VIGIL

Life is too short to sleep through.
Stay up late, wait until the sea of traffic ebbs,
until noise has drained from the world
like blood from the cheeks of the full moon.
Everyone else around you has succumbed:
they lie like tranquillised pets on a vet's table;
they languish on hospital trolleys and friends' couches,
on iron beds in hostels for the homeless,
under feather duvets at tourist B&Bs.
The radio, devoid of listeners to confide in,
turns repetitious. You are your own voice-over.
You are alone in the bone-weary tower
of your bleary-eyed, blinking lighthouse,
watching the spillage of tide on the shingle inlet.
You are the single-minded one who hears
time shaking from the clock's fingertips
like drops, who watches its hands
chop years into diced seconds,
who knows that when the church bell
tolls at 2 or 3 it tolls unmistakably for you.
You are the sole hand on deck when
temperatures plummet and the hull
of an iceberg is jostling for prominence.
Your confidential number is the life-line
where the sedated long-distance voices
of despair hold out muzzily for an answer.
You are the emergency services' driver
ready to dive into action at the first
warning signs of birth or death.
You spot the crack in night's façade
even before the red-eyed businessman
on look-out from his transatlantic seat.
You are the only reliable witness to when
the light is separated from the darkness,
who has learned to see the dark in its true
colours, who has not squandered your life.



Dennis O’Driscoll
1954-2012

Dennis O'Driscoll was an Irish poet, essayist, critic and editor. He was regarded by many as one of the best European poets of his time.

WATER-BURN

The large blue Horse*

We should have been galloping on horses, their hoofprints

Splashes of light, divots kicked out of the darkness,

Or hauling up lobster pots in a wake of sparks. Where

Were the otters and seals? Were the dolphins on fire?

Yes, we should have been doing more with our lives.

Michael Longley

1939-

*The Large Blue Horse 

by  Franz Marc

1880-1916

German Expressionist Painter

MAY

The blessed stretch and ease of it -

heart's ease. The hills blue. All the flowering weeds

bursting open. Balm in the air. The birdsong

bouncing back out of the sky. The cattle

lain down in the meadow, forgetting to feed.

The horses swishing their tails.

The yellow flare of furze on the near hill.

And the first cream splatters of blossom

high on the thorns where the day rests longest.

All hardship, hunger, treachery of winter

forgotten.

This unfounded conviction: forgiveness, hope.

Kerry Hardie

1951

TO HELL WITH COMMONSENSE

More kicks than pence

We get from commonsense

Above its door is writ

All hope abandon. It

Is a bank will refuse a post

Dated cheque of the Holy Ghost.

Therefore I say to hell

With all reasonable

Poems in particular

We want no secular

Wisdom plodded together

By concerned fools. Gather

No moss you rolling stones

Nothing thought out atones

For no flight

In the light.

Let them wear out nerve and bone

Those who would have it that way

But in the end nothing that they

Have achieved will be in the shake up

In the final Wake Up

And I have a feeling

That through the hole in reason’s ceiling

We can fly to knowledge

Without ever going to college.

Patrick Kavanagh

1905-1967

Patrick Kavanagh did not go to college. He was born in the parish of Inniskeen, attended Kednaminsha National School till the age of 12, and carried on his father's trade of cobbler and small farmer on the "stony grey soil of Monaghan". At the age of 35 he left for Dublin ("the worst mistake I made in my life") where he published a long poem, "The Great Hunger", about Ireland and the harsh realities of peasant life ("locked in a stable with pigs and cows forever"), a poem that was subversive enough to gain him the attention of the police. In 1953 he developed lung cancer, but lived for another 14 years. He was awarded a pension once he was declared incurable ("like a prize each year until I die"). He married Katharine Moloney in the year of his death.

THE MAYO TAO

Abend am Niederrhein

I have abandoned the dream kitchens for a low fire
and a prescriptive literature of the spirit;
a storm snores on the desolate sea.
The nearest shop is four miles away -
when I walk there through the shambles
of the morning for tea and firelighters
the mountain paces me in a snow-lit silence.
My days are spent in conversaiton
with deer and blackbirds;
at night fox and badger gather at my door.
I have stood for hours
watching a salmon doze in the tea-gold dark,
for months listening to the sob story
of a stone in the road, the best,
most monotonous sob story I have ever heard.

I am an expert on frost crystals
and the silence of crickets, a confidant
of the stinking shore, the stars in the mud -
there is an immanence in these things
which drives me, despite my scepticism,
almost to the point of speech,
like sunlight cleaving the lake mist at morning
or when tepid water
runs cold at last from the tap.

I have been working for years
on a four-line poem
about the life of a leaf;
I think it might come out right this winter.



Derek Mahon
1941

ADVENT

We have tested and tasted too much, lover-
Through a chink too wide there comes in no wonder.
But here in the Advent-darkened room
Where the dry black bread and the sugarless tea
Of penance will charm back the luxury
Of a child's soul, we'll return to Doom
The knowledge we stole but could not use.

And the newness that was in every stale thing
When we looked at it as children: the spirit-shocking
Wonder in a black slanting Ulster hill
Or the prophetic astonishment in the tedious talking
Of an old fool will awake for us and bring
You and me to the yard gate to watch the whins
And the bog-holes, cart-tracks, old stables where Time begins.

O after Christmas we'll have no need to go searching
For the difference that sets an old phrase burning-
We'll hear it in the whispered argument of a churning
Or in the streets where the village boys are lurching.
And we'll hear it among decent men too
Who barrow dung in gardens under trees,
Wherever life pours ordinary plenty.
Won't we be rich, my love and I, and
God we shall not ask for reason's payment,
The why of heart-breaking strangeness in dreeping hedges
Nor analyse God's breath in common statement.
We have thrown into the dust-bin the clay-minted wages
Of pleasure, knowledge and the conscious hour-
And Christ comes with a January flower.


Patrick Kavanagh
1904-1967

WHAT'S LEFT

a stand of willowherb

I used to wait for the flowers,

my pleasure reposed on them.

Now I like plants before they get to the blossom.

Leafy ones - foxgloves, comfrey, delphiniums -

fleshy tiers of strong leaves pushing up

into air grown daily lighter and more sheened

with bright dust like the eyeshadow

that tall young woman in the bookshop wears,

its shimmer and crumble on her white lids.

The washing sways on the line, the sparrows pull

at the heaps of drying weeds that I've left around.

Perhaps this is middle age. Untidy, unfinished,

knowing there'll never be time now to finish,

liking the plants - their strong lives -

not caring about flowers, sitting in weeds

to write things down, look at things,

watching the sway of shirts on the line,

the cloth filtering light.

I know more or less 

how to live through my life now.

But I want to know how to live what's left

with my eyes open and my hands open;

I want to stand at the door in the rain

listening, sniffing, gaping.

Fearful and joyous, 

like an idiot before God.

Kerry Hardie

b. 1951 in Singapore

THE SONG OF WANDERING AENGUS

Apple Blossom

Sir George Clausen RA ( 1852 – 1944) English Artist

I went out to the hazel wood,

Because a fire was in my head,

And cut and peeled a hazel wand, 

And hooked a berry to a thread;

And when white moths were on the wing,

And moth-like stars were flickering out, 

I dropped the berry in a stream

And caught a little silver trout.

When I had laid it on the floor

I went to blow the fire aflame,

But something rustled on the floor,

And some one called me by my name:

It had become a glimmering girl

With apple blossom in her hair

Who called me by my name and ran

And faded through the brightening air.

Though I am old with wandering

Through hollow lands and hilly lands,

I will find out where she has gone,

And kiss her lips and take her hands;

And walk among long dappled grass,

And pluck till time and times are done

The silver apples of the moon,

The golden apples of the sun.

William Butler Yeats

1865-1939

In his notes for the poem, Yeats wrote,  'An old man who was cutting a quickset hedge near Gort, in Galway, said only the other day: " One time I was cutting timber over in Inchy; at about eight o'clock one morning, when I got there, I saw a girl picking nuts, with her hair hanging down over her shoulders; brown hair;  and she had a good clean face, and she was tall, and nothing on her head, and her dress was simple. And when she felt me coming up, she gathered herself up, and she was gone, as if the earth had swallowed her up. And I followed her and looked for her, but I never could see her again, from that day to this, never again."

ROUND THE CORNER

Round the corner was always the sea. Our childhood

Tipping the sand from its shoes on return from holiday

Knew there was more where it came from, as there was more

Seaweed to pop and horizons to blink at. Later

Our calf loves yearned for union in solitude somewhere

Round that corner where Xenophon crusted with parasangs

Knew he was home, where Columbus feared he was not,

And the Bible said there would be no more of it. Round

That corner regardless there will be always a realm

Undercutting its banks with repeated pittance of spray,

The only anarchic democracy, where we are all vicarious

Citizens; Which we remember as we remember a person

Whose wrists are springs to spring a trap or rock

A cradle; whom we remember when the sand falls out on the carpet

Or the exiled shell complains or a wind from round the corner

Carries the smell of wrack or the taste of salt, or a wave

Touched to steel by the moon twists a gimlet in memory.

Round the corner is - sooner or later - the sea.

Louis MacNeice

1907-1963

CHRISTMAS SHOPPING

Christmas Shopping in Dublin

Spending beyond their income on gifts for Christmas-

Swing doors and crowded lifts and draperied jungles-

What shall we buy for our husbands and sons

   Different from last year?

Foxes hang by their noses behind plate glass-

Scream of macaws across festoons of paper-

Only the faces on the boxes of chocolates are free

   From boredom and crowsfeet.

Sometimes a chocolate-box girl escapes in the flesh,

Lightly manoeuvres the crowd, trilling with laughter;

After a couple of years her feet and her brain will

   Tire like all the others.

The great windows marshall their troops for assault on the purse

Something-and-eleven the yard, hoodwinking logic,

The eleventh hour draining the gurgling pennies

   Down to the conduits

Down to the sewers of money - rats and marshgas - 

Bubbling in maundering music under the pavement;

Here go the hours of routine, the weight on our eyelids-

   Pennies on corpses’.

While over the street in the centrally heated

Library dwindling figures with sloping shoulders

And hands in pockets, weighted in the boots like chessmen,

   Stare at the printed

Columns of ads, the quickest roads to riches,

Staring at a little and temporary but once we’re

Started who knows whether we shan’t continue,

   Salaries rising,

Rising like a salmon against the bullnecked river,

Bound for the spawning-ground of care-free days-

Good for a fling before the golden wheels run

   Down to a standstill.

And Christ is born - The nursery glad with baubles,

Alive with light and washable paint and children’s

Eyes, expects as its due the accidental

   Loot of a system.

Smell of the South - oranges in silver paper,

Dates and ginger, the benison of firelight,

The blue flames dancing round the brandied raisins,

   Smiles from above them,

Hands from above them as of gods but really

These their parents, always seen from below, them-

Selves are always anxious looking across the

   Fence to the future-

Out there lies the future gathering quickly

Its blank momentum; through the tubes of London

The dead winds blow the crowds like beasts in flight from

   Fire in the forest.

The little firtrees palpitate with candles

In hundreds of chattering households where the suburb

Straggles like nervous handwriting, the margin

   Blotted with smokestacks.

Further out on the coast the lighthouse moves its

Arms of light through the fog that wads our welfare,

Moves its arms like a giant at Swedish drill whose

   Mind is a vacuum.

Louis Macneice

1907-1963

SNOW

The room was suddenly rich and the great bay window was 

Spawning snow and pink roses against it

Soundlessly collateral and incompatible;

World is suddener than we fancy it.

World is crazier and more of it than we think,

Incorrigibly plural. I peel and portion

A tangerine and spit the pips and feel

The drunkenness of things being various.

And the fire flames with a bubbling sound for world

Is more spiteful and gay than one supposes -

On he tongue on the eyes on the ears in the palms of one's hands -

There is more than glass between the snow and the huge roses.

Louis Macneice

1907-1963

AMERGIN

I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,

I am the wave of the ocean,

I am the murmur of the billows,

I am the ox of the seven combats,

I am the vulture upon the rocks,

I am a beam of the sun,

I am the fairest of plants,

I am a wild boar in valour,

I am a salmon in the water,

I am a lake in the plain,

I am a word of science,

I am the point of the lance in battle,

I am the God who creates in the head the fire.

Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain?

Who announces the ages of the moon?

Who teaches the place where couches the sun?

Anonymous