30. On starting something

or reasonably priced poetry

Dear Readers,

What is the craic? The world is still green and blue down here. I can see black birds picking at the stubble of the fields. I can see a lone swan in the mud. Autumn is near.

Last night I did Something New. I attended a meeting or maybe a gathering of the Hastings Stanza group. Fifteen poets, two solid hours of reading and critique. I left well-fed, buoyed-up, buzzing. Two hours of great and brilliant and mind-altering poetry. A right feast. 

I started writing poems a couple of months ago. You know The Muse, she’s fierce encouraging like – she’s been listening and reading and asking me good questions and now I have five, or maybe five and a half poems. They’re mostly about family and/or transitional times. Great material, family – especially if you’re as lucky as I am to be born into somewhere like the most intelligent and funny and kind and caring and creative bunch of bananas that is the Coomey-Kierce-Hastings-Kant-Zamfir clan. 

By transitional times I think I mean ageing, and the shifts that occur at different times of our short lives. From home to school, from primary to secondary, from childhood to teen-hood, from teen to young adulthood and lately, as I get older, from adulthood to whatever comes next. Senior-hood? Our next-door neighbour has recently moved from the home she’s lived in for over sixty years to a new home, in care, up the road. She’s sharper than most people we know but in her words she’s lived too long, and her physical form hasn’t kept up with her mind. So I’ve been considering Brenda and my own dear Pop and how we react to things and agency and all the rest of it and putting those thoughts and feelings down on paper. It’s good for me, I think. I enjoy it anyway. 

Last year or the year before I was at a lecture delivered by one of the great and true superheroes of storytelling, Nora Twomey. She spoke about leaving something of yourself in your creations – about how the best work or the best stories, the tellings that touch the most people in ways that resonate or surprise or shock and then stay with them, how that work often or always requires the teller to leave something of themselves in the piece. To physically or bodily or emotionally extract that thing, your feelings about some beautiful or harrowing experience from inside of yourself, to take it carefully out and to look at it and then wrap it up in a story and give it away. A brutal and necessary act. Isy Suttie says a similar thing about the best comedy having a little kernel of truth right at the heart of it. Some grain of the real, a point to swing everything else around. Is that similar? I like both of these ways of considering the work. I can see how both are true in some of what I’ve written and what I am writing now.

Jason asked me yesterday, when I told him I was going to the poetry thing, how anyone knows if a poem is good. I do not know, and sorry Jay, I didn’t find the secret last night. But I know that I like some of what I write and that writing is good for me. Maybe that’s enough. 

I’ll put the poems below, let me know what ye think.

Until next time, chickens.

Paul

//

gripping

you see yourself, then, surrounded
by faces smiling and laughing
and you sit here now, confounded
by faces, unknown, a photograph

three boys and you, all tumbling limbs
alive and quick in summer haze
elsewhere, recollection swims
behind new names of recent days

kay, sam, becky, ali, lou
charged with and mindful of your care
bring tea, check in, chat with you
walk with you in chilling air

light is falling, soft through nets
there are more photographs to look at
bundled in your hands, each gets
a glance, a nod and you do know that

in time your hands will lie open
empty of questioning
and you can rest more, then
hear the birds, outside, sing

//

my friend Pete

my friend Pete stands up
in front of or in the middle of
one part of a circle
and he says

‘My dad’s a farmer’ and
we all laugh and now
afterwards, I think
my dad is not a farmer

like his father before him
and his sons after.
still we worked fields
and cattle, pigshit and

lambs newborn slick, hot
summers of straw and dust.
not farmers us, no and
we fast forget the school holiday work

and leave the continuity
to other sons

my dad says
‘The farmers have it easy’
only he does not
what he says is

‘They has it aisy’
and other things
too colourful to put into a poem
to be read in polite company.

//

things my father says

them farmers have it aisy
thumbs-up, baby chick
thumbs up
ha?

how are the cats?
I’ll ring the weekend
were you talking to the lads?
no-one rang

they never rang
there’s a letter there, have a look
you wouldn’t ever do me wan favour
explain cricket

wan second now
explosion heart eyes
I’m worse altogether
since I came out of hospital

I didn’t see anyone
snowman sunglasses face
where are the keys
of my car

I’d say
the medication isn’t still right
I’d say
what kind is the weather, there?

baby chick
explosion
heart

//

things my mother says

my mother says
come here to me now
listen

my mother says
you must mind yourself
pay attention

and
did you see that thing there that someone put up
wasn’t it hilarious?

yy mother says that when
she was young
no young people died

my mother says
funny peculiar or
funny ha-ha?

my mother says
she was afraid
to be seen

and
isn’t that something else
and

do you know what you should do now?
and
whaaaaaaaaaaaat?

my mother says
the problem is people don’t like
to admit the truth

she says
everyone always said
he was a great man for work

my mother says
apparently
with a fruit filling

my mother says
people are afraid of change
she says

hello boyeen
and
cén chaoi bhfuil tü?

and
I wonder what my mother
would say

if she knew I was putting
her words
in a poem

so I ask her
and my mother says
oh god

are you writing one about your father?

//

mines

behold and low lie the sweels
oil on a false soup a new
day in this next life we
steadfast sealocked shack led live

turn and face coat-tick yule-fog
captain oh my captain oh
me oh my what can the mother be
dear dear what can them utter we

now hen like neck craw craw
craw home my darlings to the rail
to the rail away ye go way to go
will you just

go

she steps sea shells still stab till
she says stop this, this still sky
here, here give me shift keys
keys give me the keys

at the palace door we waited
she wanted to go on, in
and I did not
cave, inter, fear, treasure.

it’s about time, taking
who holds who and when
tick-tock-tick
we run up our hill of debt

glob-rent tarfumed dreadweight
o Mama dear come here come
hear me listen I listen I
will I am I promise me child

savour the sweet
leaf fall trough call
in thicket and wrist, turn,
tip-chin gaze, alight

and now, away
again again get up get up
clean away anew and us
two by too much we bear
we
bear