100 Poems Read online

  Sometimes, leather-aproned, hairs in his nose,

  He leans out on the jamb, recalls a clatter

  Of hoofs where traffic is flashing in rows;

  Then grunts and goes in, with a slam and flick

  To beat real iron out, to work the bellows.

  The Peninsula

  When you have nothing more to say, just drive

  For a day all round the peninsula.

  The sky is tall as over a runway,

  The land without marks, so you will not arrive

  But pass through, though always skirting landfall.

  At dusk, horizons drink down sea and hill,

  The ploughed field swallows the whitewashed gable

  And you’re in the dark again. Now recall

  The glazed foreshore and silhouetted log,

  That rock where breakers shredded into rags,

  The leggy birds stilted on their own legs,

  Islands riding themselves out into the fog,

  And drive back home, still with nothing to say

  Except that now you will uncode all landscapes

  By this: things founded clean on their own shapes,

  Water and ground in their extremity.

  Requiem for the Croppies

  The pockets of our greatcoats full of barley –

  No kitchens on the run, no striking camp –

  We moved quick and sudden in our own country.

  The priest lay behind ditches with the tramp.

  A people, hardly marching – on the hike –

  We found new tactics happening each day:

  We’d cut through reins and rider with the pike

  And stampede cattle into infantry,

  Then retreat through hedges where cavalry must be thrown.

  Until, on Vinegar Hill, the fatal conclave.

  Terraced thousands died, shaking scythes at cannon.

  The hillside blushed, soaked in our broken wave.

  They buried us without shroud or coffin

  And in August the barley grew up out of the grave.

  Night Drive

  The smells of ordinariness

  Were new on the night drive through France:

  Rain and hay and woods on the air

  Made warm draughts in the open car.

  Signposts whitened relentlessly.

  Montreuil, Abbeville, Beauvais

  Were promised, promised, came and went,

  Each place granting its name’s fulfilment.

  A combine groaning its way late

  Bled seeds across its work-light.

  A forest fire smouldered out.

  One by one small cafés shut.

  I thought of you continuously

  A thousand miles south where Italy

  Laid its loin to France on the darkened sphere.

  Your ordinariness was renewed there.

  The Given Note

  On the most westerly Blasket

  In a dry-stone hut

  He got this air out of the night.

  Strange noises were heard

  By others who followed, bits of a tune

  Coming in on loud weather

  Though nothing like melody.

  He blamed their fingers and ear

  As unpractised, their fiddling easy

  For he had gone alone into the island

  And brought back the whole thing.

  The house throbbed like his full violin.

  So whether he calls it spirit music

  Or not, I don’t care. He took it

  Out of wind off mid-Atlantic.

  Still he maintains, from nowhere.

  It comes off the bow gravely,

  Rephrases itself into the air.

  Bogland

  for T. P. Flanagan

  We have no prairies

  To slice a big sun at evening –

  Everywhere the eye concedes to

  Encroaching horizon,

  Is wooed into the cyclops’ eye

  Of a tarn. Our unfenced country

  Is bog that keeps crusting

  Between the sights of the sun.

  They’ve taken the skeleton

  Of the Great Irish Elk

  Out of the peat, set it up,

  An astounding crate full of air.

  Butter sunk under

  More than a hundred years

  Was recovered salty and white.

  The ground itself is kind, black butter

  Melting and opening underfoot,

  Missing its last definition

  By millions of years.

  They’ll never dig coal here,

  Only the waterlogged trunks

  Of great firs, soft as pulp.

  Our pioneers keep striking

  Inwards and downwards,

  Every layer they strip

  Seems camped on before.

  The bogholes might be Atlantic seepage.

  The wet centre is bottomless.

  Anahorish

  My ‘place of clear water’,

  the first hill in the world

  where springs washed into

  the shiny grass

  and darkened cobbles

  in the bed of the lane.

  Anahorish, soft gradient

  of consonant, vowel-meadow,

  after-image of lamps

  swung through the yards

  on winter evenings.

  With pails and barrows

  those mound-dwellers

  go waist-deep in mist

  to break the light ice

  at wells and dunghills.

  Broagh

  Riverbank, the long rigs

  ending in broad docken

  and a canopied pad

  down to the ford.

  The garden mould

  bruised easily, the shower

  gathering in your heelmark

  was the black O

  in Broagh,

  its low tattoo

  among the windy boortrees

  and rhubarb-blades

  ended almost

  suddenly, like that last

  gh the strangers found

  difficult to manage.

  The Other Side

  I

  Thigh-deep in sedge and marigolds,

  a neighbour laid his shadow

  on the stream, vouching

  ‘It’s as poor as Lazarus, that ground,’

  and brushed away

  among the shaken leafage.

  I lay where his lea sloped

  to meet our fallow,

  nested on moss and rushes,

  my ear swallowing

  his fabulous, biblical dismissal,

  that tongue of chosen people.

  When he would stand like that

  on the other side, white-haired,

  swinging his blackthorn

  at the marsh weeds,

  he prophesied above our scraggy acres,

  then turned away

  towards his promised furrows

  on the hill, a wake of pollen

  drifting to our bank, next season’s tares.

  II

  For days we would rehearse

  each patriarchal dictum:

  Lazarus, the Pharaoh, Solomon

  and David and Goliath rolled

  magnificently, like loads of hay

  too big for our small lanes,

  or faltered on a rut –

  ‘Your side of the house, I believe,

  hardly rule by the Book at all.’

  His brain was a whitewashed kitchen

  hung with texts, swept tidy

  as the body o’ the kirk.

  III

  Then sometimes when the rosary was dragging

  mournfully on in the kitchen

  we would hear his step round the gable

  though not until after the litany

  would the knock come to the door

  and the casual whistle strike up

  on the doorstep. ‘A right-look
ing night,’

  he might say, ‘I was dandering by

  and says I, I might as well call.’

  But now I stand behind him

  in the dark yard, in the moan of prayers.

  He puts a hand in a pocket

  or taps a little tune with the blackthorn

  shyly, as if he were party to

  lovemaking or a stranger’s weeping.

  Should I slip away, I wonder,

  or go up and touch his shoulder

  and talk about the weather

  or the price of grass-seed?

  The Tollund Man

  I

  Some day I will go to Aarhus

  To see his peat-brown head,

  The mild pods of his eyelids,

  His pointed skin cap.

  In the flat country nearby

  Where they dug him out,

  His last gruel of winter seeds

  Caked in his stomach,

  Naked except for

  The cap, noose and girdle,

  I will stand a long time.

  Bridegroom to the goddess,

  She tightened her torc on him

  And opened her fen,

  Those dark juices working

  Him to a saint’s kept body,

  Trove of the turfcutters’

  Honeycombed workings.

  Now his stained face

  Reposes at Aarhus.

  II

  I could risk blasphemy,

  Consecrate the cauldron bog

  Our holy ground and pray

  Him to make germinate

  The scattered, ambushed

  Flesh of labourers,

  Stockinged corpses

  Laid out in the farmyards,

  Tell-tale skin and teeth

  Flecking the sleepers

  Of four young brothers, trailed

  For miles along the lines.

  III

  Something of his sad freedom

  As he rode the tumbril

  Should come to me, driving,

  Saying the names

  Tollund, Grauballe, Nebelgard,

  Watching the pointing hands

  Of country people,

  Not knowing their tongue.

  Out there in Jutland

  In the old man-killing parishes

  I will feel lost,

  Unhappy and at home.

  Wedding Day

  I am afraid.

  Sound has stopped in the day

  And the images reel over

  And over. Why all those tears,

  The wild grief on his face

  Outside the taxi? The sap

  Of mourning rises

  In our waving guests.

  You sing behind the tall cake

  Like a deserted bride

  Who persists, demented,

  And goes through the ritual.

  When I went to the Gents

  There was a skewered heart

  And a legend of love. Let me

  Sleep on your breast to the airport.

  Westering

  in California

  I sit under Rand McNally’s

  ‘Official Map of the Moon’ –

  The colour of frogskin,

  Its enlarged pores held

  Open and one called

  ‘Pitiscus’ at eye level –

  Recalling the last night

  In Donegal, my shadow

  Neat upon the whitewash

  From her bony shine,

  The cobbles of the yard

  Lit pale as eggs.

  Summer had been a free fall

  Ending there,

  The empty amphitheatre

  Of the west. Good Friday

  We had started out

  Past shopblinds drawn on the afternoon,

  Cars stilled outside still churches,

  Bikes tilting to a wall;

  We drove by,

  A dwindling interruption,

  As clappers smacked

  On a bare altar

  And congregations bent

  To the studded crucifix.

  What nails dropped out that hour?

  Roads unreeled, unreeled

  Falling light as casts

  Laid down

  On shining waters.

  Under the moon’s stigmata

  Six thousand miles away,

  I imagine untroubled dust,

  A loosening gravity,

  Christ weighing by his hands.

  Mossbawn: Two Poems in Dedication

  for Mary Heaney

  1 Sunlight

  There was a sunlit absence.

  The helmeted pump in the yard

  heated its iron,

  water honeyed

  in the slung bucket

  and the sun stood

  like a griddle cooling

  against the wall

  of each long afternoon.

  So, her hands scuffled

  over the bakeboard,

  the reddening stove

  sent its plaque of heat

  against her where she stood

  in a floury apron

  by the window.

  Now she dusts the board

  with a goose’s wing,

  now sits, broad-lapped,

  with whitened nails

  and measling shins:

  here is a space

  again, the scone rising

  to the tick of two clocks.

  And here is love

  like a tinsmith’s scoop

  sunk past its gleam

  in the meal-bin.

  2 The Seed Cutters

  They seem hundreds of years away. Brueghel,

  You’ll know them if I can get them true.

  They kneel under the hedge in a half-circle

  Behind a windbreak wind is breaking through.

  They are the seed cutters. The tuck and frill

  Of leaf-sprout is on the seed potatoes

  Buried under that straw. With time to kill,

  They are taking their time. Each sharp knife goes

  Lazily halving each root that falls apart

  In the palm of the hand: a milky gleam,

  And, at the centre, a dark watermark.

  Oh, calendar customs! Under the broom

  Yellowing over them, compose the frieze

  With all of us there, our anonymities.

  Funeral Rites

  I

  I shouldered a kind of manhood

  stepping in to lift the coffins

  of dead relations.

  They had been laid out

  in tainted rooms,

  their eyelids glistening,

  their dough-white hands

  shackled in rosary beads.

  Their puffed knuckles

  had unwrinkled, the nails

  were darkened, the wrists

  obediently sloped.

  The dulse-brown shroud,

  the quilted satin cribs:

  I knelt courteously

  admiring it all

  as wax melted down

  and veined the candles,

  the flames hovering

  to the women hovering

  behind me.

  And always, in a corner,

  the coffin lid,

  its nail-heads dressed

  with little gleaming crosses.

  Dear soapstone masks,

  kissing their igloo brows

  had to suffice

  before the nails were sunk

  and the black glacier

  of each funeral

  pushed away.

  II

  Now as news comes in

  of each neighbourly murder

  we pine for ceremony,

  customary rhythms:

  the temperate footsteps

  of a cortège, winding past

  each blinded home.

  I would restore

  the great chambers of Boyne,

  prepare a sepulchre


  under the cupmarked stones.

  Out of side-streets and by-roads

  purring family cars

  nose into line,

  the whole country tunes

  to the muffled drumming

  of ten thousand engines.

  Somnambulant women,

  left behind, move

  through emptied kitchens

  imagining our slow triumph

  towards the mounds.

  Quiet as a serpent

  in its grassy boulevard,

  the procession drags its tail

  out of the Gap of the North

  as its head already enters

  the megalithic doorway.

  III

  When they have put the stone

  back in its mouth

  we will drive north again

  past Strang and Carling fjords,

  the cud of memory

  allayed for once, arbitration

  of the feud placated,

  imagining those under the hill

  disposed like Gunnar

  who lay beautiful