Illuminating Sermons (9.viii.87)

Deliberate self-exposure is rare,
but all forms of public speaking
involve unconscious self-exposure.

Take sermons. I hear one every Sunday.

No matter what a preacher talks about,
if you hear him talk, week in, week out,
then the inner man appears.
You eventually get to know
what he really thinks about himself,
how important he thinks he is, and why,
how clever, how holy, how wise
he thinks he is, and is,
and how happy he is.

For instance, one devoted many sermons
to trying to convince himself (via us)
that his job was very important.
He plainly didn't believe it,
and was very miserable.

The serene certainty and charity of another
shone through the extreme seriousness and simplicity
of what he had to say.

One seemed an exception to the rule.
The sermons were exceedingly polished,
but nothing consistent of the man appeared.
Eventually, I figured it out.
The sermons came ready-made from various worthy books,
and the priest was acting simply as a conduit.
If his object was to reveal nothing,
then he had found the way.
It wasn't even possible to determine whether
he he was too humble to compose his own sermons,
or too lazy.

Class Prejudice (13.viii.87)

East of Suez, my friend,
always go first class.
Either that, or mind you
dress appropriately.

I remember, on the Lady Esmé,
the ferry from Mahé to Praslin,
all seating was on deck,
and first was aft, under an awning.

The South-east Monsoon was blowing,
shaping a decent swell.
The little steamer dug and
slapped the waves, in turn.

The spray would fly up twenty feet,
then curl across the bridge
and crash down where the second class
sat, huddled, sick and wet.

Some kids, of course, got wet
and thought no more of it,
and went out to the plunging prow
to laugh at flying fish.

Home (13.viii.87)

When we married and went to live together,
where we lived was not home.
We were just playing house,
and our separate homes were elsewhere.

Now home is here. When did it happen?
I don't remember.  The other houses
and our parents are still there,
but somewhere along the line
they stopped being home.

What makes this home?
What is home?

Home is refuge.
The place where I unstrap my armour
and relax, and know that
even thought there are a ridiculous number
of things to be fixed,
yet nothing can go wrong.

Will Someone Please Shoot the Guitarist? (13.viii.87)

A folk-mass is a Mass that is frequently interrupted
by bright folk with guitars and tambourines, etcetera,
who urge us to be cheerful, and who smile a lot.
I hate them, with a passion.

We are under no obligation to be cheerful.
No doubt, it is good to be alive,
drenched in the love of Christ,
but it doesn't always feel that way.

Life is full of wickedness, betrayal,
suffering, death, and putrefaction.
The lad who wrote Ecclesiastes
knew what he was about.

Of course, there are people sitting in church
who feel cheerful.  But the odds are that
some of the congregation are more in the humour
for the De Profundis than this hand-clapping.

The Mass should be grave and level,
and presume no particular mood.
Religion has nothing to do with moods,
and we are entitled to feel miserable
if we want to.

Stability (13 viii 87)

St. Benedict's Rule included a key novelty,
in addition to the usual vows of
Poverty, Chastity and Obedience.
It was the vow to stay put.
Not a bad idea, at all.

We've lived here for eleven years,
longer than I've lived anywhere else,
and my roots now stretch for miles around.
When I travel, it's as though I was
attached to a spring, with the other end fixed here.
Hooke's Law pulls me home.

I'm comfortable here. Each square inch of the house
bears the work of our hands.  We know it,
and the garden, and the fields about us,
and the neighbours, and their dogs
and cats and chickens and cattle and sheep.

We have no pets of our own, officially,
but we feed a few, unofficially,
and turn a blind eye to various convenient carnivores.
For instance, we look kindly on centipedes,
ever since one made a deep impression on me,
by making an even deeper impression on a marauding slug.

Across the barley-field, on the main road,
I can see throngs heading West for the weekend,
inexplicably abandoning the presumed
comforts of their homes, for what?

It's not as though we are hemmed in, at home.
From here, I can search
the labyrinth of my heart,
climb unexplored crags of mathematics,
and ride upon mad Sweeney's back.
From my attic window, last night,
I could see
twelve million, million, million miles,
to the great galaxy floating
by fair Andromeda's knee.

Little Sister 12.viii.1987

My home lies in The Maws,
an anglicised Má, a flat place,
where, once, two sparkling little rivers
and three great kingdoms met.

It was a while ago.
The kingdoms are gone,
their only trace the three bishoprics
that meet here.

The rivers no longer meet.
The smaller was cut off
by the Royal Canal, two centuries ago,
and few remark the faint remaining signs
of her primeval course.

The place lies between Maynooth and Kilcock.
Centuries before those vanished kingdoms formed,
for folk round here,
Nuadu was God the Father,
and Cóca God the Mother.
Now both are safely buried,
and Cóca has been sanctified,
made tributary to a greater God.
The shining sacred salmon-stream
that joined their holy places
has been humbled to the colonists' Rye-water,
a dredged, channelled, civilized ditch,
that now rarely raises a smile,
and misses the infusion
of its lost and nameless sister.

As I seem to be her sole afficionado,
I suppose I'm allowed to give her a new name.
I'll call her Little Sister, Deirfiuir Beag.

Never quite dry, in any weather,
her water clear and drinkable,
here and there she laughs and gurgles over stones,
and here and there she slides along,
until at last she's gobbled by
the Duke of Leinster's drain.

Hagar 13.viii.1987

I live in spirit like a viking,
spending the long and blasting winters
brooding in the warmth of home,
nuzzling my family,
talking to my friends,
poking at my acquisitions,
sometimes carving an imitation
of some civilized prize,
and then,
when the weather seems favourable, sallying out
to pillage the known world of its baubles,
but taking care not to linger too long
among the fair frankish virgins,
or the sun-drenched islands of the middle-sea.

Strap me to the Mast, boys. 4.viii.1987

Sometimes I contemplate an end of such perfection
that I wonder how it's possible.
Yesterday, inching in traffic towards Glasnevin,
en route to the Botanic Gardens,
we were passed and re-passed repeatedly
by a woman possessed of just such
a startling and wonderful shape,
who flowed perundulating in the
fleeting Summer sunshine,
stirring my thickening blood,
rousing my unregenerate brain-stem,
and giving me a choice:

I could simply thank God
for having lived to see it,
or park the car,
kiss the wife and kids goodbye,
draw a ragged line across my life,
and step out.

This time, I stayed in the car,
thank God,
and went on to contemplate the equally perfect,
but less disturbing, Echeveria elegans.

It's a curious thought that one E. elegans
is as elegant as the next,
whereas ends vary so much;
age might well wither, but custom certainly cannot stale
their infinite variety.

My beloved's passions mirror mine,
in both innocence and character,
but where, on this occasion, mine's resisted,
her's is not. She soon succumbs
to taking slips, at the peril
of her soul, her liberty, and my peace.