Poetry, ’tis a court of judgement upon the soul.
— Henrik Ibsen
1
Non piangere
From your last chair,
two months before that glutton, cancer,
devoured you, lawyer brother,
you gave me a final wigging, read the riot act,
as if I were some juvenile delinquent
hauled before the magistrate.
This sun-warm conservatory,
latest addition to your ultra-modern bungalow
overlooking Brown-Lecky’s estate,
(now manicured golf course) recalls the deck
of that Cunard liner, the Cameronia,
which, ages ago, shipped us boys to Fintona.
Home again, in mid-Tyrone,
you built your now fading life,
fathering a tribe within a tribe,
only to chide me now, for my ‘great mistake,
repeated, twice’, of choosing a wife
from the wider world outside.
‘They don’t understand. You need somebody
who thinks like you, shares your beliefs.’
Mildly, I place a picture of your two nieces
(my Cork, French, Jewish,
Church of Ireland children)
But you sigh it away
and, having pronounced your last verdict,
stalk off to rest, dying, but striding with dignity,
without a whimper of self-pity,
through your assembled family,
your last gift, this fragile bravery.
2
To leave me forever, with your disapproval,
yet rueful love, and a contradictory testimony,
‘Strangely, I have never felt so happy, as now,
giving up, letting go, floating free.’
You look down, pensively, at your glass
of burnished Black Bush whiskey.
‘And, no, I no longer pray,
although I talk to God sometimes in my head.
And our parents. Why did you hurt our mother’s pride
with your mournful auld poem, The Dead Kingdom?
Only a child, you couldn’t understand their decision:
besides, you got the details wrong!’
‘So you believe we’ll see them again?
Bone-light, transfigured, Molly and Jim,
angels dancing upon a pin, and then
I can take it up with them again?’
‘No,’ you say stubbornly, ‘never again,’
shaking your once-red Ulster head.
And plucking your pallid, freckled arm,
‘I don’t believe,’ you proclaim,
‘in the body’s resurrection.
See how the flesh wastes parchment-thin?’
Yet, resigned as the Dying Gaul,
stoic as an ancient Roman.
3
Un grido lacerante
Dear freckled brother, in an old photo,
you throw your arm around me
in a Brooklyn park, your impulse to hug
preserved there for posterity.
Let me reverse our roles, carefully as I can,
to encircle you, this time, with my arm.
In far off Florence, I learnt of your death;
Evelyn calling from a rain-swept West Cork.
‘It was a merciful release,’ that cliché — yet true.
‘But how can I trek all that way North?
My sister’s children are here, as well as our own.
It’s a long hard slog up to County Tyrone.’
Phone to my ear, gazing out at the Arno,
I hear, behind her, the laughter of children,
those nieces whose picture you dismissed.
‘Cherish the living, while honouring the dead,
I’ll stand over that, pray they’ll comprehend.
The church bells of Florence will bless him instead.’
As many mourners assemble at your funeral
in our chill and distant Northern chapel
since you loved paintings I patrol
the Pitti, the Uffizi, turning from
a foam-borne Botticelli nymph, or
sharp-tempered, once you smashed me to the floor
in our mother’s kitchen, and standing over
me, like some American boxer, ‘Rise
and fight like a man’ — and I only sixteen!
Aproned Molly hovering, a hapless referee;
you stalk away, to return with a brusque apology.
Sharp-tempered but kindly, you drove
your poet brother home from Dublin,
emptying my squalid flat without reproach.
Later, wives and lives came between us,
differing codes of conduct and belief.
Yet I still glimpse your ginger hair and freckle face.
Long before the cancer struck, I saw that face
grown ashen, fissured as chalk, suddenly old
as though some secret source had parched,
and sought to tell you, Relax again,
as when you roamed Bundoran with the Fintona gang.
But tact forbade. Or cowardice?
Now, hear my plea. Sweet-souled Santayana
might have agreed with you, brother, about exogamy,
but against your patriarchal views,
I assert the right of love to choose,
from whatever race, or place. And of verse
to allay, to heal, our tribal curse, that narrowness.
Drunken Sailor (2004)