In my mother's house

In dirt of blue-grey modelling clay
Where Sapien was Homo and happy still gay
That’s where my fathers son tottered to walk
With mother of headline, ruler and chalk.
 
Overarching boughs of green, cloisters of the lane,
Divided sparse fields, every mearing a drain.
With fences of thorn, of black and of haw,
And ruts in those lanes that sun never saw.
 
That’s where I would leave, come back to settle,
At one with the lakelander, heron and nettle.
Rutted lanes and lost lanes, blending in stride,
On penance-path to school, drinking pool beside.
 
My father was hardly a father at all
I still don’t know what a father was,
His answer to why things were as they were
The always same; because, because.
 
We were holy in a ritual way
Hymns and psalms were sung,
And chanted like the Hare Krishna
When Angelus bell stuck out her tongue.
 
She taught me numbers one by one
An abacus made from her beads,
She said ‘the world survives on mouthfuls
And mouthfuls come from seeds’. 

In the lane I counted her fingers,

I counted from thumb to ten,
A finger for every year of my life,
Never counted her fingers again



(Dedicated to John McGahern, the greatest wordsmith of them all!)

 



Brendan the Navvy

Dante of Florence mined for inspiration

Was content to trawl in another nation
For his plot and players in his Comedy Divine,
A legend now; a man then, Brendan the Navvy
Preaching and teaching, building, no compass
No trowel, no level or vertical line.
 
Christian parents, Finnlugh and Cara,
Cousins of valour; Niall of the Nine,
From Tralee of the Kingdom, bound for another,
With sandals and staff he travelled the land,
Called fourteen companions of heart and of hand
Surveyed the Atlantic with Erc, druid brother.
 
In 551 he mounted the waves riding a scallop-shell boat,
An Arc by design on damp willow bough
Lashed to the weatherproof skin of a goat.
The signal of sun, the power of the moon,
Newfoundland first, Bahamas and further,
A miracle kept the Curragh afloat.

They brave, refereed a rare confrontation

A fight to the death between pussy and shark
While Florida beckoned on Western shore,
Festivus decreed Mississippi too wide
Land of Promise; mirage of the haughty and vain,
High time and tide for Aran once more.
 
Eight leagues to the west of sultry Gomera
Brendan found his island on Tuesday I’m told
On Tuesday at fifteen or twenty past ten,
He found a lost island, he lost a found island,
I wonder if that land is low land or highland,
By noontime on Wednesday he lost it again.

(dedicated to Brendan the Navigator, who drew the maps for Christopher Columbus.)