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

The march from Shropshire to the Somme, how long?
At least two hundred years of industry and revolution,
while time twists like country lanes, till distance shortens
to a sniper’s bullet. I am back a hundred years myself,
with a music mag found on a Yorkshire market stall.
The sun is early, hot and kind upon the morning,
and A Shropshire Lad is playing.  A call of peace and youth,
of promise. A world where wealth and industry
brings longer lives and hopes and opportunities,
where steam and speed connect. George Butterworth,
its son. His father manages the LNER. He goes
to Oxford where dreamy academe invents
a past of fragrant summers, kings of chivalry
and perfect love; where folksy melodies are revived
as their words and harmonies are lost in city
smoke. George does more than this – he rescues
from uncertainty and doubt, Vaughan Williams.
Makes him write his London Symphony – even
reinventing it when a German publisher loses
it on the very eve of war. What service to us all.

A bugle call away from dark, where no light falls,
where men’s names wait for carving on memorials,
and here is Butterworth, his early works torn up
lest he should not return, and they are unrevised.
A year in uniform, defending what he heard and sang
against the threat of Beethoven and Brahms,
of Uber Alles. Stands in a trench in France, he and his men
have dug, have named for him, and does not
hear the bullet coming, coming, coming.

They bury him where he falls, in his trench’s wall.
No time for service, or an anthem played. His body’s
never found, no last post played, lost like
so many dreamy lads. A pointless stinking strip
of charnel ground. Somewhere else a plaque or two recalls
his sweet-for-summer name, his Military Cross
adorns a wall. His music, rare and lovely,
plays across a car park as I wait. So many things
to honour. Thank you, George, for leaving some
to promise more than sweetness, tears.