THE BEAR NECESSITIES
‘What kind of animal are you then?’, she asked me.
‘Well’, I replied
‘I do not growl like a bear, I roar like a lion’.
‘Ah, one of them, are you?’
‘No actually, I’m more of a bear to be honest’.
‘Oh, they’re fearsome creatures, they are’.
‘Not really’, I said ‘once you get to know them.
For instance, take me
The other day, whilst in my bear mode –
Brown bear, I might add –
I took a notion to frighten some motorists.
I spotted a likely candidate and stepped from
Behind my tree hiding-place
And plonked myself in the middle of the road.
Then a motorist stopped and began berating me’, You’re an ugly brown bear, you should be ashamed;
Trying to frighten people Get out of my way. Don’t you know who I am?
I didn’t, but he told me anyway. I am Ernest Hemingway.
‘Not Working’ doesn’t sound too bad
Except on Monday morning
When the long weekend has overslept again
And you try to think of something you might do
That hasn’t already been taken care of
Like an old clock you chide me;
‘Not Working’; analogous to some
Broken-down contraption whose time is past
Well, nothing lasts forever
Tomorrow’s SUN may be the last!
‘Not Working’ means all rusted up
Out of action, unable to breathe
Useless, finished, dead
‘Not Working’ is in one’s head
Not a place in the unemployment queue
I won’t stagnate. Will you?
The world is full of poets
And most of them know it
Rhyming couplets with fucklets
Never thinking ‘dark chocolates’
Most of them over some visionary hill
Buying notebooks they will never fill
Looking for loves lost something-or-other
Or wondering why they never hated their mother.
Oh yes, a poet’s life is thankless
Almost as bad as a life lived wankless
SOMEWHERE BETWEEN US IS A ROOM
Somewhere between us is a room
It has six sides and no roof
‘Why is it open to the sky?’ you ask
I myself wonder why
But rather than show my ignorance
I say it is because it has no door
‘But I am in a wheelchair’, you say
‘I cannot be expected to pole vault myself inside’
‘I can make it four-sided’, I say
‘And we can use the two spares as ramps’
‘But it is eight foot tall’, you wail
‘Okay, forget it’, I say
‘It was only for a coffee anyway’.
Every month a ritual enactment
For the rent man
Mother, floury nose and doughed-up hands,
Smiling practice-perfect
Us children banished to the scullery,
A whispered ‘don’t you laugh now’
A silent prayer
And the teapot ready
Beside the rent book.
Every month ‘good morning Mrs Moran’ Lovely day to be sure’ and YesI will have a cup of tea, thank you’
And every month a glowing red nose,
Lit up like a hot coal.
Every month silence from the scullery
Until the day little Tommy fell off his perch
And tumbled through the scullery door
To land in a heap in front
Of that illuminated face.
And then mother turning,
The sugar bowl in her hand
Saying – much too casually – ‘How many sugars would you like on your nose?’
There was a starling sky
Yesterday over Rye
The arc of cloudless blue
Quite frequently changing its hue
as we watched the songbirds fly-by
You and me walking hand in hand
Along this wild and windy headland
The starlings singing high above
Sketching their murmurations of love.
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.
The secret is to be casual;
Matter-of-fact words can
Sometimes inflame the senses;
Not straight away, perhaps,
But later, when the hurly-burly
Of conversation has had time to sink in
Maybe the trick is not to be seen saying it;
‘I love you’ is such a difficult phrase
To force between clenched teeth
Fishing in Corolla Bay, The Outer Banks, North Carolina. My first try at fishing! The stripey giant on my line is called a DRUM – apparently! I did put it back when I unhooked it!
There’s a lot of controversy about cop- killer Harry Roberts being released soon. Some might remember that he shot dead 3 policemen during a robbery in Shepherds Bush in the 1960’s. Well, I was mistaken for Roberts during that time he was on the run; (he was subsequently discovered hiding out in Epping Forest). I was working in Barnet – quite close to Epping forest- in a pub and one day found myself surrounded by armed police in the public bar. Someone had reported they had seen Harry Roberts in the bar! Of course when they saw me and checked me out they realised it was a mistake. One of them said to me before they left, ‘don’t worry too much but you just saved yourself from being shot’! I needed a stiff drink after that I can tell you!
Oddly enough that wasn’t the end of the matter. In the late 1980’s, when I was living in Leytonstone in East London, I worked with a guy named John Roberts, and in the course of a conversation with him in the pub after work one evening he told me that Harry Roberts was his uncle. It’s a small world.
THE SHOOTING SEASON
“Let the slag have it Harry”, said Jack
“The bullet hit him just below the eye;
He slumped to the ground;
I could hear my heart thumping;
The air was electric”.
Those callous words are B movie speech
Yet the episode is of immense distress
A policeman – one of three-
Gunned down in broad daylight
On a street near Wormwood Scrubs
On August the twelfth
The glorious twelfth
The first day of the shooting season.
My Writing Life 