Julie Breathnach-Banwait
when Caisín* fed us Cur in aghaidh na hanacra
Ab éigean dom dhaoine a dhéanamh, An chloch a chloí, is an chré Chrosanta thabhairt chun míne What they must do my people was to oppose the difficult, tame rocks, make unruly earth amenable -Máirtín Ó Direáin (Translated by Micheál Ó hUanacháin.) Wedged beneath the craggy carrick, slumped on the sandy stretch to the sea, are stored my people’s ghosts, snug and sheltered in cases of glossless cockle shells. On evenings, when scarlet swirled and sliced summer skies, my sister and I would peel back the frilly fronds of ferns to hear the haunting tales of their hunger. The hunger. My mother told us we were the lucky ones as she washed the porcelain cups in the sink. ‘Caisín saw us’, she preached, scrubbing off stale tea rings, leaning in to examine her progress. ‘She heard our ravenous rasping, churned up for us her innards and filled our hallowed bellies,’ she continued, holding the cup up to the light, squinting. ‘Dilisk,’ she droned, monotoned, cockles and razor clams, periwinkles, mussels, shucked and scraped by the feeble fingers of my famished people, with pins, nails and needles,’ acknowledging Caisín’s blanket of blue meeting red skies through the kitchen window. Those hungry souls, on stretches of summer evenings, crept from under the rock to greet their lineage of great-grandchildren, plump and satiated by picnics of swiss rolls, apple tarts and white lemonade. I kneel in Caisín’s ebbed basin, her mire absorbs my grateful body, she winks at my gratitude. ** *Caisín: Caisín Bay, Leitirmealláin, Co. Galway, Ireland. ** peering through mountains He’d stare hazily into nothingness whilst the clock ticked, peering through mountains and down to the very bottom of the ocean with his thoughts alone. At home in fields he was, the stretch to the sea, aligning ridges with a spade, calibrating his mind on bogs of brown bellies, hunched, stripping glistening sods from sloshy soils. A still man, iodine tattooed fingertips, nurturing haggards by the season, stashing turnips, swedes, drying the hay. The cattle bounding towards him as he climbed over stone walls and stiles with pails of feed. He rose with the Irises by the wall every year – even though the front garden had been raked and filled in by machines – he lurched out of the soil itself, defiant in his protection and preservation of the rugged land. I’d catch him in lilting, when concertinas gulped for air, in the Sally Gardens, in sean-nós keen, in steel toecap brogues knocking on floorboards. I’d greet him in stone walls and boulders, in tarmacked currachs, in bridged drains, his hands wound up old measuring tapes and slid planes across two-by-fours, studying skelps of wood, rasps, oiling wrenches and vice grips, admiring their form. I heard him in the blade sharpening, smoothing and greasing. Avoiding goodbyes by absconding to the sea. The slow chew of his food, lip reading the Connaught. Hunched under caskets of neighbours lost, somberly hallowing out their graves in a silent dig. Nursing cattle, bursting in birth. Stubborn and unwavering as an old oak, his steadfast refusal to raise his voice in conflict. Shuffling through the creed, cap in hand. The house slumped in stillness for the absence of that silent man, his tweed flat cap tilted on a door hook in the shed, his blunted scythe, rusted in the ferns. ** burial Agus brón ar mo chroíse tú a bheith thíos ins an talamh And sorrow in my heart with you in the ground 17th Century Poem -Anonymous The earth stills on her burial day, an eerie silence stalks the hooded mourners on this frory day after St Stephens. The drizzle looms, wearily stalling, the trees cower with cold. Mossy limp scraws – glistening with diamonds of dew – are set aside by the diggers. Mounds of earth stashed on stand-by by the graveside. Shovels scrape, scratching rocks and gravel as the tomb deepens. My mother’s and my grandmother's settled bones aroused and shifted, to make way for their daughter’s sleep. Shiny-shoed, aged, grey-haired men in flapping silken robes are whispering words and vespers that I didn’t hear but saw etched on their faces. Scarved women pat my shoulder as they walk past. Clouds hover and skulk, aligning for eruption. The Atlantic froths in a rumbling rage, pounding the rocks and stone bridges. A tethered currach bounds and bobs, skimming restlessly, another resigned to tarring – belly to gravel – on a stone pier. Cuigéal curving to the right. Ivy-clad embracing headstones, poxed with scabs of lichen and moss, comfort one another, abandoned by generations of exiled tribes and clans, restless instead in graves of other earths. Shovellers shuffle, sweeping mounds of soil into the devouring open-mouthed grave. Dancing and circling they weave, filling and flattening as they go. The dry heavy earth pounds the box lid as she is enveloped and nestled amongst the women whose womb in turn birthed the next and who now, reunite in bone, skin and womb, to rest and melt into one. ** summoning black dogs Tagann an bás, Gan chás, Gan chuireadh Death comes, Without reason, Without invitation Johnny Choil Mhaidhc Whilst aching for the respite of silent tombs, whilst black skies crowd in through frosted panes, yelping bow-legged from the glistening bogs and mires, come packs of black dogs, fierce and fanged, slavering, nipping at my ankles and licking my face dry, rendering it tearless and empty. Befriending my lone body with their cursed protection and shelter. Reeling in deadly comfort. Silently I scream through meshes and wires, through muffled speakers, through dense and saturated sponge, like crackling radio stations it scrapes. It echoes and ricochets off walls and buildings, into dank tunnels it pings. In code. Those black dogs – crawling out of muddy trenches, shielding behind steel scuta – remove their battle dress and curl up at my feet. I gulp the poison from their copper chalices, rhythmically it constricts, curdling through the throat’s canal in globs and clots. I nuzzle close. Perhaps this time they’ll suggest I plunge and drink fearlessly. I indulge and succumb with relief. I stare down the red fires as they calm. I pat their heads and summon them to sleep in my bed for peace. ** counsel In the bedroom, beyond the hall, whilst flapping newly washed linen over the bed, she counselled her daughter on the perils of her newfound love. Telling her that he’d ply her with honeyed words, whilst she tucked in the edges, devour her, she said, consume her, smoothing out the centre with her flat palm, tugging the creases to the corners. That she’d serve her heart to him on a golden platter to slice and distribute as he saw fit. She was like that she said. Too open. Vulnerable. Foolish. That she’d be raising their children on her own and he’d be lost in the chase, the catch and the discarding, whilst she plumped the pillows, positioning them at angles against the headboard. She’d be chewed by existential angst, she harped and pummelled, adrift and bobbing in worlds unknown to her, dragging the bedspread to size. And who would want her then? She walks away oozing and scalded, speckled in a blood-stained gown, shards of shrapnel lodged in her skin. Winded by words. She’d want herself she thought. And consume herself. Alone. ** boxing black snowflakes Whorling and sweeping, through the atmosphere, from the raven black skies, come swirling sheets, tumbling funnels of black, cascading. In my hand they lay, remnants of past narratives and memories, petals of black iced crystal, laced snowflakes melting and fading into the furrows of my raised palm, slipping between my fingers and drying before they touch the ground. And clearing them off my pillow at night into wooden boxes I place them, to freeze their effect, powdered and wet, slush sparkling in the dark. I store them in black-walled rooms and come knocking for their company on summer days of emptiness, to wrap up in their squelching blanket of melancholy. One day, I will take them to the ocean and set them free to be swallowed and to sink silently behind the horizon with the drowning sun. ** Julie Breathnach-Banwait is a bilingual poet and writer. She has published two volumes of poetry in the Irish language: Dánta Póca in 2020 and Ar Thóir Gach Ní in 2022. Her most recent collection is a bilingual prose poetry book called Cnámha Scoilte/Split Bones, which was published in 2023. Her poetry has featured in Poetry Ireland Review, Howl, The Waxed Lemon, Trasna, Channel Lit Mag and various anthologies in Australia and Ireland. She lives in Tasmania with her family. |