PAPA’S TRIBE
The wives and mistresses
All mealy grins and doughy skins
With their ever-wet holes
And their second-hand sins
Watching as the mirror butterflies their faces
Twinned with depthless images of themselves
Wronged women staring back in anguish
Each flopped vacuously on vacant shelves
Leftovers or left behinds
None are sure of which is which
All of them are certain of one thing though;
It’s one of the others
That is the biggest bitch.
Patrick Kavanagh was born in the village of Enniskeen, Co Monaghan on 21st October 1904. The son of a shoemaker and small farmer, he moved to Dublin at the age of 35, where he lived in poverty for most of his life. He survived on handouts, bits of journalism, and being supported for a time by his younger brother, Peter, who was teaching in the city. On Raglan Road is a poem about his doomed love-affair with Hilda Moriarty. Hilda was middle-class, the daughter of a wealthy Kerry doctor; he was a penniless poet, uncouth and unwashed, of small-farmer stock – indeed, a small farmer himself, who had forsaken the plough for the pen. His finest poem ‘The Great Hunger’ was so controversial that he was threatened with prosecution under the obscene publications act. Always a controversial figure, he was hated as much as loved in Dublin, and his long-running feud with Brendan Behan is well-chronicled. To Behan he was’ the fucker from Mucker’, while Patrick maintained that the only journey Brendan ever made was ‘from being a national phony to becoming an international one’.
ON RAGLAN ROAD
On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew
That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;
I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,
And I said, let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.
On Grafton Street in November we tripped lightly along the ledge
Of the deep ravine where can be seen the worth of passion’s pledge,
The Queen of Hearts still making tarts and I not making hay –
O I loved too much and by such and such is happiness thrown away.
I gave her gifts of the mind I gave her the secret sign that’s known
To the artists who have known the true gods of sound and stone
And word and tint. I did not stint for I gave her poems to say.
With her own name there and her own dark hair like clouds over fields of May
On a quiet street where old ghosts meet I see her walking now
Away from me so hurriedly my reason must allow
That I had wooed not as I should a creature made of clay –
When the angel woos the clay he’d lose his wings at the dawn of day.
Ah Lackendara
You heard the voices too
At Paschendaele where you
Cowered as the big guns
Bombarded your world to silence
Blasted your thoughts to kingdom come
And left you forlorn
On that ragged outcrop
In the foothills of the Comeraghs
The fox and the curlew your only companions
The gurgling Mahon Falls
All there was to quench your thirst.
For thirty years you trod those hills
Taking little notice
Of ordinary life around you going on
Your presence on the mountain a constant reminder
Of mans’ inhumanity to man.
Autumn mornings are best;
The sun smiling low over the gasworks
Flighty leaves browning the common
Kites lark-high over the tree-tops
Coffee and a roll in the old rectory
And you by my side
If I left you now, what would you miss?
Grumpy mornings, silent evenings
And taken-for-granted pause between the emptiness;
And hidden behind the tall tales, adultery;
Mental maybe, but real nevertheless
You dazed me in the park one Sunday’s summer afternoon.
Your smile was electric.
Later, you hid your patience well
When freedom was dragged from under my feet.
You ticked of the (waiting) time
And I repaid you with monologues of deceit
There are those more deserving of your kindness;
Less selfish, less angry,
And less possessed of my bloody-mindedness.
You bore your cross to the edge and beyond.
Always hauling me back to the fold.
Snatches of love were your only compensation,
Were I a better man I would cloak you in gold
NORTH CAROLINA TREES
Tall pines, straight as railway sleepers,
Stun me with their skinny beauty
Some of these were old
When Abraham Lincoln was barely knee high.
And it is even possible that George Washington
Touched one or two as he rode by.
Durham was young when these pines first sprouted life
As were Raleigh, Charlotte, and Queensboro et al
Perhaps it was the Redcoats who seeded this lush terrain
Beauty shipped all the way
From England’s green and pleasant land
To conceal the carnage of their long and murderous campaign.
Some writers should be avoided like a swarm of mosquitos. I am thinking of the likes of Martin Amis/Will Self/Salman Rushdie etc. I would probably have put Howard Jacobson in that category until I read my first book of his – ZOO TIME – recently. Brilliantly funny, waspish, and with prose so sharp you could cut yourself. Ostensibly it is about writer Guy Ableman and his obsession with his mother-in-law, but really it’s about writers and their obsession with the writing profession. No one reads any more according to Guy; his publsher, fearing the same, has committed suicide, his agent is in hiding, and his wife, Vanessa, is writing her own novel, which together with his unruly passion for his mother-in-law combine to make this the best novel I have read in years. 5*****
CHANGING TIMES
We are murdering time
Now is no good
Maybe what happens next will be better
Life is someplace else
Perhaps on our poncey phones;
It’s like eating in a restaurant
And discussing the menu
From somewhere else;
Everyone is on edge
Like we are slipping a cog
Or like musical chairs
When the music stops
You change your life
Doesn’t matter if you get it wrong
It’ll be shit whatever you choose
Oh beautiful chromed perambulator
You of the sleek wheels
And wayward inclinations
Carrier of booze and babies
And, occasionally, goods and chattels,
You were a lovely mover once
Look at you now;
Silt to your midriff
Capsized for eternity
Gathering flotsam and jetsam
For a stinking old stream;
Fit for nothing but stopping gaps
According to perceived wisdom
Everybody has a good book in them
I now have a good book in me
I ate one this morning
For breakfast
I am still digesting the contents
My Writing Life 