The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

by Patrick Crotty (ed)

  Linda misses you,

  Claire from Waterside House misses you.

  You wanted to fathom the world

  but your legs were tired,

  you had two months left.

  Cookie and Jillian miss you.

  You talked about the dark hole

  you often found yourself in,

  you were happy when you got out

  but when you were in it,

  there was no talking to you,

  you had weeks to go.

  The Rinnmore gang miss you.

  You got a bad ’flu

  and the ’flu got you

  the Millennium Bug,

  your days were numbered.

  Depression and the ’flu didn’t travel

  but you did and you never came back.

  On December the 9th 1999

  you hanged yourself.

  Paddy L. and Michael Flaherty miss you.

  Your mother rings from your grave

  I say where are you?

  She says, I’m at Michael’s grave

  and it looks lovely today.

  CATHAL Ó SEARCAIGH

  (b.1956)

  A Runaway Cow

  for Liam Ó Muirthile

  I’d say he’d had too much

  of the desolation that trickles down

  through the glens and the hillocks

  steadily as a hearse;

  of the lifeless villages in the foothills

  as bare of young folk as of soil;

  of the old codgers, the hummock-blasters

  who turned the peat into good red earth

  and who deafened him pink year after year

  with their talk of the grand sods of the old days;

  of the little white bungalows, attractive

  as dandruff in the hairy armpit of the Glen;

  of the young people trapped in their destinies

  like caged animals out of touch with their instinct;

  of the Three Sorrows of Storytelling

  in the pity of unemployment, of low morale,

  and of the remoteness and narrow-mindedness

  of both sides of the Glen;

  of the fine young things down in Rory’s

  who woke the man in him

  but wouldn’t give a curse for his attentions;

  of clan boundaries, of old tribal ditches,

  of pissing his frustration against the solid walls

  race and religion built round him.

  He’d had too much of being stuck in the Glen

  and with a leap like a runaway cow’s one spring morning

  he cleared the walls and hightailed away.

  PC

  Lament

  in memory of my mother

  I cried on my mother’s breast, cried sore

  The day Mollie died, our old pet ewe

  Trapped on a rockface up at Beithí.

  It was sultry heat, we’d been looking for her,

  Sweating and panting, driving sheep back

  From the cliff-edge when we saw her attacked

  On a ledge far down. Crows and more crows

  Were eating at her. We heard the cries

  But couldn’t get near. She was ripped to death

  As we suffered her terrible, wild, last breath

  And my child’s heart broke. I couldn’t be calmed

  No matter how much she’d tighten her arms

  And gather me close. I just cried on

  Till she hushed me at last with a piggyback

  And the promise of treats of potato-cake.

  Today it’s my language that’s in its throes,

  The poets’ passion, my mothers’ fathers’

  Mothers’ language, abandoned and trapped

  On a fatal ledge that we won’t attempt.

  She’s in agony, I can hear her heave

  And gasp and struggle as they arrive,

  The beaked and ravenous scavengers

  Who are never far. Oh if only anger

  Came howling wild out of her grief,

  If only she’d bare the teeth of her love

  And rout the pack. But she’s giving in,

  She’s quivering badly, my mother’s gone

  And promises now won’t ease the pain.

  Seamus Heaney

  GREG DELANTY

  (b.1958)

  The Cure

  to my father

  I drop into the printers and graft

  to you with my hangover on hearing

  the tall drinking tales of your craft

  from an apprentice of yours, latching

  on to the old typesetter days like myself.

  He swore he could write a book.

  I thought of how you were partial yourself

  to a jorum or two, but you would look

  down on my pint-swaggering and remind me

  you kept your drinking to Saturday night,

  barring births, weddings, deaths and maybe

  the odd quick one if the company was right.

  And for the most part I keep to that too,

  but last night was a night I broke

  and went on the rantan from bar to

  bar, jawing with whichever bloke,

  solving the world’s problems drink by drink

  and cigarette by cigarette, swigging

  and puffing away the whole lousy stink.

  You nagged away in my head about smoking

  and how the butts did away with you.

  But I swear the way I stood there

  and yaketty-yakked, slagged and blew

  smoke in the smoke-shrouded air,

  coughing your smoker’s cough,

  I thought that you had turned into me

  or I into you. I laughed your laugh

  and then, knowing how you loved company,

  I refused to quit the bar and leave you alone

  or leave myself alone or whoever we were.

  I raised my glass to your surprise return.

  And now I hear you guffaw once more

  as your apprentice continues to recount

  printers’ drink lore and asks if I know

  comps at Signature O got a complimentary pint.

  I joust our way out the door repeating O O O.

  To My Mother, Eileen

  I’m threading the eye

  of the needle for you again. That is

  my specially appointed task, my

  gift that you gave me. Ma, watch me slip this

  camel of words through. Yes,

  rich we are still even if your needlework

  has long since gone with the rag-and-bone man

  and Da never came home one day, our Dan.

  Work Work Work. Lose yourself in work.

  That’s what he’d say.

  Okay okay.

  Ma, listen, I can hear the sticks of our fire spit

  like corn turning into popcorn

  with the brown insides of rotten teeth. We sit

  in our old Slieve Mish house. Norman is just born.

  He’s in the pen.

  I raise the needle to the light and lick the thread

  to stiffen the limp words. I

  peer through the eye, focus, put everything out of my head.

  I shut my right eye and thread.

  I’m important now, a likely lad, instead

  of the amadán at Dread School. I have the eye

  haven’t I, the knack?

  I’m Prince Threader. I missed it that try.

  Concentrate. Concentrate. Enough yaketty yak.

  There, there, Ma, look, here’s the threaded needle back.

  PETER MCDONALD

  (b.1962)

  The Hand

  1

  A flat right hand: four fingers and a thumb,

  and poised, as though to strike an instrument,

  fend off a blow, or maybe stop the waves.

  Each evening, it would blatter on the glass

  of our front window like a th
underclap,

  not breaking it, stretching our nerves past breaking.

  2

  Thirty years on, and I can’t not drive

  in this direction, just to see the place.

  There’s nothing much here, nobody about:

  Stormont up in the hills, unearthly white

  as ever, new houses eating up the fields;

  but I forget more now than I remember.

  Leaving, I see the parti-coloured kerbstones

  with paint from last year or the year before

  that fades into this almost-constant rain,

  then, on one gable-wall, a raised right hand.

  3

  It took a full two minutes to run down

  from the bus terminus to our front door:

  in the last year, I skipped and swerved and darted

  all the way back, with tiny ricochets

  of stones at my legs and heels. All spring

  I ran, and ran so fast I couldn’t stop.

  4

  We lived in 44A Woodview Drive,

  across the road, and just a few doors down

  from an apprentice murderer, who learned

  his trade in town, and then came home for tea.

  The hard skin in my palm is like soft stone:

  as I look at it now under the desk-light,

  calloused and scuffed and bitten and worn-in,

  this part of me is guiltless flesh and bone,

  whatever it has done or might yet do.

  5

  Leaving means going away for the last time,

  unnoticed now, hardly worth noticing:

  up in the distance, Stormont, unearthly white.

  I forget more than I remember – how

  this road connects to that, the way to town,

  the names of people who lived there, or there.

  As I move faster, everything speeds up:

  I make the rain stop by raising my hand,

  and sunlight loses itself on the Castlereagh hills.

  COLETTE BRYCE

  (b.1970)

  Self-Portrait in the Dark (with Cigarette)

  To sleep, perchance

  to dream? No chance:

  it’s 4 a.m. and I’m wakeful

  as an animal,

  caught between your presence and the lack.

  This is the realm insomniac.

  On the window seat, I light a cigarette

  from a slim flame and monitor the street –

  a stilled film, bathed in amber,

  softened now in the wake of a downpour.

  Beyond the daffodils

  on Magdalen Green, there’s one slow vehicle

  pushing its beam along Riverside Drive,

  a sign of life;

  and two months on

  from ‘moving on’

  your car, that you haven’t yet picked up,

  waits, spattered in raindrops like bubble wrap.

  Here, I could easily go off

  on a riff

  on how cars, like pets, look a little like their owners

  but I won’t ‘go there’,

  as they say in America,

  given it’s a clapped-out Nissan Micra …

  And you don’t need to know that

  I’ve been driving it illegally at night

  in the lamp-lit silence of this city

  – you’d only worry –

  or, worse, that Morrissey

  is jammed in the tape deck now and for eternity;

  no. It’s fine, all gleaming hubcaps,

  seats like an upright, silhouetted couple;

  from the dashboard, the wink

  of that small red light I think

  is a built-in security system.

  In a poem

  it could represent a heartbeat or a pulse.

  Or loneliness: its vigilance.

  Or simply the lighthouse-regular spark

  of someone, somewhere, smoking in the dark.

  The Poetry Bug

  is a moon-pale, lumpish creature

  parcelled in translucent skin

  papery as filo pastry

  patterned faint as a fingerprint

  is quite without face or feature

  ear or eye or snout

  has eight root-like

  tentacles or feelers, rough

  like knuckly tusks of ginger

  clustered at the front.

  Invisible to the naked eye

  monstrous in microscopy

  it loves the lovers’ bed or couch

  pillow, quilt or duvet

  and feeds, thrives I should say

  on human scurf and dander

  indeed, is never happier

  than feasting on the dust

  of love’s shucked husk

  the micro-detritus of us.

  DAVID WHEATLEY

  (b.1970)

  Sonnet

  stretch pants

  cashback

  pound shop

  store card

  hubcaps

  tailfin

  souped-up

  Escort

  breakbeat

  ringtone

  dole day

  cheques cashed

  loan shark

  small change

  rat boys

  bag snatched

  tin can

  tomcat

  backstreet

  dosshouse

  TV

  late lunch

  warmed-up

  Chinese

  black dog

  tongue stud

  real nails

  fake tan

  red light

  road rage

  brain-dead

  Leeds fan

  handbrake

  wheelspin

  pub crawl

  big screen

  spiked drink

  lift home

  knocked up

  sixteen

  knocked up

  knocked out

  well gone

  all gone

  all day

  all week

  stay home

  what’s on

  chat shows

  pig out

  hard stuff

  hard case

  hard luck

  fuck life

  fuck off

  now please

  Drift

  In Whitby, through its gaping jaw,

  I entered the whale, was swept from shore,

  began to drift and smuggled my way

  in a used coffin to Robin Hood’s Bay,

  my one endeavour to route my calls

  through a satellite phone at Fylingdales

  to where you stood on Whitby sands,

  an ice cream cone in both your hands.

  *

  From Scarborough prom where donkeys roamed

  I fled in a dodgem and made for home

  until sparks flew and I came to grief

  bumped up against Anne Brontë’s grave,

  and went to ground in a B&B,

  where I watched the tide and bade goodbye

  with a postcard and an unpaid bill

  and jumped on a trawler, drifting still.

  *

  In Bempton of the guanoed cliffs

  I lived on gulls’ eggs and dry leaves,

  the puffins made me a laughing stock

  and heckled and pecked me off their rock

  to Brid where I won you a teddy bear.

  You get my drift. I was drifting far

  but only in search of a tidal spate

  to wash me up, washed up, at your feet.

  *

  In Withernsea, taking care to shun

  a nightclub called Oblivion

  I shaved on a wind farm’s turbine blade

  and watched the last of the coastline slide

  to where land gave itself up for lost,

  threw itself off itself in disgust,

  on Spurn, long dreamt-of vanishing point,
<
br />   end of the line, of the world: the end

  *

  of nothing, as it turned out. I went down

  once, twice, thrice, and woke up thrown

  on a beach that could only be Skegness.

  All that coastal drift and mess

  had merely relocated south.

  I jumped back into the whale’s huge mouth

  to drift back north and start again.

  You’d left me my ice cream. But you were gone.

  SINÉAD MORRISSEY

  (b.1972)

  Pilots

  It was black as the slick-stunned coast of Kuwait

  over Belfast Lough when the whales came up

  (bar the eyelights of aeroplanes, angling in into the airport

  out of the east, like Venus on a kitestring being reeled

  to earth). All night they surfaced and swam

  among the detritus of Sellafield and the panic

  of godwits and redshanks.

  By morning

  we’d counted fifty (species Globicephala melaena)

  and Radio Ulster was construing a history. They’d left a sister

  rotting on a Cornish beach, and then come here, to this dim

  smoke-throated cistern, where the emptying tide leaves a scum

  of musselshell and the smell of landfill and drains.

  To mourn? Or to warn? Day drummed its thumbs

  on their globular foreheads.

  Neither due,

  nor quarry, nor necessary, nor asked for, nor understood

  upon arrival – what did we reckon to dress them in?

  Nothing would fit. Not the man in oilskin working in the warehouse

  of a whale, from the film of Sir Shackleton’s blasted Endeavour,

  as though a hill had opened onto fairytale measures

  of blubber and baleen, and this was the money-

  god’s recompense;

  not the huge

  Blue seen from the sky, its own floating eco-system, furred

  at the edges with surf; nor the unbridgeable flick

  of its three-storey tail, bidding goodbye to this angular world

  before barrelling under. We remembered a kind of singing,

  or rather our take on it: some dismal chorus of want and wistfulness

  resounding around the planet, alarmed and prophetic,

  with all the foresight we lack –