Forgotten you? Well... (30 vii 87)

There is a power in silly songs to resurrect the past,
quite out of proportion to their quality as songs.
For instance, when I'm overseas
and hear the BBC World Service
dropping Lilliburlero into the static,
I think of King Billy, his left-footers,
Wexford in the sixties,
and a particularly pretty girl who used to sing it.
I also wonder whether the BBC is being
deliberately provocative,
or just plain insensitive,
but I digress.

Take wars:
Green grow the lilacs equals the Texas revolt.
Dixie equals the War between the States.
Dolly grey equals the Boer War.
Tipperary equals the First Great War.
Lilli Marlene equals the Second,
and the Marseillaise,
whatever it may mean to the French,
means the Retreat from Moscow to the rest of us.

Take peace:
Bunclody takes me back to hot days cycling,
sleeping rough under the stars,
the raw feel of the pre-dawn mist
and the ease of catching the first trout
with the first cast of the day.
A hundred other ballads call up
places, singers, lovers, friends.

I remember coming down the cliff-path at Rosslare,
one Summer evening,
and coming on two men singing on a bench,
to no-one in particular,
and I can still remember the pleasure they took
in the drop:

What's it to any man, whether or no,
whether I'm easy or whether I'm true?
I lifted her petticoat, easy and slow,
and I rolled up my sleeves,
for to buckle her shoe.

Heart-sick though I was for sweet Mary Wickham,
it cheered me up.

Heap it up, press it down, watch it flow over. (30.vii.87)

You can tell what a man is worth
by the way he treats people who can do nothing for him.
But I also like the older, slightly different, idea
that a man's worth is measured by the quality of his hospitality,
by his readiness to share his salt.

A thousand years ago, we had a name for the profession
of living at a crossroads and feeding all and sundry
from a big, steaming stew-pot. It ranked
somewhere near a bishop. We still have bishops.
God be with the days!

You might be a long time walking the roads, nowadays,
before you met the like, but, thank Christ,
there are a few houses left, and I know where they are,
where you wouldn't be left standing
with one arm as long as the other.

I haven't the slightest objection in the world
to singing for my supper. Would you like a song?
I'll sing you one. I'll sing you ten.
I'll sing until you beg me to stop,
or the sun comes up again.

Would you rather hear a story, or just talk
of old or new things, light or deep things,
sad, or brave, or gay, or silly things?
Give me half a hint, or the glint of an eye,
and I'll pull up a chair and we'll start.

Before the Council (29.vii.87)

Any day of the week, at half-past ten,
you could stand outside any church in town
and watch the faithful trickling out,
with the calm and inward look of those
who knew in their hearts, without any doubt,
that they had, once again, added to their store
yet another infinity of merit.

The arithmetic of infinity
was not like the other,
that we learned at school,
but it had a logic all its own,
and was easy to work with,
once you knew the rules.

The small print, however, could catch you out.
Did you know that, without the proper disposition
-- a complete aversion from all sin --
a Hail Mary might only get you
nine or ten thousand years years off purgatory,
instead of a full remission?

Do you know what complete aversion means?
Complete aversion is pretty rare.
In all of history, there were only two cases,
and there is no prize for guessing who they were.

Between this, and other little snags I won't mention,
you might have done better, on the whole,
hoping for time off for good behavious,
or a chance of making heaven on parole.

Grave Matter and No Consent (27.vii.87)

Little things have a way of becoming serious.
I know a house, full of children, with no bicycles.
It's not completely full. One of the children is buried
not too far from one of mine.

We still have bicyles. We simply gave away his.
Our madness took another form. We're short a gate.
We cut it off, and threw it away,
and trained a climbing rose across the gap.

We planted him a beech tree, too, that grows
smooth and cold, and beautiful, like him,
but will, perhaps, grow tall and strong,
as he did not.

Then we cried and made another baby, not the same,
another baby, and he too grows smooth and beautiful,
with legs like pillars, but warm,
a solid, happy, fragile joy.

What do I think? I think that we have all
to die, sooner or later, and can't choose when.
We have no right. That's how it is.
Our lives are cut and rounded for us.

But, God, I think about him every day,
and wish he hadn't died.
A man should die after his father, and before his sons,
however rarely it works out that way.

Lord, I don't agree with your way of doing things.
I don't agree, and I won't agree.
We are just going to have to agree
to differ on this one.

Hard Words (29.vii.87)

The bereaved are treated gently,
perhaps too gently.

Every day, when I went to grieve,
I saw the grave-digger, cutting weeds,
and keeping the place tidy,
but we never spoke, beyond a nod.

Then, one day, he came and said:
"This place is full of dead children,
and nobody weeps for them,
but their own."

What do I make of this?
It burned in my mind.
He is right.
The whole world is full of dead children,
and always was.
An ocean of uncontainable sadness,
washing round the feet of all our joys.
All life would end, buried away down deep
beneath the crushing load of sorrow,
were we not immune to most of that distress.
Our own is almost too much, as it is.
Many simply sit, pining, paralysed,
and waiting for uniting death.

I am ready to die, for my child is dead.
But though I am wounded, there are things worth doing,
and though I bleed, I still can stand
and force the gates of the resisting world.
Grief is a drug. For a while, it heals,
but in the end it kills.
The illusion of loyalty produces worse betrayal.
Life is to live. Our dead don't need our grief.

Daniel (1982. rev. 29.vii.87)

Death is too simple to be believed.
A brief block to your air-supply,
and there you were: still warm,
unmarked, so beautiful, so dead.

Later, so cold, so calm, a placid
smile upon your pale, pale face,
and when I hugged you, such a deadly
sigh that whistled from your useless lungs.

The crumbled clay uncrumbles now,
and settles on the small white box
that holds a part of you, and all of me.
Oh, Daniel, Daniel, Daniel!

If love could make you live,
you'd live forever.

Gilt by Association (28.vii.87)

Some people have trouble with the Song of Solomon
because of all the jewel-like thighs.
Their toes curl up and their juices thalamine
surge right up to the backs of their eyes.

But my objection to this brief little book
is not the lithe black keeper of the king's vineyard,
nor even disappointment about mandrake-root,
but the boost to the price of spikenard.

Not to mention pomegranates. Two pounds each!
The trouble is that, since Solomon praised it,
every little dog thinks that his little bitch
will adopt the position as soon as she tastes it.

The First of July (28.vii.87)

The undulating plain of Picardy has a district called Santerre,
variously interpreted as sana terra, sancta terra,
but most convincingly as sang-terre,
for its hedgeless fields are sodden with the blood of centuries.
Great cavalry country.

The worst Irish disaster since the famine happened there,
at the hot, sunny start of July, nineteen-sixteen.
The Ulsters perished for The Crucifix, north of Thiepval,
yelling "Up the Boyne" as they went down.
The Twelfth was the First, old style.

In all, that Anglo-German war took
forty-nine thousand, four hundred Irish lives,
and maimed in proportion.
My history book said little or nothing about that.
It was the wrong war.

I found that out, when I went to investigate
a crumbling, rubbish-strewn, weedy, overgrown
memorial in Islandbridge, which brotherly hate
and bitterness had consigned to neglect
and dishonour.

There is a tribe of seagulls on Lambay Island
that scream for every Irish death.
They've been at it for nine thousand years,
since the first landed Irishman drew breath.
Banshees to us all.

The birds cry out for the lot of us,
and they don't wait to ask:
Was he a Teague? Was he a Prod?
If he was a man, it's enough.
If he was a man, it's a lot.

The Good Food Guys (28.vii.87)

The wandering Jew must needs subsist
on vegetables and scaly fish,
and soon you hear him sadly wish
for a knife-slit, white-bled kosher kid
and the fleshpots of Israel.

It used to be that, once a week,
On Fridays, we could have no meat,
and so we thought it hard to eat
the harvest of the Dunmore fleet,
except, of course, for Salmon.

Saint Peter, on a Jaffan roof,
was shown a sheet of living things
that crept and slid and plopped and slithered,
and sported every kind of hoof,
cavorting in the gloom.

In Ramadan, the muslims fast
from dawn to dusk, and feast at night
on sweetmeats, that sharpened appetite
sweeten all the more. This last
scheme seems a better way to mortify the flesh.

On warm spring evenings, round the town,
the muslims sit in doorways munching,
chatting, laughing, singing, loving
life and company, and smiling at the frowning
faces of their betters.

You may not like their politics
or the small print in the Koran,
but as faiths go, it's not the worst,
and it has the virtue catholic,
that anyone can join.

Still, there's not much use hankering after
that kind of thing, when I'm stuck believing
the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost,
and wouldn't be easy with a monopersonal
mighty indifferent God.

Not to mention His prophet.

Never (27.vii.87)

The wedded boy came back to work,
with his usual lunch-box.
When he opened it, he found his sandwiches,
lovingly wrapped,
and tied with a blue ribbon.

Oh, the shame of it!
He ran away from his mocking mates,
and it never happened again.
Never is a long time,
but it never happened again.

When I first loved her, my love, with out care,
would kiss me and cuddle me anywhere.
Then Mom declared that 'public displays of affection
are always inappropriate',
and that was that.

Now, when she meets me from trips abroad,
and I long to take her, squeeze her and kiss her,
and rumple my fingers through her darling hair,
she pecks me chastely, quickly hugs, and
nags the kids to kiss their father.

It can't be Queen Victoria's fault.
By all accounts, she was as demonstrative as the best of them.
So who organized this poisonous restraint,
this awkward, chilling, stiff resistance to kind,
this nurtured, propagating, unyielding bony-ness?

Keeping Folly Occupied (27.vii.87)

We live in a time of frantic innovation,
new names, techniques, machines.
Of stuff outside we grow in understanding,
new theorems, particles, genes.
Wisdom eludes us.

Wisdom, Understanding, Counsel, Fortitude,
Knowledge, Piety, and the Fear of the Lord.
A list of gifts, implanted in youth,
shrivelling unwatered in the flourishing growth
of worthless information.

I know I've met this gripe before
in thoughts of men so long dead
that their beautifully-written mud-scribed tongue
lives only, now, upon the thread
of a single scholar's life.

It seems to be the way we are made,
that our minds delight in stuff that's fleeting,
and we wake each day like so many birds,
singing our little hearts out, and keeping
a bright eye cocked for worms.

Even the quest for Wisdom is vain,
a magpie game for serious fools.
For Wisdom is not a creature to own,
or something to use, as one uses a tool.
Wisdom just is.

Why fight folly, always failing?
Why not join the gang, and plunge
across the cliff-top, laughing gaily,
floating freely, trading wisecracks,
holding hands 'til splashdown?