A Guardian of Peace
by Aedh Eamon
He had been a guardian of peace with duties of conciliation,
shillelagh fights at fairs, arresting drunks to keep them
out of harm’s way, drinking his porter with a whiskey chaser
and gifted with copious tears when joy or sorrow visited him.
Whether harsh or pious he was charming to strangers,
even as he migrated with his family to mining towns of the
far north where his vigour was dissipated in a fruitless search for gold,
unlike his uncles in the Klondike who had done well
and re-migrated to small farms in Donegal
to father large families.
Having reversed the migration process he continued to soldier on,
becoming a carpenter in the Arctic,
losing a friend in a blizzard, another dead from TB,
so that he himself contracted the disease
and suffered years in a sanitorium
forcing his wife-mother to scrabble for the dole
as she drummed into our adolescent minds to not be
like your father fallen upon hard times.
Eventually retiring, he drank too much, fell on his head, fell on his hip,
grieved for his dead wife after sixty years of verbal battles,
prayed the evening rosary, confided visions of the Virgin at the foot of his bed
and his vain dreams of a grandson becoming a bishop.
Then came the body bag, the wake, the honor guard from the County Society with
green, white and gold sashes, while the grandchildren step danced as the uillean pipes
squeezed a lament while the Gaelic language flowed around the muffled coffin.
At the gravesite a nephew played a favourite dirge on the saxophone as Canada geese nibbled grass nearby.
Returning home I had visions of him stepping forth with a staff, his stories cascading
in a thick burr of words from a prodigious memory, whistling while ruminating over
the sparsity of Irish names on the headstones at the local cemetery.
When he reclined by the window near the garden, his stories lightened loneliness
with the emotional landscape of clan rivalries, sacred mountains & heroes,
one being that of an ancestor standing in his petticoats while the wooden bowls
on the sideboard shook from sounds of cannon shot as the British captured Wolfe Tone near Tory
Island and sailed with him into Lough Swilly;
The old man’s eyes seeped tears as he recounted the nobility of this hero
who turned his wounded neck to die when told hanging was to be his fate;
In this same deep slough of despondency he told of the Wild Geese
of the O’Donnells and O’Neills coerced to flee overseas
as the English fleet confiscated clan lands,
the double tragedy of ancient tribes fragmenting to satisfy a monolithic monoculture
dispossessing the indigenous in the name of Puritan beliefs;
The old man’s sighs emerged from a deep-felt sorrow as he dipped oars into poetry and myth,
his phrases like sails gliding between uncertain isles before shifting the rudder of his thoughts to old
familiar phrases: ‘sin a dóigh, that’s the way of it’.
In Memoriam
by Aedh Eamon
Hovering beyond the window it seemed not yet to move, a pale horse looming in the overcast sky.
I looked again into my father’s eyes receding in their sockets, eyelids becoming translucent like his blind mother;
each breath a slow failing, a grappling hook, an anchor rattling with images of a life of fragmented memories;
his compulsions to save scraps of rope, bent nails, twisted pieces of wire picked up from walks along the roadside, so like stories half finished, which he contrived to make whole from broken shards of native culture.
In the village of his nostalgia he had pulled his family into his orbit, his tasks becoming ours to straighten and make useful the scraps of history doled out between accordion sessions, his Irish songs of tragedy and humour entangling us in a history of grief and humour,
our bodies suffused with anecdotes articulated in stories of freedom fighters;
And now the last chapter, the labored breathing, the waiting as he struggled with his last breath;
Placing my hand on his I spoke of ancient times, the voyages and adventures of his Fenian heroes, and then of saints and holy wells and miracles of healing, of bonfires on crests of hills, whose dying embers we leaped over;
My words fell into his collapsing sun as I asked him to let go, then pleaded a reprieve as his face turned marble white, his feet cold, his eyes sinking into skull caves;
I withdrew into the ritual of prayer before conveying the news to our extended clan who shared the memory of his dream; pastures of bracken, gorse and nettles that had stung us with bitterness and pleasure;
Although immersed in stories of sacred wells and Gaelic music, his blackthorn walking stick often in his hands, his stories enclosing everyone with his passionate embrace of life.
Hugh Curran was born in Donegal, Ireland into an Irish-speaking family, and after moving to Canada did undergraduate studies in Nova Scotia. He subsequently lived for five years as a Zen monastic and did a three-month pilgrimage to India and Japan before moving to Maine. He became a founding member of the Morgan Bay Zendo where he is on the Board of Directors & guides retreats, and also founded the Friends of Morgan Bay which oversees several nature preserves. During the 1990s Hugh became the Director of a homeless shelter in Downeast Maine and has published articles on homelessness. Since 2002 he has been a lecturer in the Peace & Reconciliation Studies Program. Hugh has co-written a book on local Maine history with Esther Wood and has published poetry in various poetry journals as well as compiling a classroom text: Excerpts from Classical & Modern Writers on War & Peace. In July, 2017 he was invited to present a paper on a ‘Buddhist Interpretation on the Ethics of Animal Suffering’ at St. Stephen’s College, Oxford University, UK.
Tinteán
le Doireann Ní Ghríofa
Ag scuabadh luaithe as an ngráta atáim,
mo ghlúine ar an ruga tinteáin,
– sean-chraiceann caorach le loirg lasracha
na blianta dóite ann- nuair a iompaíonn an ruga fúm
ina léarscáil. Feicim oileán ann, áit lom le cósta garbh.
Clochach, an talamh a ghlac lenár bpobal lag, ocrach,
aimsir an Drochshaoil. Thiar ar Grosse Île tá an t-aer trom,
fós, le ceobhrán-chuimhne an fiabhras tíofóideach. Tá an chré ann
tiubh, freisin, le cuimhne na ndaoine a cailleadh thall,
a d’fhág banda bán a gcnámh tríd na gciseal talún ann.
Tá a gcuid ainmneacha greanta, ní hamháin ar leacht
cuimhneacháin; tá siad scríofa, chomh maith, i leacht
na dtonnta – na tonnta céanna a d’iompair i bhfad ó bhaile iad,
na tonnta a luíonn síos, ceann ar cheann ar cheann ar an gcladach
úd i bhfad uainn, ar imeall an oileáin a fheicim anois sa ruga
fúm, sa sean-chraiceann leagtha faoi chnámh mo ghlúin.
Hearth
by Doireann Ní Ghríofa
I’m scooping soft ash from the grate,
kneeling on the hearth-rug
– a scorch-scarred old sheepskin –
when the rug begins to become something different,
map of a bare place far away, the jagged-edged
island that held our people during the Famine.
On Grosse Île, the mist is opaque still, thick with drizzle
-memories of typhoid fever. The ground there is dense
with all who were lost, who left
a pale layer of bone through strata of earth.
Their names are etched, not only in marble,
but in the froth of the waves, the same waves
that carried them so far from home, the waves that even now,
lie down one by one by one on that rough shore, so far from us,
on the distant island that I seem to see in the rug by our hearth-
stone, in this scorched old sheepskin pinned under my knee bones.
Doireann Ní Ghríofa is a critically-acclaimed bilingual writer, author of The Ghost in the Throat (2021), her ‘dazzingly prose debut’, she has won prizes and fellowships, including The Rooney Prize for Irish Literature and a Seamus Heaney fellowship.
The poem ‘Tinteán’ is reproduced here with the author’s permission.
Condemned
by Audrey Molloy
It had been on death row since we’d moved in,
too close to the front of the house,
blocking sun to our daughter’s room.
But what finer tree for a garden than a magnolia?
Those three weeks of fondant bloom!
A mistake to prune: it suckered,
sending leggy shoots up like bamboo, ruining
the fractals of its oriental geometry.
Sometimes you must start over.
We sawed through limbs, then trunk,
paid someone to wrestle out the root system.
A pair of lorikeets watched in consternation
from the guttering, their home sundered.
We replaced it with a weeping cherry,
the kind that turns back on itself,
never growing any taller.
We did this work together one weekend,
my then-husband and I, the last thing
we collaborated on, apart from
bringing up our children. I miss it all—
the house, the tree, the lorikeets—
especially in late winter, those few weeks
when it almost felt worthwhile.
I’m told there’s more light in the house now.
**
Ambiguous Loss
by Audrey Molloy
Your child has bitten hers,
and you don’t know what to say, to make it right
with the woman who is like a sister to you.
She smiles and says, We’re solid, you and I,
like it’s inviolable, your holy bond.
And you believe her at the time. You do.
*
Driving past the kids’ old school today,
you saw her in the distance, corralling
her youngest through the gates. You waved.
She might have raised her arm.
It was early and the light was low;
you really couldn’t say for sure.
**
Gratitude
by Audrey Molloy
Trailing sleep and antiperspirant,
they abandon milky bowls, toast crusts,
and the echo of an accusation—a book lost
or stolen—their schoolbags huge as turtle shells.
You drain your lukewarm tea, unpack and stack
the dishes in the dishwasher, clean
the sink, strip the beds, tuck in fresh sheets.
You are up since dawn to make this happen.
Outside, the day has also risen early
to unfold clouds, smooth out the muslin sky.
Hazy light makes light of labour, dials
the sun’s warmth up, low, then rising hourly,
and, when the missing book turns up, you realise
that you have never thanked the morning either.
————————
These poems are published with the kind permission of the author and The Rochford Street Review. https://rochfordstreetreview.com/2024/11/12/audrey-molloy-3-poems/
Audrey Molloy grew up in Ireland and has lived in Sydney since 1998. Her debut collection, The Important Things (The Gallery Press, 2021), won the Anne Elder Award and was shortlisted for the Seamus Heaney First Collection Poetry Prize. The Blue Cocktail was published by The Gallery Press and Pitt Street Poetry in 2023. She has an MA in Creative Writing from Manchester Metropolitan University. Her work has appeared in Best of Australian Poems, Island, The London Magazine, and Poetry Ireland Review.
See more of Audrey’s work at Audrey at http://www.audreymolloy.com
A History of Rain
By Anne Casey
i. At dawn
Born from death—abrupt expulsion from the heart
of a falling star, borne on dust across the universe—
or the unimaginable
violence of Theia’s headlong plunge
into Gaia’s breast, a rupture
in time: equivocal miracle
or absurd accident—no matter,
from it, you seeded us.
ii. First betrayal
You, who had always been
true to our people,
found a way to test—
your longheld bequest withheld
as when the ancient woods
sang out in concert: oaken notes
throbbing through Duir’s thirsting roots,
silvery tones rising from the harp of Dagda Mór
to pulse from sapwood to heartwood,
majestic branch to stem to sinuate leaf—
calling, calling, yet you failed to answer.
Your first foray at power play,
initiation in arrogance perchance
or a swaying to the siren song
of jealousy—to resist our god of gods,
king of kings, father-protector,
Dagda himself.
Your ascendancy assured
at length by your absence:
our demigods dethroned,
Tuatha Dé Dannan were banished.
Yet when the great mother called,
you answered Danú’s earnest chants,
magnanimously dividing and multiplying
yourself to embroider the fairest, finest
mantle of féth fiada, a mystic mist
to envelop, enshroud, conceal her cherished,
our bloodroot Aos Sí—who were forever after
exiled (did you smile?) to abide beyond your veil—
a new order unfolding, uneasy peace reclaimed.
iii. Second betrayal
But still you flexed, finding cause to curse
or judge: Bóann who had fallen to Dagda’s
singular light, would walk nine times
around each of the nine sacred hazels
counter to the earth’s daily course,
before plunging into Connla’s Well
in haste to wash away all trace of her adultery.
In furious affront at this sullying of your sacrosanct chalice,
you rose up to surge berserk and serpentine
across the heath and heathers—
to dash fair Bóann all along
the hummocks and hollows
of her marital boglands,
to tear her limb from limb,
to blind her with your savage force
and flush her out to sea
away, away beyond the ashen
haze your rage had made
of the horizon.
In your wrathful wake, you rent her faithful
hound and cast him down
to make the twin peaks of Cnoc Dabilla:
to heel and wait, to watch forever
over the roaring swell of
An Bhóinn, that great twisting
river that embraces Brú na Bóinne, the unearthly
mounds enclosing, the enchanted gateway
to Dagda’s hidden realm.
Ever after, in the longest, darkest hour
of the shortest day of every winter,
Dagda has reappeared and time stands still
until he opens his heart to the heavens
and summons the slenderest beam
to pierce, disperse your turbid guilt, lying
low and vaporous in murky, roiling folds
over Bóann’s valley floor.
iv. Third betrayal
For many thousands of years,
Dagda and the Tuatha slowly
forgotten, you reigned supreme.
And maybe it was the monotony
of your unopposed dominion,
or maybe it was loneliness
or some deadly magnetism
of your terrible origin
or maybe Dagda stirred
your ire that spring:
too warm, too early,
his irresistible munificence bursting
throughout Bóann’s peatlands
as his fated sí transformed
to blossom in gorse bushes
too gloriously sun-yellow,
to wing as blackbirds and sing
his praise into your feathery cirrus,
to flit amidst billowy bog-cotton brightly
mocking your clustering cumulonimbus.
While Dagda gladly summoned all
the wilds to inspirit and uplift,
you were drawn to the darkness of
the Sasanach’s iron reign:
the bewildered children of Éirú
now enslaved across our stolen
lands or banished to the badlands,
far beyond the Pale.
Whatever the cause, you came
to match his benefaction
with a fervour of
blackening skies and
a batharnach, a clagairt,
ag cur foirc agus sceana:
a dreadful deluge,
a pitching down like forks and knives
so unholy and prolonged
it woke the one-eyed crone, Cailleach an Diabhail—
plague-maker, destroyer of kith and clans—
who, with fetid breath and a toothless
soul-splitting shriek, unleashed
her shadowhound, Dormath
from his station at the gate of death
to release a blight, a maleficent scourge
that stole in through a ship’s hold
to lodge in every sodden acre
from the wavewashed northern
tip of Banba’s Crown
to the southmost
stormlashed crags
of Carn Uí Néid.
All through an Gorta Mór,
the ravaging famine that followed,
you sprayed that sopping soil until
it swallowed in their hundreds of thousands
our plundered, hungering people—
all the while, Sasanach ships laden with food
departed every port as frantic, half-naked,
mothers scrabbled in stinking dungheaps
for a scrap of black and festering tuber
to feed their silent children
who rolled their eyes
to your brooding skies
and opened their empty mouths
to fill their swollen bellies
with your frozen spittle.
Until one third
of our people had disappeared
into the clod beneath the cloying
craobhmhúr of your crocodile tears—
over a million ghosts
still walk those famine roads,
built on their twiglike carcasses,
to go nowhere, while your hissing gusts
carry their keening through crumbling stone
to follow a million more:
vanished beyond the fog
you cast to cloak your crime
which hovers ever over the teeming
boneyards of the fraught Atlantic
and the foaming Irish Sea.
v. At noon
Drifting with Anna Liffey,
you hitch a herring gull over Trinity
to string diamante among
the twin moons
of Molly’s poised breasts,
circumnavigate Grafton Street
to pester a busker
then loop back across
O’Connell Bridge
to rest awhile
in Larkin’s outstretched palms—
greening in the grey light
you throw
over this fair day
of a Dublin March
before gathering force
to set adrift the squealing
pramwheels of Moore Street—
hawkers and fishwives
huffing, pushing, cursing as they
launch their motley flotilla
in a clamour for shelter.
And still and still and still
our children turn their precious
faces to you, open their blessed
mouths to receive you
on their tongues—
bearer of life,
harbinger of death
and all that lies
between.
Notes:
- This poem interweaves reinventions of ancient Irish mythology, origins of placenames, fragments of history and snippets of Gaeilge to invent a story of rain.
- The terms, names and placenames in Irish are: Duir – oak; Dagda – father-god; Mór – big or great; Tuatha Dé Dannan/Tuatha – Tribe of Danú, the mythological gods or faerie ancestry of Ireland; Danú – mother-goddess of the Tuatha Dé Dannan; féith fiada – a magical mist which veiled the mythical gods from human eyes; Aos Sí – descendants or survivors of the Tuatha Dé Dannan; Bóann (Bónn) – a water goddess who gave her name to An Bhóinn (the Boyne River), the Boyne Valley and Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange) neolithic burial site in County Meath; Connla’s Well – a sacred well attributed as the source of ancient wisdom, also correlated with the Well of Segais and the Well of Cóelrind; Cnoc Dabilla – Hill of Dabilla; sí – mythological gods or faerie folk; Sasanach – English; Éirú – matron goddess of Ireland; batharnach – downpour; clagairt – pelting rain; ag cur foirc agus sceana – raining forks and knives; Cailleach an Diabhail – crone of the devil, the Infernal Hag, goddess of winter and death who is connected with both creation and destruction, and linked to the emergence of the bean sí or banshee, faerie herald of death; Dormath – hound of Cailleach who guards the gate of death; Banba’s Crown – the northernmost point of Ireland on Malin Head in County Donegal; Carn Uí Néid – the southernmost point of Ireland on Mizen Head in County Cork; An Gorta Mór – The Great Irish Famine (1845-1849); and craobhmhúr– scattered drizzle.
- The Pale refers to that part of Ireland in the east stretching from Dublin to Naas which was under English control by the fourteenth century and regarded as ‘civilised’. Rebels and others who refused to swear allegiance to the crown were banished ‘beyond the Pale’, particularly to the poorer lands of Connaught and the mid-west.
- Anna Liffey refers to the River Liffey in Dublin.
- Molly refers to the statue of Molly Malone, a well-known figure in Dublin folklore and in the eponymous ballad.
- Larkin refers to the statue of Irish labour leader, James Larkin, who was arrested for sedition against the British Crown and is renowned for his lockout campaign which sought ‘A fair day’s work for a fair day’s pay’ for Irish workers.
Originally from the west of Ireland and living in Sydney, Anne Casey is the author of five poetry collections. Her work is widely published and awarded internationally, ranking in The Irish Times’ Most Read. Her recent awards include the American Association of Australasian Literary Studies Poetry Prize, American Writers Review Prize, Henry Lawson Poetry Prize and iWoman Global Award for Literature. She holds a law degree from University College Dublin and a PhD in archival poetry and poetics of resistance from the University of Technology Sydney where she teaches creative writing. More about Anne at http://www.anne-casey.com and @1annecasey
Tinteán 