for Madeleine
1
A light is burning late
in this Georgian Dublin street:
someone is leading our old lives!
And our black cat scampers again
through the wet grass of the convent garden
upon his masculine errands.
The pubs shut: a released bull,
Behan shoulders up the street,
topples into our basement, roaring ‘John!’
A pony and donkey cropped flank
by flank under the trees opposite;
short neck up, long neck down,
as Nurse Mullen knelt by her bedside
to pray for her lost Mayo hills,
the bruised bodies of Easter Volunteers.
Animals, neighbours, treading the pattern
of one time and place into history,
like our early marriage, while
tall windows looked down upon us
from walls flushed light pink or salmon
2
As I leave, you whisper,
‘Don’t betray our truth,’
and like a ghost dancer,
invoking a lost tribal strength,
I halt in tree-fed darkness
to summon back our past,
and celebrate a love that eased
so kindly, the dying bone,
enabling the spirit to sing
of old happiness, when alone.
3
So put the leaves back on the tree,
put the tree back in the ground,
let Brendan trundle his corpse down
the street singing, like Molly Malone.
Let the black cat, tiny emissary
of our happiness, streak again
through the darkness, to fall soft
clawed into a landlord’s dustbin.
Let Nurse Mullen take the last
train to Westport, and die upright
in her chair, facing a window
warm with the blue slopes of Nephin.
And let the pony and donkey come —
look, someone has left the gate open —
the slow motion of a dream
parading side by side, down
the length of Herbert Street,
rising and falling, lifting
their hooves through the moonlight.
The Great Cloak (1978)