The Penguin Book of Irish Poetry

by Patrick Crotty (ed)

  though not one of us

  heard it from where we stood on the beaches and car-parks

  and cycle-tracks skirting the water. What had they come for?

  From Carrickfergus to Helen’s Bay, birdwatchers with binoculars

  held sway while the city sat empty. The whales grew frenzied.

  Children sighed when they dived, then clapped as they rose

  again, Christ-like and shining, from the sea, though they could have been

  dying out there,

  smack bang

  in the middle of the ferries’ trajectory, for all we knew.

  Or attempting to die. These were Newfoundland whales,

  radically adrift from their feeding grounds, but we took them

  as a gift: as if our own lost magnificent ship

  had re-entered the Lough, transformed and triumphant,

  to visit us. As if those runaway fires on the spines of the hills

  had been somehow extinguished …

  For now,

  they were here. And there was nothing whatsoever to be said.

  New islands in the water between Eden and Holywood.

  ALAN GILLIS

  (b.1973)

  12th October, 1994

  I enter the Twilight Zone,

  the one run

  by Frankie ‘Ten Pints’ Fraser, and slide the heptagon

  of my twenty

  pence piece into its slot. The lights come on.

  Sam the Sham

  and the Pharaohs are playing Wooly Bully.

  A virtual combat zone lights up the green

  of my eyes,

  my hand clammy on the joystick, as Johnny ‘Book

  Keeper’ McFeeter

  saunters in and Smokey sings The Tracks of My Tears.

  He gives the nod

  to Betty behind the bulletproof screen.

  Love of my life, he says, and she says,

  ach Johnny,

  when who do you know but Terry ‘The Blaster’ McMaster

  levels in

  and B Bumble and the Stingers start playing Nut Rocker.

  I shoot down

  a sniper and enter a higher level.

  Betty buzzes Frankie who has a shifty

  look around,

  poking his nut around a big blue door, through which

  I spy

  Billy ‘Warts’ McBreeze drinking tea and tapping his toes

  to Randy

  and The Rainbows’ version of Denise.

  On the screen I mutilate a double-agent

  Ninja and collect

  a bonus drum of kerosene. Game of Love by Wayne

  Fontana pumps

  out of the machine, when I have to catch my breath,

  realizing Ricky

  ‘Rottweiler’ Rice is on my left

  saying watch for the nifty fucker

  with the cross-

  bow on the right. Sweat-purls tease my spine, tensed ever

  more rigidly,

  when Ricky’s joined by Andy ‘No Knees’ Tweed,

  both of them

  whistling merrily to The Crystals’ Then He Kissed Me.

  What the fuck is going on

  here, asks

  Victor ‘Steel Plate’ Hogg, as he slides through the fire

  door. The kid’s

  on level 3, says Andy. At which point Frankie does his nut,

  especially since

  The Cramps are playing Can Your Pussy Do the Dog?

  Betty puts on Curtis and the Clichés’

  Brush Against Me

  Barbarella instead, when the first helicopter shreds the air

  to the left

  of the screen. Gathering my wits and artillery, I might eclipse

  the high score

  of Markie ‘Life Sentence’ Prentice, set on October 6th.

  I hear Benny ‘Vindaloo’ McVeigh say,

  right we’re going

  to do this fucking thing. By now the smoke is so thick

  the screen is almost grey.

  The Shangri-Las are playing Remember (Walkin’ in the Sand).

  Frankie says

  no, Victor, nobody’s going to fucking disband.

  Bob B Soxx and the Blue Jeans are playing

  Zip-A-Dee-Doo-Dah.

  Through a napalm blur I set the interns free. They wear US

  marine khaki.

  Jimmy ‘Twelve Inch’ Lynch says, son, not bad for 20p.

  I leave the Zone and go

  back to the fierce grey day. It looks like snow.

  Progress

  They say that for years Belfast was backwards

  and it’s great now to see some progress.

  So I guess we can look forward to taking boxes

  from the earth. I guess that ambulances

  will leave the dying back amidst the rubble

  to be explosively healed. Given time,

  one hundred thousand particles of glass

  will create impossible patterns in the air

  before coalescing into the clarity

  of a window. Through which, a reassembled head

  will look out and admire the shy young man

  taking his bomb from the building and driving home.

  CAITRÍONA O’REILLY

  (b.1973)

  A Lecture Upon the Bat

  of the species Pipistrellus pipistrellus.

  Matchstick-sized, from the stumps of their tails

  to the tips of their noses. On reversible toes,

  dangling from gables like folded umbrellas.

  Some of them live for thirty years

  and die dangling. They hang on

  like the leaves they pretended to be,

  then like dying leaves turn dry.

  Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats

  amongst birds, Francis Bacon writes,

  they fly ever by twilight. But commonsense,

  not sixth sense, makes them forage at night.

  For the art of bat-pressing is not dead.

  Inside numberless books, like tiny black flowers,

  lie flattened bats. Even Shakespeare

  was a keen bat-fowler, or so it’s said.

  In medieval beast books

  extract of bat was a much-prized

  depilator. Reremice be blind as moles,

  and lick powder and suck

  oil out of lamps, and be most cold

  of kind, therefore the blood

  of a reremouse, nointed upon the legs,

  suffereth not the hair to grow again.

  And how toothsome is fruit-bat soup

  when boiled in the pot for an hour!

  Small wonder then that the Mandarin

  for both ‘happiness’ and ‘bat’ is ‘fu’.

  Bats have had a bad press.

  Yet they snaffle bugs by the thousand

  and carefully clean their babies’ faces.

  Their lives are quieter than this

  bat lore would have us believe.

  Bats overhead on frangible wings,

  piping ultrasonic vespers.

  Bats utterly wrapped up in themselves.

  Heliotrope

  Past beautiful,

  stuck in the dust

  of a road, her thin

  branched head

  with its baby hair

  and dozen white eyes

  so anthropomorphized

  and mute – her lover

  going down the sky

  daily in his flaming steps

  and she with her

  padlocked gaze –

  eternal follower!

  Yet the circle’s story

  fixes her

  at its centre –

  her greenish rooted

  limbs keep company

  with all the buried

  girls and boys

  whose lost testes

  and ovules stir to life

  again this month –

  under the soft rain


  of a god’s grief

  the hyacinth and lotus

  come, with narcissus

  on his sex-struck stem.

  LEONTIA FLYNN

  (b.1974)

  By My Skin

  for Terry McGaughey

  Mr Bennet in Pride and Prejudice – The Musical!,

  my father communicates with his family almost entirely through song.

  From the orange linoleum and trumpet-sized wallpaper flowers

  of the late 1970s, he steps with a roll of cotton,

  a soft-shoe routine, and a pound of soft white paraffin.

  He sings ‘Oft in the Stilly Night’ and ‘Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms’.

  He sings ‘Edelweiss’ and ‘Cheek to Cheek’ from Top Hat.

  Disney-animals are swaying along the formica sink-top

  where he gets me into a lather. He greases behind my knees

  and the folds of my elbows; he wraps me in swaddling clothes.

  Then lifts me up with his famous high-shouldered shuffle

  – ‘Yes Sir, That’s My Baby!’ – to the candlewick bunk.

  The air is bright with a billion exfoliate flitters

  as he changes track – one for his changeling child:

  ‘Hauld Up Your Head My Bonnie Wee Lass and Dinnae Look So Shy’.

  He sings ‘Put Your Shoes On, Lucy (Don’t You Know You’re In The City)’.

  He sings ‘Boolavogue’ and ‘Can’t Help Loving that Man of Mine’

  and ‘Lily the Pink’ and ‘The Woods of Gortnamona’.

  He sings – the lights are fading – ‘Slievenamon’

  and about the ‘Boy Blue’ (who awakens ‘to angel song’).

  My father is Captain Von Trapp, Jean Valjean, Professor Henry Higgins –

  gathering his repertoire, with the wheatgerm and cortisone,

  like he’s gathering up a dozen tribute roses.

  Then, taking a bow, he lays these – just so – by my skin

  which gets better and worse, and worse and better again.

  Drive

  My mother’s car is parked in the gravel drive

  outside the house. A breeze springs

  from the shore, and blows against this traffic sign

  standing between the by-road and the main road

  where somewhere a cricket ticks like a furious clock.

  My mother’s car is an estimable motor,

  a boxy thing – the car in which my mother,

  during a morning’s work, will sometimes drive

  to Dundrum, Ballykinlar, Seaford, Clough,

  ‘Newcastle’, ‘Castlewellan’, ‘Analong’.

  They drive along the old road and the new road –

  my father, in beside her, reads the signs

  as they escape him – for now they are empty signs,

  now one name means as little as another;

  the roads they drive along are fading roads.

  – ‘Dromore’, ‘Banbridge’ (my father’s going to drive

  my mother to distraction). ‘In Banbridge town …’, he sings.

  She turns the car round, glancing at the clock

  and thinks for a moment, turning back the clock,

  of early marriage – love! – under the sign

  of youth and youthful fortunes – back, in the spring,

  the first great mystery, of life together:

  my mother’s indefatigable drive

  keeping them both on the straight and narrow road,

  and, as they pass ‘Killough’ or ‘Drumaroad’,

  she thinks of children – broods a while (cluck cluck),

  on their beginnings (this last leg of this drive

  leads back to the empty house which she takes as a sign) …

  how does it work, she thinks, this little motor?

  Where are its cogs, and parts and curly oiled springs

  that make her now, improbably, the wellspring

  of five full persons – out upon life’s highroads:

  a grown-up son, a gang of grown-up daughters,

  prodigal, profligate – with 30 years on their clocks?

  She doesn’t know, and isn’t one to assign

  meaning to their ways, their worlds’ bewildering drives –

  though she tells this offspring she’s nearing the end of the road

  a clock ticks softly … the low pulse of some drive …?

  My mother watches. She’s waiting for a sign …

  NICK LAIRD

  (b.1975)

  Pedigree

  There are many of us.

  My aunt,

  the youngest sister,

  is a reformed shoplifter.

  An uncle breeds champion bantams.

  Another, a pig-farmer,

  has a racket smuggling cattle

  back and forth and back across

  the imaginary border.

  Me, I’ve forty-seven cousins.

  A scuffle over rustling sheep

  became a stabbing in a bar outside Armagh,

  and a murderer swings

  from a branch high up in our family tree.

  Which isn’t a willow.

  Instead,

  an enormous unruly blackthorn hedge,

  inside of which a corpse is tangled,

  and sags from branch to branch,

  like a dewy web:

  a farmer jumped on the road, and strangled,

  his pockets emptied

  of the stock proceeds from the county fair

  by two local Roman Catholic farmhands.

  Riots in Donegal town when they were cleared.

  And riots again when they were convicted.

  I may be out on a limb.

  One grandfather, the short-horn cattle dealer,

  went bankrupt, calmly smoked his pipe,

  and died at forty of lung cancer.

  Martha, my grandmother, remade Heathhill a dairy farm

  and when the rent man came

  my mother’d hide behind the sofa with her brothers.

  My father spent his boyhood fishing with a hook and tinfoil chocolate wrapper.

  He coveted a Davy Crockett hat

  and shined the medals of his legendary uncles

  who’d all died at the Somme,

  the Dragoon Guards of Inniskilling.

  He left school without sitting his papers

  and my mother dropped out to marry him.

  Each evening after work and dinner,

  she’d do her OU course,

  and heave the brown suitcase of books

  from out beneath the rickety, mythical bunks

  I shared for ten years with my sister.

  There is such a shelter in each other.

  And you, you pad from the bathroom to Gershwin,

  gentled with freckles and moisturized curves,

  still dripping, made new, singing your footprints

  as they singe the wood floor,

  perfect in grammar and posture.

  But before you passed me the phone

  you were talking, and I couldn’t help but note your tone,

  as if you couldn’t hear them right,

  as if they were maybe calling

  not from just across the water

  but Timbuktu, or from the moon …

  At least you can hear me, my darling,

  I’m speaking so softly and clearly,

  and this is a charge not a pleading.

  IX

  * * *

  SONGS AND BALLADS SINCE 1801

  Shall the Harp then be silent?

  Thomas Moore,

  ‘Shall the Harp Then be Silent’

  THOMAS MOORE

  from Irish Melodies

  War Song:

  Remember the Glories of Brien the Brave

  Remember the glories of Brien the brave,

  Tho’ the days of the hero are o’er;

  Tho’ lost to Mononia and cold in the grave

  He ret
urns to Kinkora no more!

  That star of the field, which so often has pour’d

  Its beam on the battle is set;

  But enough of its glory remains on each sword,

  To light us to victory yet!

  Mononia! when Nature embellish’d the tint

  Of thy fields, and thy mountains so fair,

  Did she ever intend that a tryant should print

  The footstep of slavery there?

  No, Freedom! whose smile we shall never resign,

  Go, tell our invaders, the Danes,

  That ’tis sweeter to bleed for an age at thy shrine,

  Than to sleep but a moment in chains!

  Forget not our wounded companions, who stood

  In the day of distress by our side;

  While the moss of the valley grew red with their blood,

  They stirr’d not, but conquer’d and died!

  That sun which now blesses our arms with his light,

  Saw them fall upon Ossory’s plain!

  Oh, let him not blush, when he leaves us tonight,

  To find that they fell there in vain!

  The Song of Fionnuala

  Silent, oh Moyle! be the roar of thy water,

  Break not, ye breezes, your chain of repose,

  While, murmuring mournfully, Lir’s lonely daughter

  Tells to the night-star her tale of woes.

  When shall the swan, her death-note singing,

  Sleep, with wings in darkness furl’d?

  When will heaven, its sweet bell ringing,

  Call my spirit from this stormy world?

  Sadly, oh Moyle! to thy winter wave weeping,

  Fate bids me languish long ages away;

  Yet still in her darkness doth Erin lie sleeping,

  Still doth the pure light its dawning delay!

  When will that day-star, mildly springing,

  Warm our isle with peace and love?

  When will heaven, its sweet bell ringing,

  Call my spirit to the fields above?

  She is Far from the Land

  She is far from the land where her young hero sleeps,

  And lovers are round her, sighing;

  But coldly she turns from their gaze, and weeps,

  For her heart in his grave is lying!

  She sings the wild song of her dear native plains,

  Every note which he lov’d awaking –

  Ah! little they think who delight in her strains,

  How the heart of the minstrel is breaking!