunder
And she was down on her knees praying, beseeching the Blessèd Virgin,
Dousing the four corners of the house with holy water
And the rafters too.
What an inheritance for me,
What wonder then that when the fit strikes me
And I get out of bed as vicious as a bee
Fit to kick the cat and the dog if we had either,
That I feel my father’s people are still with me
In the dark kitchen, waiting for the dawning day.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
The Hair Market
Did you ever go to the Hair Market?
It’s down on the right-hand side of the Bird Market.
You have to thread slowly through narrow streets
In a little medieval town in France.
It’s there you’ll hear the noise and fuss and uproar,
The auctioneers shouting over their megaphones,
Screaming the highest bid at the top of their voices,
Buying and selling, cutting deals at every turn.
And it’s there you’ll see plaits and chignons and ponytails
Flowing smooth or curling from ceiling to floor,
Heaps of tresses raked and teased out,
Servants combing them, armslength after armslength.
Were you ever in the Hair Market?
I went there once myself on a certain day.
They cut my long red locks close to my skull,
And sold them to a Sultan for the best price of all.
Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin
Mermaid with Parish Priest
Because she was so clever she wrote a brilliant essay
on ‘Birds’ for the Primary Cert Exam.
She had collected her knowledge from old copies of National Geographic
and other reference books she found at home.
She was crazy about birds, partly because they were so newfangled to her.
They were like fish, swimming in air like supernatural things.
It is small wonder that she lost the head over them.
The parish priest came into the school in the middle of the exam.
He picked up her essay and read it and was very taken with it.
A week later he asked the nun in charge of the class
to send the mermaid with a message of some kind to the Parochial House.
She would never forget the smell of his study.
The long lines of books and the musky smell in the air.
He spoke to her in Irish. He showed her Bedell’s Bible.
Then he put her sitting on his lap
with her legs astride him on either side.
He pushed against her again and again
and he began to huff and puff and break out in a sweat.
His face went from dark to red to white
and then she felt something wet about his trousers.
She knew something was up but she couldn’t make out what.
(She was only eleven and still totally ignorant of such things.)
But when the same thing began to happen again and again
on a weekly basis, she felt nausea and self-loathing.
In the end she refused point-blank to go over there again.
To her astonishment the nun made no comment whatsoever,
and another little victim was sent over in her stead.
There was only one other time he came on to her
when her application form
for the County Council Scholarship had gone missing
after her mother had warned her in no uncertain terms
not to forget to mail it. So she had to go
and pick up another one, which needed his signature
at the bottom of the form. She went up to the Parochial House
with her tiny little heart in her mouth, and her knees knocking against each other.
She felt just like Isaac must have felt with the sacrificial wood
round his neck. And this time there was no convenient ram
with its horns caught in the bushes to let her off the hook.
He did his business, and she got the signature.
But she felt as if she had prostituted herself for it.
From that day on she lost complete faith in all adults
and six months later, when she took
first place in the county in the Scholarship exam,
it was a Pyrrhic victory. It was tainted with misery.
Especially when she could see that same man in the chapel
every Sunday where he thumped the pulpit
and fulminated against ‘immodest dances’.
(He meant the Twist.) He was pawing and stamping like a bull.
She noticed something she remembered all too well,
how his face went from black to red to white.
That was the end of Mass for her.
Any time she went next nor near the church
she would fall down in a fainting fit.
Years later, after she’d lived abroad for a long time,
when she heard he’d died
at a County Hurling Championship, in Ennis, County Clare,
she didn’t say a prayer for his soul but cursed him roundly.
But she wasn’t free of him for a long time after
for he’d appear to her in dreams as a vampire
or bloodsucking fiend. He’d be standing on the balcony
outside the window of her bedroom
always asking leave
to come in. She used to wake up in a state of anxiety,
sweating profusely, her heart in her mouth,
terrified out of her wits, till she gradually realized
the bedroom she was in didn’t have a balcony.
Little wonder that shortly afterwards she renounced the Irish language.
Never again did she set eyes on
Bedell’s Bible. But the damage didn’t just stop there. When she finally plucked up the courage,
years later, to tell her mother what had happened, the response
she got from her was ‘Oh, the poor priest, isn’t he a man
like any other?’ ‘Well,’ said the mermaid inwardly,
‘that’s the last thing I’ll ever tell you.’
And, as it happens, it was.
Paul Muldoon
MAURICE SCULLY
(b.1952)
from Over & Through
Sound
I wish I had a house, wheedle and whine, I wish
I had a bit of money, closing the door,
opening the window. The soul’s ability
to ripple through crisp watermarks – vertical
layers – mud and wattle cabins and a tidy
compound. Only a house. In. The.
Breathing. For instance. I wish I had a
roof, my two kids, my one wife. Less
nomadics, but then a whole haversack
of heartstopping examples: wash-basins,
wainscot, rain-pearls on a clothesline,
a clean spread of glasspane deep in its framebed,
whatever you’ve got, a folded view through
gold and developing veins underground,
small traditional poems – or even less
traditional poems even – or even less.
Liking the Big Wheelbarrow
We sat on the side of a mountain and muttered
something about the Basotho. We were dissatisfied.
We were given a part of something to understand,
our self-esteem under attack, daily nibblings
at the plinth. Fixing bridges, developing struts.
Wait. The instruction was to wait. Be still.
Dust particles collide and bounce away, collide
again elsewhere and stick until a thicker
filamentary delicate medium sinks to the central
plane of the disc which breaks into rings which
clump and accrete which orbit the core which spark
the beginning of the accretion of the solid cores
of the planets we know, from webs and threads
on magnetic bands. In theory. Only quietest
collisions. Clusters. Crystals and dust grains.
The four-year-old child who said to the pilot
on their way to the plane on the air ferry tarmac:
‘I like your big wheelbarrow.’
from DEF
Lullaby
Yr father blank in a chair.
Bored tired deaf blind dirty.
Nurse calls in to the wrong ear.
Alert but not sure of the year.
Yr sister soaks a relative for money
yr brother terrified cuts & runs
yr wife yr children yr body ageing
bored tired deaf blind/damn it/all of these things –
sanity phones
listen this that
rubbish & bones
life is hate –
sit down then to concentrate this
hopelessness into an art that’s
locked in to the point where the
key clicks yes but heart sinks –
bored tired deaf blind – down to all
these all of these all
of these things piled up to here do
you hear can you hear me me falling too
father yr head against the wall-wall
of yr room cracks with a bang & jammed
against the piano & the door I can’t
get in
to you until we find the key to
life is easy isn’t it piling up the past
in the mist deaf blind it ever occur
to you among world-things to look to
the place where the money screams then
blind deaf then
it’s over
over?
Rubbish & bones
listen my love
listen to this
pass it on.
I was a boy once, then a young man; now in middle age, both; (the edge of the allegory twining the spine of the rentbook). To fool a trout, Blue Lulu. To fool me, a peck of honesty.
MAURICE RIORDAN
(b.1953)
The Sloe
That he died alone in the gully
below the pass in a snowstorm, the first
of the year, in a lurch of the seasons
which became a change of climate;
that he died some three to five weeks
after an assault – from a wild beast
or fellow man – which shattered
his ribcage and sent him above
the tree-line, far from the settlements,
that he died really from
being alone, an injured man
relying on his few resources – which were,
however, both innate and military,
so that he carried about him
not only weapons and tools
but spares, medicine, and a sewing kit,
fire, and the means of fire,
and was observant and skilled
about stone, wood, grasses, skins,
about stag-horn and bone – knew for each
its properties and use, but he died
like Xenophon’s comrades on the trek
home through Armenia, as soldiers
have died on all recorded
winter marches, not from lack of discipline
or the body’s weakness, or not only,
but because of the slight
shortening of the odds which comes
with the unexpected comfort of snow;
so that prepared for the next day’s climb,
his equipment in order,
the backpack, the axe, the two
birch-bark containers, one holding
tinder and flints, the other
insulated with damp sycamore leaves
(but no longer carrying live embers),
The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry Page 72