Harbingers

“And put out the servant who is of no profit into the outer dark: there will be weeping and cries of sorrow.”Gospel of St. Matthew

Two ravens traced the pewter sky
Like etchings scratched above the trees.
Peremptory, unhurried, removed,
Wheeling like so much give a damn against the setting sun.
Big as black of night,
Smug as crabbed unsmiling butlers
Or sour priests, contemptuous of some apostasy,
All black hat and cassock.

Three bats circled the house at dusk,
Crazy erratic and day-blind
Darting and tumbling in the outer dark
Predictably at close of day.
Sprung from somnolent secret dayshade
Silhouettes against the nickel sky
Carving the wind with cutlass wings
Their peeps mere hints in the gloom.

It’s all about death, the macabre, and madness
On their wings here in the woods.
They’re freighted heavily for all that
With storied loathing and dread,
Lurching through the darkling, evermore,
Unshriven, feared, and despised.
Just like those pretty girls in Salem
Whose fatal youth the pinched old ladies envied so.

From Mountain Wizard, by Thomas J. Phalen.

 

Tinker’s Penny

“Non, je ne regrette rien.” - Edith Piaf

She was a delicate mountain flower
A trifling unremarkable darling
An inconsequential diminutive.
But she made my juices flow
And in them my head swam.

She was the petaled perfume
Of my one time, forever, spring.
And I loved her well -
The best I could -
In my rounder’s heyday.

She was a precious copper
In this wanderer’s pocket, dispossessed,
In my gaudy wagon, spent,
On the back roads’ secret waysides
My hammer on tin.

What was this treasure, once in my hand,
That I tossed unthinking for a pebble
And now is gone,
Lost all ways,
Beneath concentric rings?

From Mountain Wizard by Thomas J. Phalen, an Irish-American poet friend.

Seamus Heaney 1939-2013

Seamus Heaney was an Irish poet, playwright, translator and lecturer, and the recipient of the 1995 Nobel Prize in Literature.

Born at Mossbawn farmhouse between Castledawson and Toomebridge, County Derry, he resided in Dublin until his death.

From "Digging"

My grandfather cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, going down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.

Death of a Naturalist 1966

Read more...

on an Irish Bus

I turned the mirror toward them. The women looked into gleaming glass. They saw their past, present and future lives all rolled into one powerful flash of light. It was a vision reflecting their joy, sadness, regrets, hope, charity, wisdom and love. The looking glass showed them their birth, middle age and death.

They saw An Gort a Mor, the great hunger and sat back sucking air.

Carrigart was the edge of their world.

“I see,” Mary said, looking up and straight into my blue eyes. They reminded her of a snow leopard, a wild, sharply focused nocturnal predator comfortable at higher elevations existing in an independent, solitary way.

“Then,” I said smiling, pointing to the red typewriter, “I download the images into this,” sliding the talisman mirror into my pocket.

“Of course, it’s a manual. They don’t make them like that anymore. Better than staring at a small screen full of radioactive electrons and clicking on a mouse.”

“I should say not,” Mary said. She preferred lead sharpened to a point.

I was trapped on an endless ride to the edge of my life. More questions. Where was I from, what’s America like, why did I leave the land of milk and honey as locals so well put it. On and on. Was I married? No. Did I miss my family?

“No, not really. My grandfather, named Malarkey, immigrated from Sligo during the famine, married Hanna Haley in St. Louis, ended up in Colorado Springs where my folks were born and my rudimentary research at Dublin Castle indicated genealogical records burned in a Sligo church fire years back.”

So much for hard circular factual data.

“My family, while emotionally cold, distant and abusive yet well-intentioned, kind and loving were dysfunctional, trying to understand my vagabond spirit nature. They had no choice in the matter and by now they’re used to receiving strange word-strings full of mysterious symbolism and tragic truths from diverse twilight zones. I transmit between crystals and gringsing decorated with universal binary codes.”

“Really now?” said Mary.

“Yes, I gave my folks a world map for their anniversary. They loved it, inviting friends, neighbors and strangers over for trivia games using postmarks, stamps, decals, flotsam, thread, needles, bark, cactus fiber, beads, charts of tributaries, topographical maps, animal skins, hieroglyphics, and Tibetan prayer wheels with Sanskrit characters.

“They caressed burned broken shards of Turkish pottery, Chinese bamboo brushes dripping blood, torn out pages from esoteric Runes, Paleolithic fertility symbols, vitreous unusual writing, and one of my favorites, a Quetzalcoatl image full of written narration based on the oral performances of Central American myths.

“Fascinating,” said Deirdre.

“Yes, I gave them Olmec nahuales shamans containing animal powers dating back to 1200 B.C. speaking their wisdom. They blended the spirituality and intellect of man with the ferocity and strength of the Jaguar to create their nahuales. Their soul required an animal medium to travel from the earth to the heavens and into the underworld.

“Additional cultural reminders were beautiful blank black mirrors. Some displayed faces others contained scripts written backwards with stories of people, geographies, forbidden objects, and a box called Pandora.

“This was one of their favorite things. They never knew, from one exploration to the next, what they’d find in the box I sent them from the journey. One realization they experienced with Pandora was how they behaved differently listened more, spoke less, almost as if they were communicating via telepathy or kinesthetic dimensions, within the exotic flow of spirit energies bathing them in a crystal light. They slowed down.

“Yes, they didn’t know what to make of it whenever something mysterious, fascinating, and totally intriguing reached them from General Delivery far away from their daily existence working to pay for a house mortgage, car, food, terrorism insurance and child care.

“You don’t say,” said Mary. 

Excerpt from Subject to Change, A Century is Nothing.

John Lennon - 32 years ago

Here's a excerpt from a book he wrote. He was living in Ireland, the emerald green isle and preparing to move to Donegal in the remote northwest.

He met a shopowner in a Liberties, Dublin antique shop to buy mirrors for his travels. He gifted her a piece of gringseng cloth, a healing fabric from Bali.

“Wonderful," she said, "many thanks. Travel safe and look after yourself. Before you go I will reveal a small future to you,” she said.

“After Tiglin you will ramble across country to the Killarney hostel where, sadly and unfortunately, you will be awake in the predawn morning of December 8 hearing a BBC news announcer tell the world about John Lennon being shot in New York. You will turn your head to the wall and cry.

"Later you will take the black push bike down narrow wet twisted streets and meet a nun opening heavy steel black church gates and you will tell her what happened. You will push open the heavy wooden doors, genuflect, cross yourself, walk the length of a cold aisle and light votive candles in silence.

"Then you will ride into town and go to every news agent to buy every Irish paper with the screaming black tabloid headlines full of desperate black ink and grainy images of death personified before retiring to a pub to sit by a peat fire drinking, reading, and sadly, quietly remembering John’s creativity and his words Imagine and Give Peace a Chance.”