Cabbage
Earthen
He is Gone
The Pulse
You planted cabbages to please me,
I know.
And there the last three or four of them clung
like pock-marked green moons in orbit
across the muddy sky of the garden slope.
Sometimes when the sky clears
to a thin astonishing blue
the heart turns, looks over its shoulder
at shadows of the tall perennials
cross-hatching an old brick path.
Wind rises.
Dry seed-heads rattle and bow
like old thoughts.
The rivets on a wooden bench
are rusting. Weeds thrive
in cracked and broken bricks
set far below
the clean high sky.
Yet there is beauty
in such fecklessness, such disrepair.
It is our body’s native language.
‘He is gone. Say it. Say it to yourself, to the room,
say it loud enough to believe it.’
Paula Meehan, Laburnam
Twice as fast
As a mother’s heart
Week five heart chambers divide
A switch-on beat
Shocks surging life
To limb and body yet unformed
We had to get out the hatchet
to chop the woody stem off the one I wanted.
And then I pulled off leaf after leaf,
each rubbery jacket bull’s-eyed
like cigarette burns on an unfortunate table,
where slugs had tried to burrow in.
Before I brought it inside for a good scrub
I hacked off
half-a dozen leaves with my pocket knife
and flung them onto the compost heap,
flicking slugs off,
lacking the zeal even to deprive
them of their disgusting lives.
Autumn is here, and where
is the gardener’s thoroughness
that would have been mine in March or May?
The smell of the cabbage
as I chopped through its crunchy thickness
on the kitchen counter
was what the word October
smells like.
The pure white-and-greenness
that filled my head
with what grows and keeps on growing
was what I had needed all this
short and getting-shorter day.
Richard Tillinghast
Kerry Hardie
Stormy Weather, 1938
i.m. my parents, George & Dora Coady
On their Killarney honeymoon they found
themselves with time and money just run out.
Far off and deep downstream she would tell of
that evening in the bar of Scott’s Hotel
counting small change to make the train fare home
until she walked to the piano and played the intro
to the Harold Arlen song, ‘Stormy Weather’ –
his party piece in those first years together.
Go on! some drinkers called, go on! And so
by the night's end the place was full of song,
his hat a well of silver and the proprietor
proposing they stay on, with a retainer.
That given time was never quite undone
by all the weather of the years to come.
Michael Coady
September, you cover your ears against the shrill
whistle
of fast approaching Autumn, swallows
making ready to carry off
the last of summer. He is gone.
Say it. His name on your lips
like a mantra, not letting go,
his name repeated like a charm
that could bring him back.
September, golden light gone with him,
grey landscape camps at your city walls.
Go out now to the hedgerows,
with the vessel of your heart.
You must go from bush to briar, gathering,
harvesting your bright fruit,
sharp hips, sweet berries,
every kernel, every nut, every seed.
Harvest the apples, the star-fruit.
Pick them with thought, with kind
attention to your bruising,
hold yourself in the palm of your hand.
Seek the reds that will inflame
your winter, rose-hip, hawthorn,
scarlet rowan, guelder
fire to feed the hearth.
With your hands pricked and bleeding
reap the smoked blues and purples,
blackberries, damsons,
sloes eager for the first frost.
Hoard not this bounty, lay it
before the birds of the air,
the creatures of the fields:
he is gone, make of yourself an offering.
Grace Wells
Seeking its own kind
The pulsating push of the sea
Heaves breathing sighs
Surging waves thrash free
On blocking rocks
Roaring and running
Towards a sandy sea shore
Johanna Tanner
Her Blindness
In her blindness
the house became
a tapestry of touch.
The jagged end of a dresser
became a signpost
to the back door,
bread crumbs crunching
under her feet told
her when to sweep
the kitchen floor;
the powdery touch
of dry leaves
in the flower-trough
said that geraniums
needed water.
I remember her
beside the huge December fire,
holding a heavy mug,
changing its position
on her lap; filling
the dark space
between her fingers
with the light
of bright memory.
Thomas McCarthy
[pps]
Welcome 3755547K
your small head rests
in the arms of the State
your fingers are counted, your toes
registered, your cries
have found their way
to a vault of need, you’re
known, allowed for, admitted
though mysterious to us
and as yet unpersuaded
you drift and sway
and kick against the world
but listen
your breath moves in a far drawer
a number among numbers
you shift in your folder
you open your eyes
you fall through the letterbox
and climb the stairs
you float towards your basket
and gently surrender
ah 3755547K
recognised, acknowledged, filed,
let the complex systems
convince, sleep on the miracle
of your name spilling across the screen,
the long arms of the sun reaching in.
Peter Sirr
From The Thing Is, Gallery Press, 2009
The Forge
An sméar mhullaigh
Lasann súilíní sna cloig dhubh-chorcra
faoi dhuilleog lásach
beireann ordóg is méar a ngreim go bog mín
ach brúfar sú, smearfar méar is leiceann
is an buicéidín geal stáin
atá mar scáthán
béal-oscailte.
Priocann deilgíní boige méire
mar rabhadh go bhfuil a tháille féin
le n-éileamh ag gach rud sa saol.
In airde le cos ar ghuaille titeann
an ceann is súmhaire sa bhféar
an braon ón spéir á mbaisteadh
sa chuardach
ach seasann siad, chomh daingean
le préamh drise
dath an fhómhair smeartha anois
ar aghaidh is éadach
slaod-bhlas fómhair faoi dhéada
an bogha ceatha
mar chuar na ngas driseach
os a gcionn.
Arís, is arís, éireoidh cosa
guagacha ar ghuaillí
pianmhara
go dian sa tóir
ar rí na sméar.
Áine Uí Fhoghlú
The pick of the crop
(This translation by Áine Uí Fhoghlú
is a guide in English to An sméar mhullaigh)
Beads of light shine
from the purple-black blisters
under lacy leaf
thumb and finger grip gently
but juice will be pressed, finger and cheek
will be smeared
as the bright tin bucket
gaping like an open-mouthed
mirror.
Thorns prick softness of fingers
as if to warn that everything in life
demands its own price.
Feet climb on shoulders
the fattest berry falls in the grass
the drop from the sky soaks
their search but they stand, as staunch
as a briar-roots
autumn colour now smeared across
face and garment
thick-taste of autumn under tooth
the rainbow like the arch of briary
stems overhead.
Again, and again, shaky legs
will mount
aching shoulders
forever seeking
the king berry.
Áine Uí Fhoghlú
An old ponycart attracted us inside.
The smith, heaped on a broken chair
in shadow, we didn’t notice, until he spoke.
The great bellows he showed us lovingly,
the many different nails, the shoes, tongs, hammers
were buried under inches of dust,
sunken shipfittings on an ocean floor.
He moved like a man underwater,
his breathing equipment disconnnected.
He touched his face and the spot stayed white.
A Menu
of
Poems
Introduction
In mid-August, the Waterford Healing Arts
Trust wrote to nine poets living in or from the
South East of Ireland to invite them to share a
poem with the patients of Waterford Regional
Hospital on 1st October, All Ireland Poetry Day.
All of the poets responded very generously by
sending us these poems. Although they were not
given a specific theme, some shared themes
emerge when all of the poems are seen together.
The poems invite us to look, smell, touch, listen,
and to think and feel. Many of them are aptly
located at this turning point of summer into
winter. Others invite us to reminisce. Áine Uí
Fhoghlú has kindly given an English guide to her
poem An sméar mhullaigh.
I hope these poems offer you an opportunity for
a quiet reverie in the course of your day in Waterford Regional Hospital, and that you will keep
and savour them into the future.
Please do let us know if you have a favourite
poem and your thoughts on it, or on all of the
poems, by filling in the comment sheet attached
and sending it back to us via the nursing staff.
Finally, I would like to thank Poetry Ireland,
without whom this project would not have been
possible.
Mary Grehan ,
Arts Director, Waterford Healing Arts Trust
It seemed the world had forgotten the forge
when through the lit door it spat a live coal,
a swallow, bringing the heat of her face
to melt from the dark the forms of her young.
Mark Roper