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Skibbereen

County Cork, 1845

It started here, the famine. A country and a people,
but with absent owners. Families housed in huts
of stone, with just enough to fill their ever-open mouths.
The potato comes – late growing, prolix, wholesome,
Peruvian. It makes their sons grow tall. It’s a solution
to a growing family’s needs. But comes from Mexico,
the Blight. The crops are ruined, hunger feeds
the staring eyes, rents are left unpaid.
The landlords, deaf to pity, shake their heads.

Then comes evictions; roofs and chimneys smashed;
an English Government that blames the victims
for their moral weakness, and believes the market
must be free to prosper her believers. Charities
endow soup kitchens, inventing unnutritious
broths; work schemes pay to break up rocks and
mend the roads for pennies; workhouses overflow.
Half-naked, ragged people crawl the streets,
their pitiful possessions in pawn, and die together
in the gutters. They’re buried coffinless in pits.

Good doctors wring their hands, sketches fill
the Illustrated London News, and, to its credit,
outrage fills the world – if not the hearts of Peel
and his be-whiskered friends. But tens of thousands
die, and Ireland’s emptied fields remain unfarmed.
Ships returning empty to America offer passage
in their holds – and those that do not die at sea
take with them betrayal of their land and hopes.

Today in Skibbereen, a tourist town, points map
where bodies fell; plaques mark the kitchen, gaunt
and empty as a jail. A new-age vegan bookshop
holds a range of old LPs, sells fairtrade coffee,
and a better kind of read; brightly painted bars
draw down the happiness of night; and shoe shops offer
style and comfort as you walk its streets of shame.

P

Meliora Sequimur

Ravilious went to our school. Imagine this.
He breathed its woody polished air; tumbled down
its stairs; lined up outside its masters’ rooms.
Enjoyed the spell of Latin, the pigeons on the roof,
the slap of balls on wood, of hands across the face.

At 12, he was escaping to the Downs, sketching 
Wilmington’s Long Man, and marvelling at stringy 
biplanes that danced the air. At his age, I helped 
weed its painted stones that pretended to be chalk, 
biked everywhere, made kits.  And waited for the trains 
to pass the gates that kept our Hampden Park
from his, but his brush would catch their steamy
progress, creeping from the city to the sea,
the countryside a quilt of grasses, people free.

On his wedding day he smiles.  A home movie
flicks the husband from the man. See him step
outside his watercolour shield.  And there is Tirzah
[really Eileen] a dark-eyed match in art and love.
Biography at last, to replace the misty strokes,
the shades and patterns of his hand, his character.

And here some are. The balanced scenes of bedrooms,
shops of curiosity, trees with winter branches
that lightning-stab the air. And then, as wartime
takes his hand, a frigate’s dazzle sides,
bold brass props a Henry Moore could shape,
a childlike fighter held to ground by storm. 
His appetite for art and war, had brought a commission
and commissions.  Tumbled into uniform, he can pass
above the terror and the pain, to see the shape
of the machine, the curves and angles that bring ends
and endings. Finally, he gets to fly above it all.
He leaves his wife at home recovering [a breast
removed] and, sent to Iceland, joins a rescue flight.

Is never seen again. There’s no sign of wreckage,
bodies or reports – only “missing in action”, which he was not
– and was. It takes a year for wartime Britain
to confirm he’s dead. Tirzah receives no pay
or pension till that day. His loss, and lost support,
becomes her spur. She remarries for one short and final
time. Poor Tirzah, once again abandoned, making more
of her own accomplishment, but also dead quite soon –
the cancer he had fled to Iceland from, coming home.

Even so, the vision that he shaped becomes the way
I see his time, and Sussex where I lived.
He fills lost landscapes with how things might have been,
presents war as not so violent as designed.

Though in his death an emptiness. The usual cry of
promise unfulfilled, of course – but there’s desertion
there as well, the life insisting to be let in to the art.

But still he went to our school. A place of exercises,
ringed caps and ink. He then escaped its rituals
for art. This and none of this we shared, for when I went,
into the Grammar School, he was long dead,
gone into that wartime ocean, passed twenty years.
Though his pictures modestly adorned our corridors
No one thought to mention him to we who followed on.
Art was banished to a stock room, brought out meekly,
once a week, as we strove for better things.

 

Of Cabbages and Kings

It’s an Irish morning. Rain stains the window
like frosted glass and wind moans in the locks.
Our horizon, a long dark smudge, overlooks
an estuary fed by two rivers. Where this abundance
meets in water, fresh and salt, Patrick
has his oyster beds. They flourish in this rare
accommodation in thin and lonely lines.
In Dicken’s London oysters fed the poor –
now they go to restaurants in Spain. But today
it’s Thursday – no time for mollusks in their shells.
Today the family feasts on cabbages and bacon.

On the stove the bacon’s boiled, the cabbage, sliced,
is cooked in liquor from the meat, and all is mixed,
then served with turnips, mashed. You may
imagine seasonings and butter, and laughter satisfied.

Out there the oysters wait their consummation.
Cleaned and tasting only of the sea,
they’ll pass down throats anonymous and cold.

Killorglin, on The Ring of Kerry

JUMPERS

This Sunday, we are late getting away.
Our train – packed with travellers returning,
going; separating, connecting; heading home
for comfort or forgetting; for wedding feasts
and funerals; all these importances
are weightless, going nowhere.

And out there on the track, where
it’s possible to leap or stray, they’re
searching for the missing parts of
some poor desperate, whose life
has ended in a crush of happiness.

We are held for 90 minutes of calm
updates, as the search for remains continues.
As are other trains, queueing in their turn.
some in the consoling countryside,
others in stations, where impatient
lovers can fret upon the platforms.
On-board children may lose themselves
in small screen games, where levels
are attained, and many-headed monsters
explode like myths. It all adds up
to many days of life lost, in unspoken
inconvenience, or inkept patience.

Released [each finger, foot or eye
accounted for], the train speeds on
and life resumes. I think about
a train ahead shepherded away
for cleaning lest the ended life
still clings to wheels or motors.
And a driver whose shift is ended
entered into lists for counselling.
Emails go to all the passengers
with instant compensation for their loss.

The sun shines on the brilliant fields
of June. Church spires pin their hopes
above their peoples, cemeteries sleep
on beside the tracks, and weekend
leisure heads towards its end,
as the mowers and the cricket bats are put away,

Out there, concealed behind the lovely greens
of fields, the gardens spruced and tended
just beyond the slick and silver rails,
more jumpers wait, their minds made up, their hold
on life resolved, their farewell secret made.

The Fifth Wave

Walk on any beach, but take the edge
Where the smooth sand lines up the resilience of our realm
With the resourceful sea. Admire the encroachment 
Of property on nature. Or despair at the arrogance of wealth
As it towers into the steel of the sky.
Notice the distant reef as it restrains an agitated surf
The spent energy swells towards your feet
And gently grasps your ankles and slips past
Faintly disturbing the balance you enjoy.
Then heed the tracks you’ve made through
The plucky sand. All trace of you is gone
After the fifth wave.