Patrick Kavanagh was, in my view, Ireland’s greatest poet. And probably its most cantankerous!  In a pub one day one woman acquaintance  hinted he should buy her a drink. ‘Can’t you see I have a mouth on me’, she said. ‘How could I miss it’, he replied, ‘and swinging between your ears like a skipping rope’. Another time a American academic asked him, ‘Have you ever tried the Alexandrine hexameter with the internal rhyming scheme?’    ‘No’, he replied, ‘but I once nailed a pigs liver to the haggard door and I shagged it!’               His greatest enemy was Brendan Behan, who detested culchies, and who often described him as ‘the fucker from mucker’, and said that the greatest thing he ever wrote was a cheque that didn’t bounce.  While Patrick maintained that the only journey Behan ever made was from being a national phoney to being an international one!

THE GREAT HUNGER  (extract)

II
Maguiire was faithful to death:
He stayed with his mother till she died
At the age of ninety-one.
She stayed too long,
Wife and mother in one.
When she died
The knuckle-bones were cutting the skin of her son’s backside
And he was sixty-five.
O he loved his mother
Above all others.
O he loved his ploughs
And he loved his  cows
And his happiest dream
Was to clean his arse
With perennial grass
On the bank of some summer stream;
To smoke his pipe
In a sheltered gripe
In the middle of July.
His face in a mist
And two stones in his fist
And an impotent worm on his thigh.
But his passion became a plague
For he grew feeble bringing the vague
Women of his mind to lust nearness,
Once a week at least flesh must make an appearance.
So Maguire got tired
Of the no-target gun fired
And returned to his headland of carrots and cabbage
To the fields once again
Where eunuchs can be men
And life is more lousy than savage.

Patrick Kavanagh.

LOS ANGELES

From dream factory

To nightmare landscape

Eternally self-renewing

And all but used up,

The hot LA nights

Spiked with a Santa Ana wind,

Capote, Faulkner, Mailer, Fitzgerald, et al

Haunting the many-faceted gin-mills,

Looking for characters

For the books they were soon to write,

Hockney hobbling to

The marijuana  store

To smoke away his many ailments,

Drinking Chai tea with the other lunatics,

Down Venice way

The ancient muscle men on Muscle Beach

Doing press-ups

And pull-ups that demean them,

Hollywood writ large on the hills

And a jaded sign on Santa Monica pier

Saying ‘Route 66 ends here’.

 

 

2 poems by Anthony Raftery the blind 18th C  Irish poet

Mise Raifteirí an File

I am Raftery, the poet,
full of hope and love
With eyes without light,
silence without torment.

Going back on my journey,
with the light of my heart
Weak and tired,
until the end of my way.

Look at me now,
facing the wall
Playing music,
for empty pockets.

Cill Aodáin

Now coming of the Spring
the day will be lengthening,
and after St. Bridget’s Day
I shall raise my sail.

Since I put it into my head
I shall never stay put
until I shall stand down
in the center of County Mayo.

In Claremorris
I will be the first night,
and in Balla just below it
I will begin to drink.

to Kiltimagh I shall go
until I shall make a month’s visit there
as close as two miles
to Ballinamore.^[9]

SINGING THE LAND
An unsung land is a dead land
Forget the song
And the land will surely die.
Our forebears, though mostly illiterate,
Made music that can still make us cry
Musical phrases, like a map reference,
And the land read as a musical score
Where singing the land
Has the crowd calling out for more.
The song couplets stretch across tectonic plates
Just like mountains stretch across continents
And someone waving as we pass through endless gates.
*
Pale sand, red rock, burning fire
Everything your heart may desire
Mapping the music
to which everything transcends
This is where the story begins not ends.                                                          Religion, pagan or Christian
Permeating everything, blending,
People sympathetic and synthetic,
Careless and unknowing of secular beginning
Or religious ending.
All the colours of the rainbow
Dressed in human clothing
Aisling, dreang, radharc
And the gift of seeing what isn’t there
When the songs are left unsung
Who is then left to care?

 

 

 

 

 

DEAR MR PRESIDENT

The prophecies have come to pass,

The great spirit Massau’u

Says that man should live in harmony,

Yet the government has destroyed our basic religion

In this land of the Great Spirit.

Great roads like rivers cross our land

Man talks to man

Through a cobweb of telephone lines

And travels the roads in the sky,

Man is tampering with the moon and the stars

The White Man has desecrated the face of Mother Earth

In his desire for material possessions

Blinded to the pain caused to Mother Earth

By his quest for so-called natural resources.

The sacred lands of the Hopi are desecrated

By men who seek coal and water

To create power for the white man’s cities.

The Great Spirit says not to allow this to happen

Says not to take from the earth

Not to destroy living things,

Otherwise a gourd of ashes will be dropped upon the earth,

That many men will die,

And that the end of this way of life is near at hand

 

 

 

NOAH’S ARK

Noah knew a thing or three about Arks

Though he never had to deal with dry snakes in the parks

(as far as I know)

Or alligators eating raw taters

In the fields where potatoes used to grow

Or see the hedgerows decompose

‘Cos underwater rots your toes

And lettuces float lonely in orderly rows.

There is ice in the neighbourhood

But it’s not in the fridge

It’s log-jamming tightly

Against the almost submerged bridge

While uptown bright red stilettos

Are swimming downstream

Towards the already-empty ghettos.

The people are gone

But the water hurries on

Self-raising evermore as it swamps the seashore

And heads for the hills and the high-rise domains

Where soon this new-spawned Atlantis

Will be all that remains

 

 

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