New and Selected Poems (13 page)

As you plaited the harvest bow

You implicated the mellowed silence in you

In wheat that does not rust

But brightens as it tightens twist by twist

Into a knowable corona,

A throwaway love-knot of straw.

   

 

Hands that aged round ashplants and cane sticks

And lapped the spurs on a lifetime of game cocks

Harked to their gift and worked with fine intent

Until your fingers moved somnambulant:

I tell and finger it like braille,

Gleaning the unsaid off the palpable.

   

 

And if I spy into its golden loops

I see us walk between the railway slopes

Into an evening of long grass and midges,

Blue smoke straight up, old beds and ploughs in hedges,

An auction notice on an outhouse wall –

You with a harvest bow in your lapel,

   

 

Me with the fishing rod, already homesick

For the big lift of these evenings, as your stick

Whacking the tips off weeds and bushes

Beats out of time, and beats, but flushes

Nothing: that original townland

Still tongue-tied in the straw tied by your hand.

   

 

The end of art is peace

Could be the motto of this frail device

That I have pinned up on our deal dresser –

Like a drawn snare

Slipped lately by the spirit of the corn

Yet burnished by its passage, and still warm.

Killed in France 31 July 1917

The bronze soldier hitches a bronze cape

That crumples stiffly in imagined wind

No matter how the real winds buff and sweep

His sudden hunkering run, forever craned

   

 

Over Flanders. Helmet and haversack,

The gun’s firm slope from butt to bayonet,

The loyal, fallen names on the embossed plaque –

It all meant little to the worried pet

   

 

I was in nineteen forty-six or seven,

Gripping my Aunt Mary by the hand

Along the Portstewart prom, then round the crescent

To thread the Castle Walk out to the strand.

   

 

The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.

Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.

A farmer stripped to his studs and shiny waistcoat

Rolled the trousers down on his timid shins.

   

 

Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside

Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.

Literary, sweet-talking, countrified,

You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane

   

 

Where you belonged, among the dolorous

And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers,

Easter water sprinkled in outhouses,

Mass-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

   

 

I think of you in your Tommy’s uniform,

A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave,

Ghosting the trenches like a bloom of hawthorn

Or silence cored from a Boyne passage-grave.

   

 

It’s summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl

My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.

Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles

You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.

   

It’s nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows

But a big strafe puts the candles out in Ypres:

‘My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows …

My country wears her confirmation dress.’

   

 

‘To be called a British soldier while my country

Has no place among nations …’ You were rent

By shrapnel six weeks later. ‘I am sorry

That party politics should divide our tents.’

   

 

In you, our dead enigma, all the strains

Criss-cross in useless equilibrium

And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze

I hear again the sure confusing drum

   

 

You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans

But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.

You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones

Though all of you consort now underground.

Suddenly this bleating

and belling in the glen!

The little timorous stag

like a scared musician

   

 

 startles my heartstrings

with high homesick refrains –

deer on my lost mountains,

flocks out on the plain.

   

 

The bushy leafy oak tree

is highest in the wood,

the forking shoots of hazel

hide sweet hazel-nuts.

   

 

The alder is my darling,

all thornless in the gap,

some milk of human kindness

coursing in its sap.

   

 

The blackthorn is a jaggy creel

stippled with dark sloes;

green watercress in thatch on wells

where the drinking blackbird goes.

   

 

Sweetest of the leafy stalks,

the vetches strew the pathway;

the oyster-grass is my delight,

and the wild strawberry.

   

 

Low-set clumps of apple trees

drum down fruit when shaken;

scarlet berries clot like blood

on mountain rowan.

   

 

Briars curl in sideways,

arch a stickle back,

draw blood and curl up innocent

to sneak the next attack.

   

 

The yew tree in each churchyard

wraps night in its dark hood.

Ivy is a shadowy

genius of the wood.

   

 

Holly rears its windbreak,

a door in winter’s face;

life-blood on a spear-shaft

darkens the grain of ash.

   

 

Birch tree, smooth and blessed,

delicious to the breeze,

high twigs plait and crown it

the queen of trees.

   

 

The aspen pales

and whispers, hesitates:

a thousand frightened scuts

race in its leaves.

   

 

But what disturbs me most

in the leafy wood

is the to and fro and to and fro

of an oak rod.

I would live happy

in an ivy bush

high in some twisted tree

and never come out.

   

 

 The skylarks rising

to their high space

send me pitching and tripping

over stumps on the moor

   

 

and my hurry flushes

the turtle-dove.

I overtake it,

my plumage rushing,

   

 

am startled

by the startled woodcock

or a blackbird’s sudden

volubility.

   

 

Think of my alarms,

my coming to earth

where the fox still

gnaws at the bones,

   

 

my wild career

as the wolf from the wood

goes tearing ahead

and I lift towards the mountain,

   

 

the bark of foxes

echoing below me,

the wolves behind me

howling and rending –

   

 

their vapoury tongues,

their low-slung speed

shaken off like nightmare

at the foot of the slope.

   

 

If I show my heels

I am hobbled by guilt.

I am a sheep

without a fold

   

 

who sleeps his sound sleep

in the old tree at Kilnoo,

dreaming back the good days

with Congal in Antrim.

   

 

A starry frost will come

dropping on pools

and I’ll be astray here

on unsheltered heights:

   

 

herons calling

in cold Glenelly,

flocks of birds quickly

coming and going.

   

 

I prefer the elusive

rhapsody of blackbirds

to the garrulous blather

of men and women.

   

 

I prefer the squeal of badgers

in their sett

to the tally-ho

of the morning hunt.

   

 

I prefer the re
-

echoing belling of a stag

among the peaks

to that arrogant horn.

   

 

Those unharnessed runners

from glen to glen!

Nobody tames

that royal blood,

   

 

each one aloof

on its rightful summit,

antlered, watchful.

Imagine them,

   

 

the stag of high Slieve Felim,

the stag of the steep Fews,

the stag of Duhallow, the stag of Orrery,

the fierce stag of Killarney.

   

 

The stag of Islandmagee, Larne’s stag,

the stag of Moylinny,

the stag of Cooley, the stag of Cunghill,

the stag of the two-peaked Burren.

   

 

The mother of this herd

is old and grey,

the stags that follow her

are branchy, many-tined.

   

 

I would be cloaked in the grey

sanctuary of her head,

I would roost among

her mazy antlers

   

 

and would be lofted into

this thicket of horns

on the stag that lows at me

over the glen.

   

 

I am Sweeney, the whinger,

the scuttler in the valley.

But call me, instead,

Peak-pate, Stag-head.