———————————————
WITN ES S
A Revised and Expanded Edition
Seán Body ———————————————
Belfast Lapwing
witness Revised and Expanded Edition
Seรกn Body
Belfast LAPWING
This Revised Version of Witness First Published by Lapwing Publications c/o 1, Ballysillan Drive Belfast BT14 8HQ lapwing.poetry@ntlworld.com http://www.lapwingpoetry.com Copyright Š Seån Body 2013 All rights reserved The author has asserted his right under Section 77 of the Copyright, Design and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Since before 1632 The Greig sept of the MacGregor Clan Has been printing and binding books
All Lapwing Publications are Hand-printed and Hand-bound in Belfast Set in Aldine 721 BT at the Winepress
ISBN 978-1-909252-29-5
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS A number of these poems have won prizes and were first published in the following prize winners’ anthologies: Auschwitz, June 2, 1942 in Manchester Poetry 2 (1989) East Side, West Side in Staple 20 (1991) Going Back in Weyfarers (Guildford Poets Press 1991) Women, Children, A White Road in Harvest ’92 (Bridport Arts) Walk on Grass in Vision On (Bridport Arts 2000) and Peace Poems (Crocus 2003) Joseph was published in Poems from the Readaround (Manchester Poets 1995) Letting Go in Pennine Platform 50 (2001) The Witness sequence in Dreamcatcher 10 (2002) Mother in The Retting Dam (Scriobhneóirí 2001) Megan won second prize in the Bridport Competition and was published in Harvest ’91 Stroke in the Peterloo Competition Poster 1993 (4th prize) Histories shared the Jewish Quarterly National Poetry Prize (1994) Going Back, Write Me A Poem, Stroke, Crocus and Joseph were broadcast on BBC Radio
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CONTENTS ONE AUSCHWITZ, JUNE 2, 1942 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WITNESS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Again . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Transport P Kr 9298 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Camp Commandant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Gold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Women, Children, A White Road . . . . . . . FOR PRIMO LEVI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . HISTORIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WORKSHOP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ECCE HOMO . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CAROL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A CHILD’S VOCABULARY OF WAR . . . . . . . . TEMPORARY FAULT – GOOD FRIDAY . . . . . OPENING CEREMONY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . POSELSKA STREET . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A HYMN FOR AFRICA . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
7 9 10 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 18 19 20 21 22 23
TWO LLYN SUMMERS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
1. Going Back . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Write Me A Poem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Sea Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Dinas Evening . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. After The Flood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . THE ONE-LEGGED SEAGULL . . . . . . . . . . . . . MEGAN . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TIES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . COMMUNION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . HONEYMOON SNAP . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SOMETIMES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . HEARING THE SILENCE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . GIFT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
25 27 27 28 29 30 31 32 34 35 36 37 38 39 40
THREE FLIGHT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Flight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Avoidances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. East Side, West Side . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Leaving . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
41 43 43 44 45 46
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REPRISAL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . INCIDENT AT CARRAIG . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15TH AUGUST . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . WALK ON GRASS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
47 48 49 50
FOUR A MORNING SERVICE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BRIGHTENINGS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ALL AMERICAN HERO – THE MOVIE . . . . . . EXILE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . JOSEPH . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . CHRISTMAS EVE SINGING SILENT NIGHT . ON THE ROAD TO EMMAUS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . PROBATION . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . SCARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VICTIM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
51 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62
FIVE FOR MY MOTHER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Mother . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. The Handbag . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Pain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Crocus . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 5. Treasures . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . FOR MY FATHER . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1. Floating Rush Crosses At The Holy Well . . 2. Caerphilly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Meeting My Father In Oxford Street . . . . . . FOR SUSANNAH MARIE MURPHY . . . . . . . . . 1. Bomb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2. Stroke . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3. Sitters . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4. Letting Go . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . VIATICUM . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . AUTHOR’S NOTE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
63 65 65 66 67 68 69 70 70 71 72 74 74 75 76 77 78 79 79
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In memory Sheila Marie Body (1939 – 2010)
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ONE
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AUSCHWITZ, JUNE 2, 1942 Finding a stray flower blown in from the lost world, the old man, who berated God in a voice of dried bones, offered it to the child. Terrified, she inched away, down the long slow darkness. The door’s opening exhaled sour intimacy. A web of stagnant light violated the neatly folded rags to which no one would return. Smoke coiled in a whisper. O Lieblin! Lieblin! the bones cried, a hand that had forgotten hurting the flower with an old tenderness. Spent blossom, frayed joy littered the scuffed ground like tears chipped from a stone eye.
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WITNESS 1. Again Someone is always leaving, does not look back, no waving follows him. –Johannes Bobrowski On the Jewish Dealer A.S. (trans Matthew Mead) Places become used to leaving. It seeps in like weather. Ice forms, fits footprints. Memory will not cling to the plundered interiors, the rage of briar. Cleared slopes will soften to gardens. Reconstruction open new avenues; broad slashes like healed scars. There will be regret, how silence made it possible: the corpses ricked like tinder, stunned-open eyes– Distanced we seek a language for outrage. Spectres wait on stations, mark how the air gets colder.
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2. Transport P Kr 9298 They are growing to hate him too, the old man whose sobbing troubles their confinement. The rise and fall of his tears drench them with apprehension. Rifles butt his useless sleep. Back there on the track, his son’s hand begs where it lay, bowed like a bowl from which they’d turned. His pride was foolish, left him then, like air stamped out under the clenched boots. They have moved on: in the night they felt movement. “Today we will arrive,” someone says, “or tomorrow.” They have few expectations. When it is light, one will peer through a chink in the door, guess destinations.
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3. Camp Commandant They groomed him for priesthood, his catholic parents. Imagined him laying on hands, being easy with death. He had a steadfast faith: a world purified, how words would fire– Fatherland. Duty. Order. “Direct to cleansing, men over fifty, women over fortyfive, women with children, whatever age…” It would be inhuman he believed to separate mothers from their children. He was moved by plays, cultivated gardens, friendships. Was adored by daughters. In his journal, wrote: “Only our deeds survive us.”
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4. Gold I was seven then, the day Daddy brought home the gold: three chains, a bracelet, charms so exquisite I dare not touch. I keep them still in the carved box. The damaged hinge tilts, locks half-open, yields. The morning vibrant with his will, storming the apartment, a gift for his Prinzessin, eyes violent with love, pressing the gold onto my bare skin, cold as if it might evaporate. I keep his photograph in the clasped heart. How delicately each link holds. The woman refused, would not accept that goods were requisitioned. He had to strike her– Twelve Jews died that day. I remember, it was so few.
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5. Women, Children, A White Road They have left behind the little tombs of clothes, the shoes that will become eloquent. Herded in lines, they shiver, take little running steps, shamefaced, with hands over their genitals. Trust is a prayer, then silence. A child comforts a doll; it will not flinch from the dark, the catch of breath. They pass into darkness, leave small gestures we hardly catch: how a hand trails, takes with it the last air. That road is white with their presence, in the moonlight, glints bone.
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FOR PRIMO LEVI I came to you late (the plaudits all sung) in the 50p dip with the offprint copies of The Bitch and Lace. Uninformed by the half truth, Died 1987, I read you with innocence, warming to a hard hope. But art serves only to disturb, finds you still in the long night that has no manna, only this raw fruit of knowledge and a star desecrating rags that numbed you into witness. Their Moments of Reprieve dog your useless sleep: make you Messiah who had no faith in faith. Your aching text rings like an anvil, shapes defiance the soul’s grandeur. Your death is the putting out of the last perceived light. Beyond the fence, you wrote, the lords of death, and not far off the train is waiting. Stopped in the Lager, holding the door open.
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HISTORIES The yarmulke you loan me fits like a glass slipper. A brief metamorphosis. Somewhere there is ice, a long search. “My grandfather brought it from Russia,” you say. Each stitch a binding painstaking, by candlelight. You keep it in a drawer with trinkets, mementoes from the old country. The language he dreamed in bringing words into daylight. Some you remember, may pass on how he walked across Europe taking his faith, two small sons. “We are Jews,” he taught them. Settled in Germany. A master tailor. Earned respect. Died in another exile. An exile here, stiff among the fading shots: a child knee-deep in snow; a woman laughs; a girl boarding a train half turns, is speared by light. Today you are responsive to histories. Show them like medals. It is your son’s bar mitzvah. Today is a coming of age. You wear all their naked faces.
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WORKSHOP for Elizabeth C.
We’re creating a river of words brightenings to tempt an arid plain cascade in splintered showers rainbows we pursue down the yellow brick road… “Say a word, any word.” hear it unpack echoes checked at barriers calls back the myriad voices vying for attention “Train,” someone says– a long-ago anticipation of sea, of laughter a child’s spade abandoned on some silent strand carriages of eyes hurtling through Europe– words are revenants grace notes lingering in some abandoned room
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ECCE HOMO Pontius Pilate was a nice man. Listened to his wife’s dreams, washed his hands of the blood. Didn’t plait the thorns, drive the nails. I see him often: his clean hands, how he shakes the drops from his fingers, offers his open palms, surrenders.
CAROL Romania, Christmas 1990
The child in a headscarf rocks griefs, growing old inside a tight knot; her hammocked eyes the terror behind windows, the midnight knock. If hope comes it will have wings, tempt her to other skies foreign tongues their pidgin intimacies soft-spoken; the patient arms outheld for hers that dare not open.
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A CHILD’S VOCABULARY OF WAR Saddam Hussein has scud missiles. We have patriots. Scuds kill people. They are not accurate. Often they kill the wrong people. We call it a strike. The dead we call victims. Patriots take-out scuds. Do not kill people. Except when a crater is left where there was a house or a block of flats. That we call a rogue patriot. It is not a strike. The dead we call casualties.
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TEMPORARY FAULT – GOOD FRIDAY eerie this silence that strikes the exact hour as if faith might still be potent, or hunger do not adjust your set a head drops to a shoulder, stays a breast hangs over the torn lip of a dress parched as a tongue images appropriate to the day the crucifix and pieta we put in a stone niche leave small change small change here the dead and the about to die this year or another interchangeable– except that she is glimpsed erect, dignified as if this remorseless sunhated place had conjured an image to confound: woman normal service will be resumed the camera snaps back like a censured hand unfocussed only the abject may cry out on this unredeeming Golgotha not her imperilled stark magnificence
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OPENING CEREMONY Winter Olympics 1994
Lillehammer. A Christmas-card village of pop-up buildings vibrant with expectation. A snow-blind Brigadoon like a day out of time. An ephemera of dreams. Burly Santas circle sleigh rides. Bright faces muffle fierce cold, contend like gladiators: We who are about to thrill, salute you. Combative flags express cordiality. Icy fingers tune leaping strings, mittened dancers, a peasant song. Who aspire to excellence might strike gold. For the rest, sufficient we wave flags, sit out the cold, or sedentary in distant rooms wait a country’s entry. Mine’s not there. I anticipate it among the “I’s” then hope for some quirk of the Norwegian tongue longing to feel, for a moment, that quick belonging, the lift of pride. Ten years back it burned brightly: He who wins should be glad, he who loses should not be sad, we are here to make friends. We remember Sarajevo, observe a minute’s silence– a fine snow beginning, white poppies.
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POSELSKA STREET (postcard by Jan Walczewski)
Imagine night, starless, dark– a dark invaded dark. Now peel back decades: this stately street conceived of certainties, architect and trader gainfully allied, each stone a statement. Wars intervene, take root: a pestilence of beliefs. Momentous events have passed by: assignations under the lanterned street light that scarce illumines itself. Pent shadows in crouched doorways begin whispers. Someone is always watching. As now, concealed lights pick over the street’s debris, this strange covering that might be of a manger or a flood. Everything chimes with some exacting myth: the aureoled burn – of a shot or a star? the rooted pillar forever glancing back; a wreath’s small wither; and the vaguely lit window that blocks our view toward which two dark figures separately move.
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A HYMN FOR AFRICA polling, Soweto, April 26, 1994
is beautiful this dark the light beginning this new air the breath I breathe is beautiful this man this woman faces I smile on this long line making waves like the sea part is beautiful this exile this long hunger sticks I walk on my legs’ pain is beautiful arms that held dust opening a white man cries I take his hand is beautiful this being born being woman the cross I lay down on a ballot sheet is beautiful
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TWO
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LLYN SUMMERS 1. Going Back All night they have cried the lambs in their separation penned in a strange field. All night the wind has moaned in the intimate places of the windbreak beyond the small window that chatters cold teeth. In the morning there will be wild colour and ribbons of water bearding old rock. You have a fondness for retaking steps; all day we have searched for a view of islands the small cove, absented from its remembered place that put a shawled arm round a moment. So much is elusive now beyond the next bend, or the last but not letting go – This harsh weather maps the shape of hurts, leaves fissures on the high ground where blown seeds bind a loose arrangement, open rock veins.
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2. Write Me A Poem June again, but not raining. Sea like a meadow rippling. Too regular: movement an illusion– light fondling water. I turn in by the dandelion, carefully compute the angle of approach, square the car slowly by the sea wall, inch forward and stop. Your affinity with landscapes has a precision children understand. You look for the placing of figures: a farmer’s slow surveillance, decaying buildings, a lessening of sheep, fields turning to scrub. The first moment is an unveiling of sensibilities. Only surrenders are this naked: eyes folding-in lights that are already becoming memories. On the diminishing sliver of sand that rings the hot bay, a child joyously teases-in the sea, tamed to her small step, docile. Above her, close by, a bird pauses on the edge of sound, tunes a shy stirring, opens its full throat and sings. “Put that in a poem for me,” you say, as if a moment could be pressed like daffodils between sprung words. And it is gone. We strain far out into the still air, intent, waiting, denied. But it is not loss, this past-hearing, this vigilance.
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3. Sea Change Voices carry, like messages in bottles are brought in on waves. We pick them up haphazardly, store bright shells in which to take home the sea. Out of her depth, a child is learning to trust, reclines into hammocked arms that tether seas to a gentle rocking. Gently as the day alters: a busying of movements, murmurs of thunder, as lightning slips from a cloud’s vigilance whiplashes alarm, its swift menace fluent as an arrow scythes rain, the panicked waves.
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4. Dinas Evening sidles in on a mood, a gentling of endings blurs the edges of geography, hangs out pale lights. Wisps of ascending mist languid as incense, invoke the dark coterie of hills spent hope, easy with wilderness. We trespass on absence, how it’s become landscape: shored mountains of shale the rained-on loveliness of slate; and deeper, further, imagined voices drunk on consonants proclaim the stone certainties. But it is only the stillness how a land reclaims its silence. Along the untended valley, light lingers, flares – and slips away.
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5. After The Flood And so we believed it would not change except in tempered ways we come to mirror: a yearly tending to wilderness, walled windows sealing silence. But the dandelion would still be there; the sheep like Christmas rags in draughty cribs; the farmer’s slow yielding tending deteriorations, swaths of defeat; a still cultivator cultivating rust. Now – boulders, this strange terrain like a burial ground excavated for evidence from which scholars might construct hypotheses, artefacts, fates. Alien as a moonwalk this cratered strip you search for nothing familiar (basalt, meteorite, flint). Find instead sea pink, delicate and defiant trembling between rocks.
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THE ONE-LEGGED SEAGULL Dynas Dinlle, in rain
Still as a mystic it is reconciled endures as if in another dimension some composed enclave of the mind or gull-imagined heaven where the living’s easy. So perfectly it’s balanced on wineglass stem the air around it hushed. It scarcely breathes or stirs a quill. A ballerina of stillness its absorbed calm absorbs weather. Another tries to mirror its composure but cannot achieve mastery of inactivity like one newly idle it looks for tasks picks up a twig puts down again when its throat opens the air screams.
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I wonder if they are a pair: half-remember intimacies they still half-share. Their separate worlds are easy side by side, make few intrusions. The vigil ends with loud acclamation. They exchange Amens. One rises, waves nonchalantly takes the wind, glides. Then the other, precariously like a child on a scooter kickstarts, is airborne.
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MEGAN Yes… Megan… that’s me. Megan. Bad night isn’t it. Terrible weather we’re having. Terrible. Miss it is. Yes. Never married. No. Would have liked to. Yes. Thought I would have once. Yes. Nobody special you understand. No. Never came to that. No. Just the way we expect things to be. Yes, well, the ways of the world – or of men anyway. What’s the use complaining? No use at all. No. Bitter? I’m not bitter. No. Life’s too short for bitterness. Yes. A pity. Yes. Megan. Common enough name in these parts. Yes. Belonged to my grandmother. Dead now. Yes. Only a cold the doctor said. Small dark woman. Dressed in black. Cold hands with blue veins. Very raised they were. Yes. Used to say I’d make someone a good wife one day. Yes. You’ll make someone a good wife, one day, Megan. Yes. Or maybe it was my mother said that. Wanted me to be happy see. Yes. A bad night. Yes. It’s with living at the edge of the world, my mother used to say. Yes. Sometimes I watch the giant waves leap up the great rocks, like old oilers flapping at their shins, and it’s like everything else is silent. Like some great giant is roaring and the whole world’s gone quiet. Sometimes I shout a word, a name, anything, Megan maybe. Megan, I shout, Me-gan. Very loud and very strong; and it’s like a little cry in a cave. Megan. Me-gan. Yes. Very wet, the coat. Saturated. Yes. Wool you see, absorbs the damp. Yes. Strange that. Seeing the weather we get I mean. You’d think God would have given sheep a better coat for the weather, in Wales anyway. Something waterproof. Or drip dry. Yes. Warm of course. I expect that’s what he was thinking. But it must be heavy with all that rain in it. Yes. Strange now he overlooked that. Yes. Maybe he wasn’t expecting sheep to be living at edge of the world no more than Megan. No. Just found themselves here, poor little mites. And couldn’t say we don’t like it here, we think we’ll emigrate – now could they? No. I stand out there on the edge… and that’s the whole world. There’s no one to be seen of course. No. Just the way it always is and always will be. Ad semper, my mother used to say, Ad semper. Liked to show her learning, my mother. Yes. Her distemper my brother Evan called it. When he was alive. Before they killed him. Yes. Killed in action, the telegram said. Killed in action. Yes. She nailed it up on the door like a message – Gone away. Yes. Yes. Yes. 34
TIES in Moston Cemetery
Your grandmother is anecdotes: the crumbs of conversation you feed on, hugging wounds and hunger. This is a place of pilgrimage, of intense listening; as if the soil she has become becomes her. ‘Your grandmother was a Lady.’ Proprietress of a boarding house in Georgian Dublin, dying of consumption in a Salford slum. The engrossed picture-goer who when the silent screen rained, raised her umbrella. ‘Laugh! We split our sides!’ The bright young country girl for whom a city danced, twirled a green skirt. Was it marriage brought her here? The farm already spent that was his suit. She’d not reveal. ‘Airs she gave herself!’ Voices-off, like Chinese whispers, take you no further than the blunt-fisted street, the bruise of her, closed as a bedroom. Gone to ground in this anonymous spot, you now tidy with grand-daughterly care, leave a prayer in the grass, propped up like a leave-taking–
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All there is: a tissue of ties. Her silence cupped like a hand round the small wick of honour and a word, like a sigh of ocean, Labasheeda. Her place of first memory. The Silken Bed. A soft place of rain.
COMMUNION She will seek reconciliation lay herself on his mercy open the door into the dark confinement of wax, lavender, sweat behind a thin gauze his breath musk of him, reverberations in old wood words like arms extended press her gently she will rise to his coming receive him the wafer of his flesh will melt slowly as bread his blood leave on her tongue the exhilaration of wine his life will move in her.
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HONEYMOON SNAP Late Ramsey evening. Rain. A seagull mindlessly pecking at the same unyielding spot. In the still photograph it moves in the apathetic, complaining way seagulls have in rain. A sense of oppression: the way promises become disappointments to be lived with. You are marooned on the long bench back bunched in anger in the hastily bought mac, several sizes too large. Like a hand-me-down it begs indulgence. Earlier, walking the beach you looked for pebbles to weight memories or coyly with an apple, posed – a nimble Eve. Innocent of how an image might insist: how recognising our nakedness we would look for leaves.
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SOMETIMES Sometimes you seem so lonely I would run to fold you in healing arms but something restrains holds back like lips. Sometimes I am so troubled I ache for you to come unbidden as you sometimes would hand touching my shoulder light as a bird and trusting– but you do not hear. Sometimes we fit a single space so distantly you in my arms and I dumbly calling.
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HEARING THE SILENCE 1. Words make fissures in silence cause echoes to start down long emptinesses disturb old workings that have become unstable that underlie our easy plateau ambush with quick recognitions that like thicket birds sensing a nearness, cry out and go‌ 2. O My Darling, let not disappointment fester between us. What we censor we falsify. Let us be naked in each other’s hearing through labyrinth and minefield and let us not bear arms. Face to naked face when truth hurts let silence be easy between us sorrow a cradling. Let our words be artless naive as prayers in a faithless time and let them be answered. And if we quest let it be as the instant of a finger seeking an infant finger before it grips before it knows how fiercely tender holds.
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GIFT I bring you this moment the eyes’ ardour words new-formed tender with histories fresh as cut flowers we pluck from their season will not let die
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THREE
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FLIGHT Manchester – Belfast, September 1989
1. Flight Ascending we glimpse harmonies: patchworks of green and brown, clouds in heaped duvets, soft mountains for the mind’s play– Head in the clouds and higher than any kite, out of myself and out in this blue levitation: Phil Coulter’s Sea Of Tranquility transporting me to my roots where too much is always left unresolved and history’s a wound we can’t leave to heal: With their bombs and guns O my God what have they done… Our hammered sensibilities hammered on strings, melodic, danced to– Descending, we touch shadows. Antrim’s fields are greener, hardly allow other colours. But claims are more erratic converge awkwardly leave divisions.
Sea of Tranquility: a recording of Irish melodies played on the piano by Phil Coulter. The quotation, With their bombs and guns… is from ‘The Town I Loved So Well’, Phil Coulter’s elegy for his native Derry.
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2. Avoidances Living together necessitates avoidances. Things we do not talk about run deep. I look for cues: between half-lines read permissions. I’m troubled by guns. I like the guns I see, a gentle man says, recounting long hurts, a family history kept moist with telling. They came at night, the hooded men, rowed him out on the lake. A warning. Heeded seventy years. We forge bonds: a meal together, a drive in his car, get lost on unfamiliar roads, part shyly, like children who have shed disguises. I see him turn away with his wounds put back in their place, wait for the car’s sound to fade indeterminately in the remoteness of hurt farms. My hand, still in the air, acknowledges divisions deeper that one night’s journey. In the Guest House, there are voices behind closed doors, but no one comes into the lounge. I sit alone, watch a fitful light thread a slow line to a stranded farm, stun a white gable. Trees draw down night, receive darkness.
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3. East Side, West Side Flags announce the prevailing wind, incite fervours; like old bandages bear the infected print of wounds. On the City Hall, BELFAST SAYS NO, a white sheet round its damaged portals. High walls and checkpoints. Gates that snap-to in an instant are today half open, half expectant. The Lower Falls is edgy with slogans: skewered lines drip rage leave names on stone: a pieta of unhealed griefs, bereavement worn like a pledge – and this lone taxi hugs a slow claim up the marked hill. The troubling of that image is inexplicable: opposing litanies of the dead, the cynicism of accommodations. Here it is the ordinary that seems sinister. A child’s voice startles, You lost, Mister? Mild featured saints, ranged in lines, look provocatively out from family windows.
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4. Leaving Belfast Airport, for my father, who once divined water
Glass walls reflect postures, pale ghosts left out in the Irish rain. I’m preoccupied with light, the clarity of spring surfacing through stone: a small miracle that had been trapped in rock. Between the converted faces and the light you stood, stunned by your own persistence, who alone had believed in the divining of your hands– How readily they believed you then! Faith comes easier with miracles but someone has to strike the rock– On the tarmac, a boy with a gun absorbs rain. Looking deceived, as if playmates had slipped away, he levels at angles, rain, casts broken crosses on the fuselage.
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REPRISAL 1. They found him above in the road face down in the hurt gravel fronded with a thin ice like calico left out to bleach. The hole in his head was stamped like a thumb print. Words would issue bad blood. 2. A body the morning revealed caught between lines. Later, identification: father of five, devoted. Reason for death: catholic lived here.
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INCIDENT AT CARRAIG Such a beautiful evening! Fawns coming to the water light softening, lingering, a scent of jasmine. The dog’s low whine surprises ear cocked to the house stiffening. She’d become accustomed returning to find the yard unchanged, evening pacing itself. But today it unnerves her the stillness, the waiting silence she enters. Thinks it is the boy sleeping, small, curled to a foetus as if the man has become his own child. Afterwards, it is time she remembers precisely the position of hands on the clock face how space troubled them.
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15TH AUGUST There are feast days and feria days. We pick them out on the calendar. Today, the Assumption. Assume means taking for granted, he tells us, but Jesus wouldn’t ever be takin’ his mother for granted, now would he? We are children and words play tag, haring in and out of our understanding, no sooner one thing than another. That’s the way with words, he tells us, slippery customers words, which is why we shouldn’t assume, always make sure it’s the word of God we’re listenin’ to and not the other wan. A slippery customer that other wan with his false clothes and false voice, like them fancy birds do be imitating the words out of your mouth. Ah a slippery wan! And we believe him, every word, look up when he tells us to glimpse her, glorious and rising through clouds of angels, straight to the arms of her beloved son. Ah the beauty of it, he croaks, the blindin’ beauty of it! Them attending her struck to the ground in contemplation. A good word contemplation, a God word… At Omagh, after the bomb the child on the wrong side of the street, as if fascinated, contemplates how her legs crossed over.
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WALK ON GRASS Noineens my father loved: the uncultivated mild eyed daisies that might adorn an unlikely patch. Something perhaps in their hardiness connected with him. Something elemental in their proliferation. Not heeding the sign: Keep Off The Grass. I’ve become observant of signs, but today – perhaps it is the headiness of light, the sudden summer – today quite deliberately and slowly I walk on grass. The carefully-tended well-kept-off bed of civic pride yields to my presence, springs back. I smell green – So at peace am I then, so cleansed of the city, the half life, the timidity, the ways marked out for me. So filled with a simple joy of being, I want to steal overnight to places that daily wake to hatreds– The Ormeau Road, The Falls, Garvaghey– to quietly slip the notion into sleeping heads, so morning might rise to a gentle exorcism: Please walk on grass; but first remove your shoes, this ground is holy– tread lightly, touch the song.
Noineens: from Nóinín (Gaelic) A daisy
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FOUR
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A MORNING SERVICE She kneels by a bollard islanded from morning traffic. Her mind’s slow angling hauls nets, throws back stares. The Manchester weather kept out with too many overcoats: a mummification to wrap deaths. Pain is not anaesthetised by raw spirit, the needles of contempt. She has the gift of tongues, confides in passing cars; but we hear only the madness of berating lips. Her one open, slow, cold eye could kill. The little mound of earth she has piled with care on the lit bollard might be a bed or a grave, a sowing or an obsequy. Either way, the sifted soil slipping through stumped fingers forms a brief obelisk.
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BRIGHTENINGS i.m. my great-aunt Julia Connell
Passed down the line like a forfeit the family skivvy, unschooled and unchurched, until outraged the returning sister snatched you and the genie was out of the bottle. No longer under a bushel, your light blazed, innocently, fiercely. More intuitive and resourceful than they could imagine you became the barometer of days a brightening in small lives. The infant left out in the sun, they said, took the sickness. Today, they would run tests identify a syndrome. How it might amuse you to trash some carefully constructed artifice then meek as a lamb, smile disarmingly; show how inventive you could be: make molehills out of their mountains. Or sing your song, your one phrase symphony: Up to the beadin’, up to the beadin’– love song, lullaby, ode to joy. You who had but a semblance of language, taught us words have transports. We cheered like charioteers chicaned the furniture chanted a wild Babel: the delight of tongues. You left us in the night, slipped away when no one was vigilant. The priest, not speaking your language, struggled to explain God’s infinite plan. You, of course, would be unfazed: shaping eternity to the familiar, singing the heart’s song.
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ALL AMERICAN HERO – THE MOVIE for Steven Waling
It begins with a montage, an interleaving of past and present. We glimpse action: a ballet of swirling limbs, exposed thighs, flowered garters: a wilful tease, like the hero’s slow stride. It used to be a swagger, now an intense sexual burn, unconsummated. There will be a woman. The one he left on that day, the day he’s returning to, or from, the day too much was left unresolved. She’ll be the one in the saloon, high-kicking a generous skirt for the paying patrons. Moll to the Fatman, a sinister bit player with mean eyes. Twenty seven times he’s watched Jack Palance in Shane, learned the menace of stillness. His performance is choreographed, a paced sculpting from door to table, light to shade, shade to light, the slow directioning of his look lethal, the eyes levelling like gunsights. The town is edgy. There’s an imposed peace: the Fatman’s greed. Nervous fingers touch triggers. The light’s unstable, seasons change, times of day, colours become elegiac, establish symmetries. The road which the hero walks down at the beginning he’ll walk up at the end, a little more battered, his dues paid. He comes now with his burden of integrity, too many failures. Throws the last drained bottle over a world-weary shoulder, picks up his bundle… The climax will build slowly, a series of tense tableaux. The days of the staged shootout are past. This is art. The showdown will be symbolic, the victory ambiguous. The star’s life will mirror this: ageing, sick, the once good looks no longer skin deep, charisma an irony… In the end he is each of us, alone again, following his shadow. The sun sets on cue, sends up a few flares. The audience stirs, curtains close, music plays.
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EXILE His pipe calls up ghosts, spirals a grey dance. The room fills with silent men, hunched over coals, callouses. Hands that built bridges quiet as crossed spades on their broad knees– Exile their only belonging. Now they countdown sleep: hands he has not taken, friendships that seeped in blown out like dandelion. At funerals, he slips in with the closing door, reticent, kneels on stone; leaves before the handshake, not wishing to intrude on grief, bringing his own, paying respect.
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JOSEPH It did trouble me, knowing I was not the father. I kept quiet. She was young, responsive to his voice, conceived the Word. Who hasn’t sometime been blinded by the light? And that choir he brought along: harmonies, descant, the soul magnifying the Lord and the body rejoicing. We have our dreams. And the boy was different. Even the infant looked up at you with eyes that were older than you. Something inscrutable a silence as if what he had to say might not be credible on a child’s lips. Older, became preoccupied. Took to desert, wilderness. Spoke from distances: a boat, a mountain top. Returned to the garden some troubled knowledge. I noticed how care had entered him solicitous for his mother arms outstretched, evening nailing his shadow to a tree… I’m Joseph the carpenter I make tables, chairs, sometimes a crib. 57
CHRISTMAS EVE SINGING SILENT NIGHT No mystery to move me now no sleepy midnight incense transports my child thought. But between the Si– and the –lent, I catch from fifty years the sibilant note of a reedy harmonium midnight usher in the birth for which Simeon had grown old and I remember belief. Again the priest will lead the shepherds to the lighted crib the plaster infant in his cradling arms. The teacher will guide her blind sister to the podium. Above the breathing notes her small voice will move to silence and her blindness will be eloquent.
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ON THE ROAD TO EMMAUS ‘And their eyes were opened and they recognised him; but he had vanished from their sight.’ Luke 24:31
Agnostic from when aged four you rumbled Santa. Kept schtum a decade, knowing belief would be rewarded. Writing now from the divided city He wept over, you evidence weeping, expedient deaths the duplicitous kiss. An aura from those violent, wailing streets as if out of a bush might step a radiant I am; or suffering instil what intellect has failed. Let it be known you seek Him and someone will show the exact location of the inn the stable close by (never mind you’re in the wrong city) a splinter of manger venerated through generations, the child’s grip indented on hollow wood; fragments of the cross multiplying like fishes. Or more auspiciously, on some darkening road another fall in step; might He be revealed in the breaking of bread? But never so manifest not even then always in the aftermath always that sense of something missed: absence like a presence that is everywhere and nowhere.
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PROBATION “You can’t please women,” he’d say, as if the generalisation gave him legitimacy, one of a brotherhood. Blamed his mother: her pained disapproval unspecific. What do you want? he’d begged. Exasperated, she’d said, I wish you’d go. He did. Enlisted. Came back in uniform. She went berserk. “How could you understand that?” he’d ask. Later, it was his wife, weeping in the dark he’d found her often. Asked why. If you don’t know… Blamed himself for her death, his pillion, a blow out. He knew the tyre was faulty, took a chance. Kept the children, six of them, together. “It’s what she would have wanted.” A man of duty, religion, guilt. There was darkness. The youngest broke it first, We don’t trust me Dad. I worried over its meaning, worried others. In court, he curled to a rag, downcast eyes swept low pleas that would not reach the bench. Unable to come clean, he traded small guilts, petulances, half admissions. Accepted probation, prescribed friendship. But he needed expiation, head down, sat it out. At Christmas, brought me cigarettes. “Had to give someone something.” Knew I didn’t smoke. I would find someone. When his order expired, he rang me once. Would I meet him, have a drink? Needed to know we could meet, man to man. The boys had gone, the girls in care. Their hate would last. He thanked me, tense to have me gone. Sat alone, in the place he called his local, head down, waiting, much as he’d sat in my office, tuned to a purgatorial of time, ticked strokes.
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SCARY It wasn’t planned, not exactly. Wasn’t spur of the moment either. One minute you’re there thinking nothing in particular: state of the country, price of fags, a good fuck – religious things like that. Next minute you see him and you know. He’s no one in particular, not special, nondescript, the kind you couldn’t describe later: Male Caucasian, average height, no identifying marks. Doesn’t notice you. Isn’t aware of your existence. So you think, “Fuck you!” But you’re enjoying the slow build. Get it right now: each move, each throbbing second. You’ll remember them: a locked tick, like a slow clock counting down– thud of an axe. ripped flesh, smashed bone. He goes down like a bag of shit spills onto the pavement, piss and shit and vomit. And you’re ripping into him like you mustn’t leave one piece on another, and you’re screaming– crying out, like you’re him. But you feel good too. He’s off your back, you’re free
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he’s disintegrating. And there’s this little kid no more than three or four just watching– not crying or frightened just fucking watching– scary.
VICTIM They picked her up on a whim, the nonchalant boys. Took her in dark places, stripped, pulled out her hair. Extracted teeth, a fingernail. On the third day they set her alight. Against six of them, it was hard to fight back. But she’d endure consciousness charge them with her charred breath. Today they cremated her remains (to fire what fire had left). People who had not known her wept. A band played. There was rain. Policemen sent a wreath. Sickened, a nation revealed its capacity for love. In life, she’d sought it: moving between estranged houses not outstaying her welcome making allowances. Now the flowers proclaim how so much love failed her (the words not said) how wreaths are always a regret.
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FIVE
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FOR MY MOTHER 1. Mother wonder came naturally to you stilled before an opening flower you’d stand an eternity, rapt as if prayer had taken you I imagine you then taking an infant hand the claiming fingers held by their fledgling grip
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2. The Handbag I want to turn from this image of you, stripped in the draught of others’ care, outside the stone ablutions where you wait the nurse’s minute. Desolately the needle bruised hands hover over a memory of mothering, like flightless wings, clumsy as swans in a slicked sea. Distress has stitched you up like a wound, you are almost defeated, two small minnows founder in dark sea pools. The weal in your oedemaed arm is deep, where the handbag’s tug has cut, clutched to you like an image out of famine, it worries you like a dominion. They have struggled to take it from you, stunned by a sudden truculence, the terror in your fight. What have we here? one has asked, Some priceless treasure then? More precious than treasure, this old accoutrement: a sense of self, the small stand of dignity under siege.
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3. Pain Always the same inert voice ugly with suffering, greeting culled to a posture. Always the same violation in those TeresĂn eyes, head lolling on a ligature of old ties. The ungreyed hair belying years straggles a lost face like seaweed on this white beach where death will come piecemeal.
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4. Crocus Today your crocus opened shyly as a doe. Slipping from the dark of winter vaults it shivered in the snow. A small tongue of candle glow, as on white linen tilting the breeze no one felt beginning. Your last breath never came. The tear, a bruised welt out of your dead eye would not dry on marbled face.
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5. Treasures Things she kept! Pieces of old cloth and ravelled thread like pennies for a rainy day. A dozen pairs of glasses the new ones never her. the Essential Hemingway pristine in a Woolworth bag bought for a cover’s bait the old man’s lived-in face. Unopened. What is this of ironies and pity? A silk-green handkerchief its terse Remember stored fifty years. I leave it in its folds. Remnants of our leaving like a held handshake: the foreign place name laboriously traced; a crushed flower delicate as a web; the card I snatched while changing trains its corner worn to a thumb’s crescent. And there, trapping the unprepared eye my grandfather’s mark witnessed in parenthesis. An illiterate blot. So many closed worlds! I hold it to the light like an incubating egg. I want to scrutinise its unskilled lines the ploughman’s pressure on the broken page; to put my finger in the place of the wound.
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FOR MY FATHER 1. Floating Rush Crosses At The Holy Well That day at the holy well the water was too still to take our green prayer. It tangled in the debris of plaited hopes, stayed the stagnant centre of dark water. Why rushes? I asked, needing significance. Your pragmatism disappointed. There was a connection of course the boy saved from the Nile’s water. But our cribs were crosses: images fusing like memory– sunlight, closeness the eagerness of beginnings. Now I would float you out on whatever hope there is but you too become tangled in the debris stay the fixed centre of pain. And I, who have so little belief, pray for a fair wind, the mercy of air.
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2. Caerphilly A name for cheese. Good for you, my father said, dying‌ These days there are ghosts in every silence. Voices stab me like shafts of light in places you would not know would not like this squat castle hunkered for centuries wasting thirty acres. One man’s will to prevail a lifetime building a poor monument. Poorer than yours which says Loss. Or hers, The Green Lady haunting these empty walls. Still, after seven centuries nightly seeking her foxy love.
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3. Meeting My Father In Oxford Street a place you wouldn’t be found alive in too many people and not a hand to shake the loneliness of faces bent on destinations times rushing past you like your thoughts whose connections are tenuous are all somewhere else a man of absolutes if only for the sake of argument but that night the house wide open and the breath choking out of you the only absolute was the one we faced old fraud! leaving us with an alias the white lie a blush over your mother’s shame is identity this fragile? existence even? the child in the birth certificate did not have a life and you were not born though you married, fathered children, died that much recorded on a grey stone in a foreign cemetery covert as any refugee from a belief-torn place
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but you have slipped away again sussing the lie of the land as you always would mapping the manageable walk like a manoeuvre where I surprise you recognition lighting your tired face coming toward me in the glass
(After his death, we found that my father had been registered at birth in his mother’s maiden name. There is no record of him having used or being known by this name.)
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FOR SUSANNAH MARIE MURPHY 1. Bomb Born with the war, it was your first word. Exploding in delighted arms it blasts down fifty years to this island room where careful curtains modulate the day and the averted lamp keeps night on a low flame. We have moved the eightieth birthday card whose wreathed flowers troubled her waking and Larkin’s Collected Poems that etched a pale grief in the mirror. As gradually we neutralise the room that was ours and will not be again, we too are learning to be disturbed by shadows, flower-bursts, the patterning of rain. War on the air; they replay the precision of strikes beam targets. Downstairs, Jason eases the joy-stick of his computer game, strikes and is admitted to the next level. A woman in veils is crying. You turn down her foreign grief. The child she will not nurse to life blinks, and I wonder if somewhere in the kingdom of souls a light has been switched on. The room keeps forgetting to breathe, seals like a cell. “Yes,” she says, thinking someone might have spoken. The assenting voice is disengaged, compliance hurts. “Speak to us,” you plead, “please don’t keep saying Yes.” “Yes.” After three years of caring, you speak to me only of her, rise startled in the night, are already by her side when the troubled moment comes, cradling her small in hurt arms, settling frail bones that no longer bear the weight of love, or memory you bring out like a rosary beseeching her: “Remember, Mum, remember? Bomb, I said, Bomb.” Hurling it. As if that small ambush might again confound silence, give back language.
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2. Stroke Honeysuckle is today’s word. Tomorrow it will be different but exotic: a word to flower on the tongue, to taste pleasure. Now that words have become detached from meanings she picks them out like treasure: small blooms from a dark wood. Gives them to things she loves: ice-cream, jujus, ice-buns. They throw open windows– Delphinium. Bivouac. Hyacinth– words stored for who knows how long like bright marbles in a child’s pocket.
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3. Sitters It had not meant to leave it there: the wraith-like image haunting this still room. A large bird, attempting to fly past, as if what it did not see was not there. Surprise etched on the bright pane: a dusting of feathers arced to a wing-span from which the head hangs as if from suspended arms, like Dali’s crucifixion. Such images trouble you now that we are close to loss. Vestiges of some old superstition you would not acknowledge. Irrational and fixed as the dark in the child’s room to which she has returned. We stand by her bed. Patiently side by side, as in a queue wait the next move.
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4. Letting Go swaddled in deep pillows your face unseals is crossed by brief concentrations we your children watch over you turn you in your sleep coax weak lips to suck wait the passing of each night we fear the dark being out of sight each hour we notice change how you turn a little more away so self-contained your world now and your breathing not stressed but uncertain as if it has become a rationing you are expert but will become too confident go beyond the watch we keep for you overplay stillness your serenity all that is hard-won resigned as your five year silence the seconds gently counting down
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VIATICUM i.m. my Aunt, Nonie Nolan …leaving is only arriving somewhere else. –Edward Storey, Afterwards
Unable to swallow; your eyes receive. This is my body which will be given… Is given. A transparency through which to glimpse the journeying soul, the infinity of love. Outstretched arms tenting a small space out of the storm. Words surface at long intervals, draw to an Amen the lived and the mildly borne. This stillness, poised, as if any moment a chord may strike and you would leap highkicking into the dance… It would not be you to step over a threshold without a flourish.
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BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE Born in Templeglantine, Co. Limerick, Seån Body has lived most of his adult life in the Greater Manchester area, working as an accounts clerk prior to training as a probation officer. He transferred from Manchester Probation Service with the implementation of the 1969 Children Act to the newly formed Social Services Department where he undertook a variety of roles, including management and training. Subsequently he ran his own training agency, specialising in child care. He joined Manchester Poets in 1988, where he became a Director, establishing Tarantula as a Manchester Poets imprint, and taking responsibility for publicity and publications. He helped to organise monthly Readings, special events and to conduct monthly Workshops. He was also a founder member of Manchester Irish Writers, to which he contributed and participated in similar events. In 1998 he reconstituted Tarantula Publications as an independent publisher and launched the thrice yearly magazine Brando’s Hat. His poetry has won prizes in several competitions, including, Ver Poets, Peterloo and Bridport (3 years running). A short story won the Irish Post Listowel Writers Competition. Throughout the last decade, family illness has forced him to curtail his activities. He now lives in Cheshire.
AUTHOR’S NOTE For this revised and expanded edition, I have discarded some items which were in the original and have omitted others which more rightly belong elsewhere; but have included many more new ones. I have also taken this opportunity to reconsider all the poems which I have retained. Most edits are slight but some have been extensively rewritten. I would like to thank Dennis Greig, Lapwing Publications, for his confidence in my work, his ongoing support and for offering me this rare, and much appreciated opportunity to revise and expand a collection which had become unavailable.
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L A P W I N G PUB L I C A T I O N S
SEÁN BODY
…Body understates, suggests, never overwrites. Pity and horror are there in these poems, a superb command of language, total control. Take Reprisal, a poem about the Irish troubles that just says what it has to say with a lyric intensity and leaves it at that. Mary Knight, PROP ...the reticence which characterises Body's poetry and goes some way towards investing it with its singular quality has to do with an uncompromising commitment to look the painful, the disconcerting, and the controversial squarely in the face and to respond to them in such a way as to involve the audience in an act of witnessing which presupposes no moral judgements. This unflinching attitude (tempered with a gift for articulating that most difficult of human emotions, tenderness) is characteristic of Body at his best; and he is often at his best in long, oblique sequences such as Witness. Seán Body is a deeply sacramental poet who celebrates the very fact of existence. Ian Parks, Pennine Platform Vivid, memorable imagery full of tenderness and compassion. An original voice, disturbing, powerful, but ultimately redemptive. Chris Woods Seán Body has the gift of tackling the most delicate subjects with great insight, imagination, and sensitivity… his clever selection of words can often convey a story without it having been told. Agraman, City Life www.seanbody.co.uk The Lapwing is a bird, in Irish lore - so it has been written indicative of hope. Printed by Kestrel Print Hand-bound at the Winepress, Ireland
ISBN 978-1-909252-29-5 £10.00