Death of a Naturalist Page 2

  As if a bandage had been ripped from skin –

  Empty plaque to a house’s rise and fall.

  Twenty years ago I herded cattle

  Into pens or held them against a wall

  Until my father won at arguing

  His own price on a crowd of cattlemen

  Who handled rumps, groped teats, stood, paused and

  then

  Bought a round of drinks to clinch the bargain.

  Uncle and nephew, fifty years ago,

  Heckled and herded through the fair days too.

  This barrel of a man penned in the frame:

  I see him with the jaunty hat pushed back

  Draw thumbs out of his waistcoat, curtly smack

  Hands and sell. Father, I’ve watched you do the same

  And watched you sadden when the fairs were stopped.

  No room for dealers if the farmers shopped

  Like housewives at an auction ring. Your stick

  Was parked behind the door and stands there still.

  Closing this chapter of our chronicle,

  I take your uncle’s portrait to the attic.

  Mid-Term Break

  I sat all morning in the college sick bay,

  Counting bells knelling classes to a close.

  At two o’clock our neighbours drove me home.

  In the porch I met my father crying –

  He had always taken funerals in his stride –

  And Big Jim Evans saying it was a hard blow.

  The baby cooed and laughed and rocked the pram

  When I came in, and I was embarrassed

  By old men standing up to shake my hand

  And tell me they were ‘sorry for my trouble’.

  Whispers informed strangers I was the eldest,

  Away at school, as my mother held my hand

  In hers and coughed out angry tearless sighs.

  At ten o’clock the ambulance arrived

  With the corpse, stanched and bandaged by the nurses.

  Next morning I went up into the room. Snowdrops

  And candles soothed the bedside; I saw him

  For the first time in six weeks. Paler now,

  Wearing a poppy bruise on his left temple,

  He lay in the four foot box as in his cot.

  No gaudy scars, the bumper knocked him clear.

  A four foot box, a foot for every year.

  Dawn Shoot

  Clouds ran their wet mortar, plastered the daybreak

  Grey. The stones clicked tartly

  If we missed the sleepers, but mostly

  Silent we headed up the railway

  Where now the only steam was funnelling from cows

  Ditched on their rumps beyond hedges,

  Cudding, watching, and knowing.

  The rails scored a bull’s-eye into the eye

  Of a bridge. A corncrake challenged

  Unexpectedly like a hoarse sentry

  And a snipe rocketed away on reconnaissance.

  Rubber-booted, belted, tense as two parachutists,

  We climbed the iron gate and dropped

  Into the meadow’s six acres of broom, gorse and dew.

  A sandy bank, reinforced with coiling roots,

  Faced you, two hundred yards from the track.

  Snug on our bellies behind a rise of dead whins,

  Our ravenous eyes getting used to the greyness,

  We settled, soon had the holes under cover.

  This was the den they all would be heading for now,

  Loping under ferns in dry drains, flashing

  Brown orbits across ploughlands and grazing.

  The plaster thinned at the skyline, the whitewash

  Was bleaching on houses and stables,

  The cock would be sounding reveille

  In seconds.

  And there was one breaking

  In from the gap in the corner.

  Donnelly’s left hand came up

  And came down on my barrel. This one was his,

  ‘For Christ’s sake,’ I spat, ‘Take your time, there’ll be more.’

  There was the playboy trotting up to the hole

  By the ash tree, ‘Wild rover no more,’

  Said Donnelly and emptied two barrels

  And got him.

  Another snipe catapulted into the light,

  A mare whinnied and shivered her haunches

  Up on a hill. The others would not be back

  After three shots like that. We dandered off

  To the railway; the prices were small at that time

  So we did not bother to cut out the tongue.

  The ones that slipped back when the all clear got round

  Would be first to examine him.

  At a Potato Digging

  I

  A mechanical digger wrecks the drill,

  Spins up a dark shower of roots and mould.

  Labourers swarm in behind, stoop to fill

  Wicker creels. Fingers go dead in the cold.

  Like crows attacking crow-black fields, they stretch

  A higgledy line from hedge to headland;

  Some pairs keep breaking ragged ranks to fetch

  A full creel to the pit and straighten, stand

  Tall for a moment but soon stumble back

  To fish a new load from the crumbled surf.

  Heads bow, trunks bend, hands fumble towards the

  black

  Mother. Processional stooping through the turf

  Recurs mindlessly as autumn. Centuries

  Of fear and homage to the famine god

  Toughen the muscles behind their humbled knees,

  Make a seasonal altar of the sod.

  II

  Flint-white, purple. They lie scattered

  like inflated pebbles. Native

  to the black hutch of clay

  where the halved seed shot and clotted,

  these knobbed and slit-eyed tubers seem

  the petrified hearts of drills. Split

  by the spade, they show white as cream.

  Good smells exude from crumbled earth.

  The rough bark of humus erupts

  knots of potatoes (a clean birth)

  whose solid feel, whose wet insides

  promise taste of ground and root.

  To be piled in pits; live skulls, blind-eyed.

  III

  Live skulls, blind-eyed, balanced on

  wild higgledy skeletons,

  scoured the land in ’forty-five,

  wolfed the blighted root and died.

  The new potato, sound as stone,

  putrefied when it had lain

  three days in the long clay pit.

  Millions rotted along with it.

  Mouths tightened in, eyes died hard,

  faces chilled to a plucked bird.

  In a million wicker huts,

  beaks of famine snipped at guts.

  A people hungering from birth,

  grubbing, like plants, in the earth,

  were grafted with a great sorrow.

  Hope rotted like a marrow.

  Stinking potatoes fouled the land,

  pits turned pus into filthy mounds:

  and where potato diggers are,

  you still smell the running sore.

  IV

  Under a gay flotilla of gulls

  The rhythm deadens, the workers stop.

  Brown bread and tea in bright canfuls

  Are served for lunch. Dead-beat, they flop

  Down in the ditch and take their fill,

  Thankfully breaking timeless fasts;

  Then, stretched on the faithless ground, spill

  Libations of cold tea, scatter crusts.

  For the Commander of the Eliza

  …the others, with emaciated faces and prominent, staring eyeballs, were evidently in an advanced state of starvation. The officer reported to Sir James Dombrain … and Sir James, ‘very inconveniently’, wrote Routh, ‘interfered�
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  CECIL WOODHAM-SMITH: THE GREAT HUNGER

  Routine patrol off West Mayo; sighting

  A rowboat heading unusually far

  Beyond the creek, I tacked and hailed the crew

  In Gaelic. Their stroke had clearly weakened

  As they pulled to, from guilt or bashfulness

  I was conjecturing when, Ο my sweet Christ,

  We saw piled in the bottom of their craft

  Six grown men with gaping mouths and eyes

  Bursting the sockets like spring onions in drills.

  Six wrecks of bone and pallid, tautened skin.

  ‘Bia, bia,

  Bia’. In whines and snarls their desperation

  Rose and fell like a flock of starving gulls.

  We’d known about the shortage, but on board

  They always kept us right with flour and beef

  So understand my feelings, and the men’s,

  Who had no mandate to relieve distress

  Since relief was then available in Westport –

  Though clearly these poor brutes would never make it.

  I had to refuse food: they cursed and howled

  Like dogs that had been kicked hard in the privates.

  When they drove at me with their starboard oar

  (Risking capsize themselves) I saw they were

  Violent and without hope. I hoisted

  And cleared off. Less incidents the better.

  Next day, like six bad smells, those living skulls

  Drifted through the dark of bunks and hatches

  And once in port I exorcised my ship,

  Reporting all to the Inspector General.

  Sir James, I understand, urged free relief

  For famine victims in the Westport Sector

  And earned tart reprimand from good Whitehall.

  Let natives prosper by their own exertions;

  Who could not swim might go ahead and sink.

  ‘The Coast Guard with their zeal and activity

  Are too lavish’ were the words, I think.

  The Diviner

  Cut from the green hedge a forked hazel stick

  That he held tight by the arms of the V:

  Circling the terrain, hunting the pluck

  Of water, nervous, but professionally

  Unfussed. The pluck came sharp as a sting.

  The rod jerked with precise convulsions,

  Spring water suddenly broadcasting

  Through a green hazel its secret stations.

  The bystanders would ask to have a try.

  He handed them the rod without a word.

  It lay dead in their grasp till, nonchalantly,

  He gripped expectant wrists. The hazel stirred.

  Turkeys Observed

  One observes them, one expects them;

  Blue-breasted in their indifferent mortuary,

  Beached bare on the cold marble slabs

  In immodest underwear frills of feather.

  The red sides of beef retain

  Some of the smelly majesty of living:

  A half-cow slung from a hook maintains

  That blood and flesh are not ignored.

  But a turkey cowers in death.

  Pull his neck, pluck him, and look –

  He is just another poor forked thing,

  A skin bag plumped with inky putty.

  He once complained extravagantly

  In an overture of gobbles;

  He lorded it on the claw-flecked mud

  With a grey flick of his Confucian eye.

  Now, as I pass the bleak Christmas dazzle,

  I find him ranged with his cold squadrons:

  The fuselage is bare, the proud wings snapped,

  The tail-fan stripped down to a shameful rudder.

  Cow in Calf

  It seems she has swallowed a barrel.

  From forelegs to haunches,

  her belly is slung like a hammock.

  Slapping her out of the byre is like slapping

  a great bag of seed. My hand

  tingled as if strapped, but I had to

  hit her again and again and

  heard the blows plump like a depth-charge

  far in her gut.

  The udder grows. Windbags

  of bagpipes are crammed there

  to drone in her lowing.

  Her cud and her milk, her heats and her calves

  keep coming and going.

  Trout

  Hangs, a fat gun-barrel,

  deep under arched bridges

  or slips like butter down

  the throat of the river.

  From depths smooth-skinned as plums,

  his muzzle gets bull’s eye;

  picks off grass-seed and moths

  that vanish, torpedoed.

  Where water unravels

  over gravel-beds he

  is fired from the shallows,

  white belly reporting

  flat; darts like a tracer-

  bullet back between stones

  and is never burnt out.

  A volley of cold blood

  ramrodding the current.

  Waterfall

  The burn drowns steadily in its own downpour,

  A helter-skelter of muslin and glass

  That skids to a halt, crashing up suds.

  Simultaneous acceleration

  And sudden braking; water goes over

  Like villains dropped screaming to justice.

  It appears an athletic glacier

  Has reared into reverse: is swallowed up

  And regurgitated through this long throat.

  My eye rides over and downwards, falls with

  Hurtling tons that slabber and spill,

  Falls, yet records the tumult thus standing still.

  Docker

  There, in the corner, staring at his drink.

  The cap juts like a gantry’s crossbeam,