1976

Engrossed in the story, I looked out
to see night had fallen as I read.
The dark of the Atlantic coast was mine now,
the fields of the broken girl’s tears and those
of Monaghan were the same ink. A power cut:
the bus moved through an absence of light
as complete as any. Hills might have been sea.
Every welcome and shunning waited,
those years that would unroll
and gather up behind each of us,
strangers who gazed out, unspeaking,
awaiting the first bright dot. No journey since
has passed with night as ambush –
how complete, how comforting it was,
Ireland blanketed in dark, Ireland itself a blanket.

ON GROSSE HAMBURGER STRASSE

Hatless, I passed by last time.
Today, emptiness and overgrowth
erases the eloquence of the city.
Ahead, a lone figure, tall, in a white
yarmulke, makes his way along the wall.
He has the silent purpose of a pilgrim,
one who belongs, for whom
no gesture is necessary.
He has walked through an outcast
world to be here; the gap
between each step is a distance
that overshadows the likes of us
as the word infinity crushes
the imagination. At the gate of such
a tabernacle of suffering, what can we do
but don a cap – a lungful of air
in the face of a crashing sky.

MARIN MARAIS

On such a morning everything is on delay.
The laptop coughs into life
as if from a long sleep: a chaconne
by Marin Marais. From the marsh.
Nothing could be more appropriate:
the windows are fogged by the tail-end
of a New England blast which shuddered
and split. Now it spends itself.
You can imagine it: dizzy, old,
at some great altitude.

And the earth waiting
to be soaked and pounded.
Sometimes it seems to call
punishment on itself – the landscape,
that is: we two-legged ants,
carry on regardless. Plough
and shrapnel are one, we churn
where river-courses have been turned away.
And in the end what is there
but the dizziness that comes
from watching the sky too long?

Ted Mc Carthy is a poet and translator living in Clones, Co. Monaghan. His work has appeared in magazines in Ireland, the UK, Germany, the USA, Canada, and Australia. He has had two collections published, November Wedding and Beverly Downs.

His work can be found on www.tedmccarthyspoetry.weebly.com