Kerry Hardie

The sky didn't fall.

It stayed up there,
luminous, tattered with crows,
all through
January's short days,
February's short days.

Now the year
creeps towards March.
Damp days, grass springing.
The poplars' bare branches
are fruited with starlings and thrushes.
The world is the body of God.
And we -
you, me, him, the starlings and thrushes -
we are all buried here,
mouths made of clay,
mouths filled with clay,
we are all buried here, singing.
...

This new map, unrolled, smoothed,
seems innocent as the one we have discarded,
impersonal as the clocks in rows
along the upper border, showing time-zones.

The colours are pale and clear, the contours
crisp, decisive, keeping order.
The new names, lettered firmly, lie quite still
within the boundaries that the wars spill over.

It is the times.

I have been always one for paths myself.
The mole's view. Paths and small roads and the next bend.
Arched trees tunnelling into a coin of light.
No overview, no sense of what lies where.

Pinning up maps now, pinning my attention,
I cannot hold whole countries in my mind,
nor recognise their borders.

These days I want to trace
the shape of every townland in this valley;
name families; count trees, walls, cattle, gable-ends,
smoke-soft and tender in the near blue distance.
...

It was a mild Christmas, the small fine rain kept washing over,
so I coated myself in plastics,
walked further than I could manage.
Leave me now, I'd say, and when they had tramped ahead
I'd sit myself down on a stone or the side of a high grass ditch,
or anywhere - like a duck in a puddle -
I'd rest a bit, then I would muddle around
the winding boreens that crawled the headland.

Sometimes, water-proofed and not caring,
I'd sit in a road which was really a stream-bed,
being and seeing from down where the hare sees,
sitting in mud and in wetness,
the world rising hummocky round me,
the sudden grass on the skyline,
the fence-post, with the earth run from under it,
swinging like a hanged man.

Then I would want to praise
the ease of low wet things, the song of them, like a child's low drone,
and praising I'd watch how the water flowing the track
is clear, so I might not see it
but for the cross-hatched place where it runs on a scatter of grit,
the flat, swelled place where it slides itself over a stone.
So now, when you write that you labour to strip off the layers,
and there might not, under them, be anything at all,

I remember that time, and I wish you had sat there, with me,
your skin fever-hot, the lovely wet coldness of winter mud
on your red, uncovered hands,
knowing it's all in the layers,
the flesh on the bones, the patterns that the bones push
upwards onto the flesh. So, you will see how it is with me,
and that sometimes even sickness is generous
and takes you by the hand and sits you
beside things you would otherwise have passed over.
...

‘A thing can be explained only by that which is more subtle
than itself; there is nothing subtler than love: by what then
can love be explained?'
Sumnun ibn Hamza al-Muhibb
The blackbird that lives in the graveyard
sits on the Wall at the fade of the winter day.
He has fed off the worms that have fed off the clay
of the Protestant dead.

And yet he is subtle,
subtle and bright
as the love that might explain him
yet may not be explained.

As for the rest, there is almost nothing to add,
not even This is how it was,
because all we can ever say
is This is how it looked to me -

In the blackbird's looped entrails
everything is resolved.
...

She never liked pansies. All those little faces,
looking at you. I always made a point of sowing them.
When I left it late, I bought young plants in trays.
It was against my husband as well.
Not that he minded what flowers I grew,
but she was his mother:
it was my small gesture of defiance,
a staking of territory; mine, not hers.
He never noticed and I never told him.
He grows sorrowful when I reveal my jealous nature.

It is May now, and the first held sun of the year.
The pansies in the long box under the window
are straining to reach round the edge of the wall
and push up their velvet faces.
Every time I pass I feel their eyes following me.
Their plaintive yellow and purple and garnet gazes.
That's all she does now. Follows her husband around.
If I had it again I would open my heart and share everything.
...

for Marian
The blessèd stretch and ease of it -
heart's ease. The hills blue. All the flowering weeds
bursting open. Balm in the air. The birdsong
bouncing back out of the sky. The cattle
lain down in the meadow, forgetting to feed.
The horses swishing their tails.
The yellow flare of furze on the near hill.
And the first cream splatters of blossom
high on the thorns where the day rests longest.

All hardship, hunger, treachery of winter forgotten.
This unfounded conviction: forgiveness, hope.
...

The grid of ribbed light sliding under the water
as the full tide slides into the little stream-cut creeks.
The blue rib of the storm-broken boat.

~

The high arching of ribs over the slack belly
of the dun cow lain on the rushy grass
in the washed morning light, the storm spent.

~

The ribbed arc of sprung bone
of the fish on the river path,
the belly eaten away, the ribs rising to shield it.

~

How the ribs rise everywhere
over the hot, soft belly;
how I, seeing everywhere,
high life collapsing into death,

walk here by the black-plumed reed
ribbed with the purple of loosestrife,
cry for the hot belly
gone from the bleaching bone.
...