i.m. Minnie Kearney
1
I go to say goodbye to the cailleach,
that terrible figure who haunted my childhood
but no longer harsh, a human being
merely, hurt by event.
The cottage,
circled by trees, weathered to admonitory
shapes of desolation by the mountain winds,
straggles into view. The rank thistles
and leathery bracken of untilled fields
stretch behind with — a final outcrop —
the hooped figure by the roadside,
its retinue of dogs
which give tongue
as I approach, with savage, whingeing cries
so that she slowly turns, a moving nest
of shawls and rags, to view, to stare
the stranger down.
And I feel again
that ancient awe, the terror of a child
before the great hooked nose, the cheeks
dewlapped with dirt, the staring blue
of the sunken eyes, the mottled claws
clutching a stick
but now hold
and return her gaze, to greet her,
as she greets me, in friendliness.
Memories have wrought reconciliation
between us, we talk in ease at last,
like old friends, lovers almost,
sharing secrets
of neighbours
she quarrelled with, who now lie
in Garvaghey graveyard, beyond all hatred;
of my family and hers, how she never married,
though a man came asking in her youth.
‘You would be loath to leave your own,’
she sighs, ‘and go among strangers’ —
his parish ten miles off.
For sixty years
since, she has lived alone, in one place.
Obscurely honoured by such confidences,
I idle by the summer roadside, listening,
while the monologue falters, continues,
rehearsing the small events of her life.
The only true madness is loneliness,
the monotonous voice in the skull
that never stops
because never heard.
2
And there
where the dog rose shines in the hedge
she tells me a story so terrible
that I try to push it away,
my bones melting.
Late at night
a drunk came beating at her door
to break it in, the bolt snapping
from the soft wood, the thin mongrels
rushing to cut, but yelping as
he whirls with his farm boots
to crush their skulls.
In the darkness
they wrestle, two creatures crazed
with loneliness, the smell of the
decaying cottage in his nostrils
like a drug, his body heavy on hers,
the tasteless trunk of a seventy-year-
old virgin, which he rummages while
she battles for life
bony fingers
reaching desperately to push
against his bull neck. ‘I prayed
to the Blessed Virgin herself
for help and after a time
I broke his grip.’
He rolls
to the floor, snores asleep,
while she cowers until dawn
and the dogs’ whimpering starts
him awake, to lurch back across
the wet bog.
3
And still
the dog rose shines in the hedge.
Petals beaten wide by rain, it
sways slightly, at the tip of a
slender, tangled, arching branch
which, with her stick, she gathers
into us.
‘The wild rose
is the only rose without thorns,’
she says, holding a wet blossom
for a second, in a hand knotted
as the knob of her stick.
‘Whenever I see it, I remember
all she suffered.’
Briefly
the air is strong with the smell
of that weak flower, offering
its crumbling yellow cup
and pale bleeding lips
fading to white
at the rim
of each bruised and heart-
shaped petal.
Tides (1970)
and The Rough Field (1972)