Bernard O’Donoghue Poems

Each cold October morning he went out
into the Gate Field and walked up and down,
like the horse-drawn seed-drill quartering every inch
to make sure the harvest was kept constant,
reading his Office, every sentence
of the forty pages for the day. In the evening,
as the colder darkness fell with the crows'
harsh calling, he sat alone in the back
benches of the unheated chapel, hour
after hour, staring for inspiration
at the golden, unresponsive tabernacle.
...

Originally there were the two Steps here:
the first from our daffodil haggard
above the Old Screen, past the pencil quarry
and over to the Din Beags' yard. You crossed
the top of that with a wave at the old people
to the second Step which led - as it still leads -
into Kate and Jer's place, where we come
to meet again curlews, snipe and woodcock.

The first has gone: nowadays no more
than a briar-covered mound that slows our short cut.
The second is still there. Over it Kit Hickey,
elbow-aided now by two granddaughters,
clambers with a gallon, gathering blackberries.
Or did last year. Mostly now we go out
the back way, west along to the tar road
that leads to the N72 where you must
be cautious of the lorries on their way
to Rosslare and onward overseas.
...

The only child of parents in their forties,
he grew up in a County Council cottage
by the roadside. They never knew what
to make of him, so when the teacher
from the National School urged them to send him
to the secondary, they let him go.

He never said that much: but enough to show
he had more brains than all the rest of us
put together. When Joe Garvey asked
‘What part of speech is desperandum?',
trembling, he volunteered ‘a gerund',
and then translated ‘what must be despaired of'.

How did he know? At the end of the first year
he chose to stay at home. Again a teacher
called to the cottage in despair, begging
them to send him back, but his father said
with a shrug ‘whatever he says himself'.
He said he wanted just to stay at home.

The only time I saw him afterwards
(at least I think it was him), drunk
at a local dance when the rest of us
were home on holidays from college, his speech
was slurred, and he could barely stand.
‘I'm better off the way I am,' he told us.
...

i.m. George Watson

‘so rare a thing is absolute congeniality in every attitude
and habit even among dear friends'
Petrarch
There are two ways of climbing to the summit
of Ben Bulben: one behind Drumcliff churchyard,
east at the creamery and up the hill.
There you pass elegant retirement houses
on ever-narrowing woodbine-scented roads,
until you have to leave the car and walk,
straight up the formidable, striated front.

This is a hard way. If you make it,
look back down at all that you have left:
the sea stretching from the Rosses to the foot
of Knocknarea - seeing maybe the last thing
that Diarmuid saw before his death:
the unexcavated cairn of the fierce queen
who scorns the dangerous currents at Strandhill.

The other way is easier: you ask Jimmy Waters
whose business visits to the local farms
have taught him every yard and forest-track
where the mountain-stream disappears under
the ground. He'll tell you which warnings to ignore:
the gates you can open, and what bogs
above Glencar you can still take in your stride.

And the Yeatses: which way for them? Did they stand
and clap their hands to send the swans wheeling
in broken rings, over the sea and across
to the other mountain, to wonder at the gist
of what they mean? Or did they watch the races
being set up on the yellow strand,
where men still break stones on the road below?
...

Before the days of Flymos, to cut the sloping lawn
above the lake in the sixties state-of-the-art Business School
I held a rope supporting small Mr Howard
from Cowdenbeath (the old Scottish Second Division)
on a tight rein while he snipped the grass with shears.

He talked as he worked: for example about the time
when he was cycling along the Ring Road
at 3 a.m. one New Year's Day and suddenly felt
not so much drunk as very, very tired
so he laid his bike down and slept on the hard shoulder.

In the evening sometimes I went round
to his well-kept house in the suburbs
where he smoked Capstan, gave me a can
of MacEwan's Export, and played me Beethoven
on the stereo he bought after his wife died.
...

Plenty of gates to lean on around here,
and plenty of time to watch the horse-flies
on the dung, to see if they are really
generated from it. There is more chill
than blessing in this gentle breeze off Dartmoor,
more edge than you'd expect in late September.
So: winter soon, after no summer.

Yes, this is the place: ‘Road liable to flooding'.
This is where Grace Ingoldby did handstands
on the frosty tarmac. Where Mick Imlah stayed,
when we nearly ran over the cliff
at Morwenstow, looking for Hawker's hut
in which the old man composed, or didn't.

Before Grace's son died in the fire, and Grace died too.
Before Mick got ill. Today I am back on my own
to stare at these insects at their dreadful trade.

‘Now try your brakes', it still says on the sign.
...