Opened Ground Part 15

The pilot from Coleraine sailed to the coal-boat.

Courting couples rose out of the scooped dunes.

A farmer stripped to his studs and s.h.i.+ny waistcoat Rolled the trousers down on his timid s.h.i.+ns.

Francis Ledwidge, you courted at the seaside Beyond Drogheda one Sunday afternoon.

Literary, sweet-talking, countrified, You pedalled out the leafy road from Slane Where you belonged, among the dolorous And lovely: the May altar of wild flowers, Easter water sprinkled in outhouses, Ma.s.s-rocks and hill-top raths and raftered byres.

I think of you in your Tommy's uniform, A haunted Catholic face, pallid and brave, Ghosting the trenches like a bloom of hawthorn Or silence cored from a Boyne pa.s.sage-grave.

It's summer, nineteen-fifteen. I see the girl My aunt was then, herding on the long acre.

Behind a low bush in the Dardanelles You suck stones to make your dry mouth water.

It's nineteen-seventeen. She still herds cows But a big strafe puts the candles out in Y pres: 'My soul is by the Boyne, cutting new meadows ...

My country wears her confirmation dress.'

'To be called a British soldier while my country Has no place among nations ...' You were rent By shrapnel six weeks later. 'I am sorry That party politics should divide our tents.'

In you, our dead enigma, all the strains Criss-cross in useless equilibrium And as the wind tunes through this vigilant bronze I hear again the sure confusing drum You followed from Boyne water to the Balkans But miss the twilit note your flute should sound.

You were not keyed or pitched like these true-blue ones Though all of you consort now underground.

Ugolino (from Dante, Inferno, x.x.xii, x.x.xiii)

We had already left him. I walked the ice

And saw two soldered in a frozen hole On top of other, one's skull capping the other's, Gnawing at him where the neck and head Are grafted to the sweet fruit of the brain, Like a famine victim at a loaf of bread.

So the berserk Tydeus gnashed and fed Upon the severed head of Menalippus As if it were some spattered carnal melon.

'You,' I shouted, 'you on top, what hate Makes you so ravenous and insatiable?

What keeps you so monstrously at rut?

Is there any story I can tell For you, in the world above, against him?

If my tongue by then's not withered in my throat I will report the truth and clear your name.'

That sinner eased his mouth up off his meal To answer me, and wiped it with the hair Left growing on his victim's ravaged skull, Then said, 'Even before I speak The thought of having to relive all that Desperate time makes my heart sick; Yet while I weep to say them, I would sow My words like curses that they might increase And multiply upon this head I gnaw.

I know you come from Florence by your accent But I have no idea who you are Nor how you ever managed your descent.

Still, you should know my name, for I was Count Ugolino, this was Archbishop Roger, And why I act the jockey to his mount Is surely common knowledge; how my good faith Was easy prey to his malignancy, How I was taken, held, and put to death.

But you must hear something you cannot know If you're to judge him the cruelty Of my death at his hands. So listen now.

Others will pine as I pined in that jail Which is called Hunger after me, and watch As I watched through a narrow hole Moon after moon, bright and somnambulant, Pa.s.s overhead, until that night I dreamt The bad dream and my future's veil was rent.

I saw a wolf-hunt: this man rode the hill Between Pisa and Lucca, hounding down The wolf and wolf-cubs. He was lordly and masterful, His pack in keen condition, his company Deployed ahead of him, Gualandi And Sismundi as well, and Lanfranchi, Who soon wore down wolf-father and wolf-sons And my hallucination Was all sharp teeth and bleeding flanks ripped open.

When I awoke before the dawn, my head Swam with cries of my sons who slept in tears Beside me there, crying out for bread.

(If your sympathy has not already started At all that my heart was foresuffering And if you are not crying, you are hardhearted.) They were awake now, it was near the time For food to be brought in as usual, Each one of them disturbed after his dream, When I heard the door being nailed and hammered Shut, far down in the nightmare tower.

I stared in my sons' faces and spoke no word.

My eyes were dry and my heart was stony.

They cried and my little Anselm said, "What's wrong? Why are you staring, Daddy?"

But I shed no tears, I made no reply All through that day, all through the night that followed Until another sun blushed in the sky And sent a small beam probing the distress Inside those prison walls. Then when I saw The image of my face in their four faces I bit on my two hands in desperation And they, since they thought hunger drove me to it, Rose up suddenly in agitation Saying, "Father, it will greatly ease our pain If you eat us instead, and you who dressed us In this sad flesh undress us here again."

So then I calmed myself to keep them calm.

We hushed. That day and the next stole past us And earth seemed hardened against me and them.

For four days we let the silence gather.

Then, throwing himself flat in front of me, Gaddo said, "Why don't you help me, Father?"

He died like that, and surely as you see Me here, one by one I saw my three Drop dead during the fifth day and the sixth day Until I saw no more. Searching, blinded, For two days I groped over them and called them.

Then hunger killed where grief had only wounded.'

When he had said all this, his eyes rolled And his teeth, like a dog's teeth clamping round a bone, Bit into the skull and again took hold.

Pisa! Pisa, your sounds are like a hiss Sizzling in our country's gra.s.sy language.

And since the neighbour states have been remiss In your extermination, let a huge d.y.k.e of islands bar the Arno's mouth, let Capraia and Gorgona dam and deluge You and your population. For the sins Of Ugolino, who betrayed your forts, Should never have been visited on his sons.

Your atrocity was Theban. They were young And innocent: Hugh and Brigata And the other two whose names are in my song.

from SWEENEY ASTRAY (1983)

Sweeney in Flight

When Sweeney heard the shouts of the soldiers and the big noise of the army, he rose out of the tree towards the dark clouds and ranged far over mountains and territories.

A long time he went faring all through Ireland, poking his way into hard rocky clefts, shouldering through ivy bushes, unsettling falls of pebbles in narrow defiles, wading estuaries, breasting summits, trekking through glens, until he found the pleasures of Glen Bolcain.

That place is a natural asylum where all the madmen of Ireland used to a.s.semble once their year in madness was complete.

Glen Bolcain is like this: it has four gaps to the wind, pleasant woods, clean-banked wells, cold springs and clear sandy streams where green-topped watercress and languid brooklime philander over the surface.

It is nature's pantry with its sorrels, its wood-sorrels, its berries, its wild garlic, its black sloes and its brown acorns.

The madmen would beat each other for the pick of its watercresses and for the beds on its banks.

Sweeney stayed a long time in that glen until one night he was cooped up in the top of a tall ivy-grown hawthorn. He could hardly endure it, for every time he twisted or turned, the th.o.r.n.y twigs would flail him so that he was p.r.i.c.kled and cut and bleeding all over. He changed from that station to another one, a clump of thick briars with a single young blackthorn standing up out of the th.o.r.n.y bed, and he settled in the top of the blackthorn. But it was too slender. It wobbled and bent so that Sweeney fell heavily through the thicket and ended up on the ground like a man in a bloodbath. Then he gathered himself up, exhausted and beaten, and came out of the thicket, saying: It is hard to bear this life after the pleasant times I knew. And it has been like this a year to the night last night!

Then he spoke this poem: A year until last night I have lived among dark trees, between the flood and ebb-tide, going cold and naked with no pillow for my head, no human company and, so help me, G.o.d, no spear and no sword!

No sweet talk with women.

Instead, I pine for cresses, for the clean pickings of brooklime.

No surge of royal blood, camped here in solitude; no glory flames the wood, no friends, no music.

Tell the truth: a hard lot.

And no s.h.i.+rking this fate; no sleep, no respite, no hope for a long time.

No house humming full, no men, loud with good will, n.o.body to call me king, no drink or banqueting.

A great gulf yawns now between me and my retinue, between craziness and reason.

Scavenging through the glen on my mad king's visit: no pomp or poet's circuit but wild scuttles in the wood.

Heavenly saints! O Holy G.o.d!

No skilled musicians' cunning, no soft discoursing women, no open-handed giving; my doom to be a long dying.

Our sorrows were multiplied that Tuesday when Congal fell.

Our dead made a great harvest, our remnant, a last swathe.

This has been my plight.

Suddenly cast out, grieving and astray, a year until last night.

Sweeney kept going until he reached the church at Swim-Two-Birds on the Shannon, which is now called Cloon-burren; he arrived there on a Friday, to be exact. The clerics of the church were singing nones, women were beating flax and one was giving birth to a child.

It is unseemly, said Sweeney, for the women to violate the Lord's fast day. That woman beating the flax reminds me of our beating at Moira.

Then he heard the vesper bell ringing and said: It would be sweeter to listen to the notes of the cuckoos on the banks of the Bann than to the whinge of this bell tonight.

Then he uttered the poem: I perched for rest and imagined cuckoos calling across water, the Bann cuckoo, calling sweeter than church bells that whinge and grind.

Friday is the wrong day, woman, for you to give birth to a son, the day when Mad Sweeney fasts for love of G.o.d, in penitence.

Do not just discount me. Listen.

At Moira my tribe was beaten, beetled, heckled, hammered down, like flax being scutched by these women.

From the cliff of Lough Diolar up to Derry Colmcille I saw the great swans, heard their calls sweetly rebuking wars and battles.

From lonely cliff-tops, the stag bells and makes the whole glen shake and re-echo. I am ravished.

Unearthly sweetness shakes my breast.

O Christ, the loving and the sinless, hear my prayer, attend, O Christ, and let nothing separate us.

Blend me forever in your sweetness.

It was the end of the harvest season and Sweeney heard a hunting-call from a company in the skirts of the wood.

This will be the outcry of the Ui Faolain coming to kill me, he said. I slew their king at Moira and this host is out to avenge him.

He heard the stag bellowing and he made a poem in which he praised aloud all the trees of Ireland, and rehea.r.s.ed some of his own hards.h.i.+ps and sorrows, saying: The bushy leafy oak tree is highest in the wood, the forking shoots of hazel hide sweet hazel-nuts.

The alder is my darling, all thornless in the gap, some milk of human kindness coursing in its sap.

The blackthorn is a jaggy creel stippled with dark sloes; green watercress in thatch on wells where the drinking blackbird goes.

Sweetest of the leafy stalks, the vetches strew the pathway; the oyster-gra.s.s is my delight, and the wild strawberry.

Low-set clumps of apple trees drum down fruit when shaken; scarlet berries clot like blood on mountain rowan.

Briars curl in sideways, arch a stickle back, draw blood and curl up innocent to sneak the next attack.

The yew tree in each churchyard wraps night in its dark hood.

Ivy is a shadowy genius of the wood.

Holly rears its windbreak, a door in winter's face; life-blood on a spear-shaft darkens the grain of ash.