Tabernacles
Altarwise by owl-light in the halfway house
The gentleman lay graveward with his furies
……………… – From Altar-wise by Owl-light I, by Dylan Thomas
Owl says, I have a story (we all like a story
if it’s a good story and not too long). This
is a long story, and wide. A story held open like the golden wings
of a cross. A simple shape that a child could scratch into dirt
with a stick. Old Straw Head in a grain field: fashioned in a human shape
to save the seed; to scare a bird. Such a basic shape from which to hang
a god. Indoctrinated to choose between flesh and spirit,
between sanctity and sin. A disingenuous creed to live
and die in. And always, we are building to keep things out,
to keep things in. Half-way houses where women were crucified
on a plank of shame and little babies sacrificed for virtue’s sake. Where
small boys in short pants were nailed to loveless childhoods, robbed of a mother’s
or a father’s name. And we are left with years of lies and silences;
the drowned fish; the tombs and wombs and tabernacles. Black railings
that kept things out and kept things in.
…………………………………………………..Owl says, look how the evening light
spreads wide and golden. This is the light to build by. We are assembling
a story to live by. We are building a voice.
First published in The Architecture of Containment ( The Mill Cove Gallery) editor John Goode.
A response to the painting “Remnants” by artist Janet Graham, from her exhibition “The Architecture of Containment” which addresses the experiences of women affected by institutional abuse in Ireland, particularly the women who were confined in Magdalene Laundries.
**
Deciduous
for Jessie Lendennie
There was a girl and the path through the woods
was the only path. It was winter and the scene was
clean and all verticals. Serious green to grey to softer grey and
lines of solid black, dexter and sinister. Future and past
unknowable. Trees sang the story of trees
their long shadows.
……………………………………………..Her hands on the skin
of a tree. Scarred like her knee and warm
to her touch. Dark fissures for beetles
to nest in. Silver scribble of lichen displaying
a traceable lexicon. Acid and alkaline. Squidgy green moss
to the north side. Yellow lichens sang the story of air
its pure components.
…………………………Stood at the base of the tree and
grounded. Her feet where small creatures burrowed and
foraged. Debris of autumn rotting down
into earth. Leaf mould and carcass. Reduction happening
so quietly. And the floor sang the story of fungus
its insatiable hunger.
…………………………And the path from the woods was
the right path. Footstep and footstep. And the girl sang the story
of trees, the story of air. Sang the story of hunger. With the trees
at attention.
And the woods sang the song of a child.
First published in Days of Clear Light: A Festschrift in Honour of Jessie Lendennie & in Celebration of Salmon Poetry at 40 edited by Alan Hayes & Nessa O’Mahony (Salmon Poetry)
**
Going Back
First thing you will learn
…………………………………….there is no going back
to the house in the shade of the seven round hills
where she knitted a triangle of cats. One to keep watch from
the attic. One on the roof, weighing the concept
of flight, and one with its paws four-square
on the ground. In daylight she knitted triangular
trees and her man strung them out on the
hillsides under cover of night. Mornings,
there were brown eggs for breakfast and the whole
day ahead for the garden.
…………………………………….You come out the door
to realize you have already eaten a triangular slice
from the cake. There are crumbs on your sleeve.
Crumbs on the ground where you scattered them
out for the chickens. Her man is reading out loud
from a book, with writing impossibly small, when
tourists appear at the gate. They want to take photos
of the house with the cat in the window and the rose
arching over the door. She does not look up from
her knitting. The dog has retrieved a new ball
of wool from under the hedge. Her needles
are busy building stripes of two plain, and two purl,
two plain, and two purl. At twilight,
a green-banded cat will weave through the grass.
And you will be there in an album, with your
hair hanging down to your waist and with crumbs
on your sleeve. You have seen the cat
with green stripes move through the grass
…………………………………………….there is no going back.
Inspired by the painting “Sa Bhaile”, by Saffron Willetts
First published in Poets Meet Painters (The Mill Cove Gallery) edited by John Goode
**
Two Rungs High
The lines on her skin are a map.
With her hand on my shoulder I grasp
what she knows: with a wave of my hand
I can magic it up. Float her scarf in the air and
a blue murmuration opens doors in the sky.
Round hills and trees flow into position. I spy
in the distance a house with two doors the colour of sun:
I can enter at will, should I need to. Two horses, a white and a brown,
circle in from the left. I know they run here forever
past the gate with four rungs; a child, and a mother
with her feet on the ground and her hair the colour of flame.
Forever, her hand reaches out to steady the girl in her game …
One step, two steps, two rungs high
Inspired by the painting As it used to be by Saffron Willetts
First published in Poets Meet Painters (The Mill Cove Gallery) edited by John Goode
**
In the Green Room With Paul
Green rooms are rarely green, save for the reflected tinge
off the skins of the poets fretfully watching the clock,
Maybe no one will come, said Paul, with hope in his voice.
We can read as we please and imagine them all
in their seats. Too late for that now, says I, they’re already gathering.
Aren’t you nervous, he asked, you seem so steadily calm?
Me, calm? Jesus, I’m terrified, I’m reading with Durcan!
He grinned and said, Sometimes, he frightens me too.
Then he drew down a silence and minute by minute,
by minute, the room grew more green.
Or we could make a run for it, out of the exit, down the back lane,
up the hill and under the Arch of the Blossoms and off
through the fields. His suggestion floated up
to the ceiling. But we didn’t run. We had come all that way
and most poets are not built for running. I know, he said,
we’ll brazen it out. It’s all we can do.
And we did, we brazened it out and Durcan
held the whole room in thrall and we laughed and we cried
at his humour and sadness. The clocks keep doing their rounds
and the years whistle by while poems languish in notebooks,
unfinished. A friend rings from Dublin to say Paul Durcan
has died.
…………….I spirit him back to that small Limerick town,
making a run for it, up the hill and under the arch
at the Gate of the Blossoms, up through the fields
of Kilmallock , his back to the wind,
declaiming his poems to absolutely no one.
First published in “The Stony Thursday Book 50” edited by John Liddy & Jim Burke
**
Morning at Lough Leane
Nothing much is happening here this early.
I am the lone visitor, sitting still by the still lake,
idly watching the swans in the shallows by the pier.
Drawn here, again, by the promise of mountain and sky, the sun
casting pale light on the lake, and the swans casting
perfect reflections of themselves on the gleaming water.
Abruptly, a cob breaks into a solo run,
churning white spouts of foam in its wake;
long neck stretched out to its fullest, tail feathers
low like a rudder steering its course straight,
wings flapping frantically and the dark, webbed feet
slap slap slapping against the surface
until finally it hauls itself up and up and into the air.
Then the bevy takes flight with loud commotion
and grumbling ducks scrabble towards the reeds
and I could ask no more of the morning than to sit here
with the light increasing and the white swans
gliding like angels of grace through the air.
First published in “Vox Galvia” (The Galway Advertiser) editor Deirdre Hines
Eileen Sheehan is from the Southwest of Ireland. One of the poems from her most recent collection, The Narrow Way of Souls (Salmon Poetry), featured on the Leaving Certificate English Syllabus. Anthology publications include Blackjack, with translations by Oana Lungu (editors Dorina Șișu and Viorel Ploeșteanu / Singur Publishing); Best Loved Poems: Favourite Poems from the South of Ireland (editor Gabriel Fitzmaurice with photographs by John Reidy/ Curragh Press) and The Deep Heart’s Core: Irish Poets Revisit a Touchstone Poem (editors Eugene O’Connell & Pat Boran/ Dedalus Press). A selection of her work appears on Poetry International Web. She has read at festival in Ireland and abroad and was Bealtaine Writer in Residence at The Seanchaí Kerry Writers’ Museum, Listowel.
