THE TIME HAS COME
by Michael Boyle
My father’s father’s father
survived the potato blight of ’47.
lived all his life
on the Crow’s Nest farm
where he heard an eerie
caw, caw, cawing
late in the night.
My father’s father’s father
was coming home
from Maghera fair
on Tuesday 31 August 1869.
He took the lower Crewe Road
and breathed the stench
of the smelly lint dams.
He made a sharp right hand
turn up the rough
stony Curragh Road
and he was killed by horse
somewhere on Moore’s steep brae.
Family lore suggest
there was much more.
How did a horse kill him?
Was he attacked?
Why was he tended
and cared for two long days
in Maghera town before he died?
Questions, rumors
of a cover up linger till today.
Local surgeon and coroner
Dr. McCaw. A smallish
self-conceited man
with a grayish moustache
and receding hairline,
wrote lengthy, detailed
essays in The Lancet
and British Medical Journals
but he gave the shortest
inquest report
on my father’s father’s father.
‘INQUEST REPORT
Wednesday September 22 1869
Married, Male, Age 55.
Cause of death-
Horse running against
and accidentally killing deceased
on September 2.
Ill for three hours.’
Doctor J. Dysart McCaw.
For me unanswered
questions remained.
In an early Newfoundland dawn
in the midst of a howling storm
as lights flickered in the darkness
And I heard the echo
of a staccato haunting voice.
I froze- fell on the floor
listened as my dog
plucked up his ears.
It was my father’s father’s father
calling out to me
from somewhere beyond the grave.
He said
‘There is nothing
I can add to your tale.
Horse accidents
often occur in country places.
But I tell you frankly
that evidence of a cover up
or miscarriage of truth
is not easily obtained.
Don’t forget my fate
but learn
to forgive and live.
The time has come
for you
to let all this go.’
Today around
the family homestead
of my father’s father’s father
you can still hear the crows
calling ‘caw, caw, caw.’
Michael Boyle is a native of Lavey, Derry, Ireland. His poems have appeared in the The Antigonish Review, Dalhousie Review, Tinteán and New Ulster Writing. He lives in St John’s New Foundland, where he conducts a historical walking tour and is currently putting the final touches to his memoir On New Turf about his life in Ireland and in Newfoundland.
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FOX
By Patrick Deely
1
I daub white paint onto the back wall,
a fresh invitation to the graffito merchant,
but he doesn’t return. Instead,
muddy pawprints from bottom to top –
a fox’s. Admitting himself to the garden
even as I follow his well-worn trail
along the ragged bank of the River Dodder,
up towards Glenasmole. But while
neither of us is overly bothered
about the movements of the other, I know
enough to know that for the fox
enmity or wariness towards humans
is necessary in face of the threat we carry –
of death, or even the tyranny
of domestication: a hideous pie-balding
of the fur, a meek curliness of tail,
such whingey cuteness as might find him
reduced to a wretched lapdog.
So let him stay footloose, sinuous,
answerable only to the edict of the earth,
which tricks differently with me
as I stand speculative, testing and tested
by the puzzle of existence, caught
between holding and conceding ground.
2
We stop within a foggy breath of each other,
and he gathers from my stare that I feel
entitled here, his nightly rove
given to this place which I claim as mine
alone, that the gap in understanding
between us never will diminish –
for while I am crossed with over-thinking,
he is tuned to the living moment.
I speak softly but he twists lithely away
through my plot of pet foliage,
our chance encounter fading from his skull
even as it consolidates in mine
to a myth of fellowship – the way
this city garden implies both farm and feral
to me still, or my potted cacti
a desert chaparral, or the patch of thick grass
thrown in the glow of a laneway lamp
remembers the spot where I buried
the collie two years ago. So if by moonlight
I see the collie appear to rise,
to run and dance, a smile might wreathe
my face before I again realise
that neither the dog nor the dog’s ghost
returns, but the fox, rooting for sustenance.
MY FATHER’S SALSA
He would jiggle the riddle’s circular frame
between his hands, sand dancing
within, fine grains streaming through the grid
until only shingle and jags of stone
remained. Then stop those salsa rhythms
I found myself dancing to; chuck
loose pebbles aside, shovel from the quarry
a refill, shake and shuffle as before,
sifting so the damp, silken sand
overspilled the sides of its conical hill.
Walls were called for where clay ditches
had always done, the quickening –
though neither of us knew it yet –
to modernity begun, cement mixer and silo
soon to be shunted into position.
We saw it as improvement, tunnels drilled
through hills, tar lorries, steamrollers
smarming a nexus of routes.
And bridges, so many new bridges to cross.
Decades later, in this underpass,
a muffled whoosh, plastic scrunched
underfoot, long mittens of ivy
darned on rock. I scamper up and around,
smell fuel-burn, feel the wind
on my face no matter which way I turn.
Traffic bugles, trombones, an out-of-tune
brass band, the world of strangers
here and gone, all my townlands swept past
in no more time than it takes
to mime my father’s salsa, dream the man.
Patrick Deeley is a poet, memoirist and children’s writer from Loughrea, County Galway. His new collection of poems, Keepsake, recently appeared from Dedalus Press.
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Eilís Ní Cheallacháin in Hobart,
Van Diemen’s Land 1821
le Colin Ryan
Ag teacht i dtír di bhraith sí
Sasanachas na háite
Londain bheag eile beagnach
murach íoróin na sléibhte
airgead falsa
a chuir an loch amach í
an fharraige ghlas
ag slogadh na staire
is an séan ag seadú ina haigne
Contae an Chláir ina cheo
is Whitechapel á dhearmad
pé anbhás a thiocfadh feasta
níorbh fhiú léi í féin a chaoineadh
is a bróga go beo ar na clocha
le ceolta an dóchais
nárbh fhearr seo ná an chroch
a gealladh di lá gaoithe
Eilís Ní Cheallacháin in Hobart,
Van Diemen’s Land 1821
by Colin Ryan
On coming ashore she felt
the Englishness of the place
almost another little London
if it wasn’t for the irony of mountains
it was counterfeit money
that saw her transported
with the green sea
swallowing the history
and the omen settling in her mind
County Clare lost in mist
and Whitechapel being forgotten
however violent her end might be
she thought it not worth lamenting
and her shoes lively on the rocks
with the music of hope
wasn’t this better than the gallows
promised to her on a windy day
Is scríbhneoir gaeilge, as an Astráil, é Colin Ryan. Tá dhá chnuasach gearrscéalta agus dhá chnuasach filíochta foilsíthe aige i ngaeilge, chomh maith le cnuasach filíochta dátheangach.
Is mór an onóir d’fhoireann Tintéan labhairt le Colin in eagrán na Márta d’Agallaimh le scríbhneoirí gaeilge.
Colin Ryan is an Australian Irish language writer. He has published two collections of short stories and two collections of poetry in the Irish language as well as a bilingual collection of poetry.
The Tinteán team are excited to present Colin as our next guest, in March’s Agallaimh le scríbhneoirí Gaeilge/Interviews with Irish language writers.
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Tinteán 