From Achill Sounds, a collection of poems by Thomas J. Phalen, a friend.
Wather
There was a mad poet
Hawking his verse
On the streets of Galway City.
And I watched him pronounce Wather in Irish.
His mouth, a kiss around it:
Ooowhishka, he said.
The whisky in aqua vitae,
The Fionn Uisce in Phoenix Park,
That the conquerors’ tongues
Had such a hard time with.
Winning the Turf
I swept out the ashes, cold on the stones,
Bent to the task in the dawn gloom.
The wind skirled laments in the too skinny flue
And out the window, the threat of more rain.
There on the stones, fumbling for cold
I stacked and balanced the turves
Built there a redoubt sturdy and heaped
As Brigid Moran had once shown me.
The Morans have turbary rights in the bog
She’d said, as she struck the match smartly
It’s Moran turf, surely, we’re burning this morning,
As her yellow flame danced and grew bold.
She’d bent to the task, all business it seemed,
And mid-wived the flickering flame.
Blew on it once, then twice, like a bellows
Brought it forth in the forge of the hearth.
***
I’d seen all the boghollows hewn in the heather
As I’d ambled the brambled boreens
Seen turves helter-skelter, heaped up from these rents
Slane marks etching the faces.
I imagined her da at the face of a bogbank
Where the bog water rilled at his heels
Inelegant, red-faced, in blue overall
His Wellingtons thick with muck spatter.
Slaning it deftly, six bars deep,
And heaving sods high to the spreader
Who barrowed them heavily by donkey and creel
And footed the turf stacks in clamps.
Sputtering, puffing, like a kettle at gallop
Delving and heaping the sods
As the slow day turned down and a blanket of mist
Tucked them into a distant soft weather.
***
My match flared up hugely in the grey morning cold
And I touched it to paper and shavings
Watched it there kindle, smoulder, and smoke,
Hesitate, catch, and then take.
My turf fire blossomed all orange and bright blue
Putting chase to the slate day’s cold weight
This light, heat, and life, all up from the mud -
The mud of fair young Brigid’s home.
Work in the Stones
They bled the fields of the stones
Back breaking
And by the thousands.
Snaked the walls right round
Fitting and snugging flat the faces.
They tucked the dead weight tight
Sinuous and sturdy,
Running from here to nowhere
But not in the fields now.
‘Til the hills were striped and boxed.
And the work,
The low-down, rain-sodden work,
Held forever
Like a breath
In these stone walls.
Up close, the copes, some fallen,
Bear down on the batters
The throughs and the heartings
Buried in the heap of them.
The binders hewing them
Together from the heap fall
The batter lines spreading out
To the wet foundations
The wall heads at the corners
The joints broken with coverstones.
And the squeeze stiles
To pen the bulls
But a lunkie or a smoot
For the wayward lambs.
The work,
The heavy dull-thudded work,
Deft and thumb smashing,
Cunning and cruelly hard,
Here, forever, by the side of this road,
Admired and ignored.
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