Michael Daniel Higgins Poems

The currach strains to the full
in the low trough
between the unpredictable
mountain that is the wave,
not disentangled
but making a new shape.

The fantasy is revealed
in the white-knuckled joint
that terrifies
in its belief of another life
beyond the predictable
wave.

It is the flimsy base of skin
alone,
well tarred with pitched illusion,
that skims the space
from trough through foam
to the slap
of inescapable fear.

To pull with one hand
is a gesture
of the heroic,
man-made and defiant.
The stillness of the sea
supports the illusion,
allows the fantasy,
for those are the terms
of the old game played
between
the known terror
of life
and the unknown thrill
of the trough
where the currach knows
its fantasy
and survives.
...

a poem for my father
This man is seriously ill
the doctor had said a week before,
calling for a wheelchair.
It was
after they rang me
to come down
and persuade you
to go in
condemned to remember your eyes
as they met mine in that moment
before they wheeled you away.
It was one of my final tasks
to persuade you to go in,
a Judas chosen not by Apostles
but by others more broken;
and I was, in part,
relieved when they wheeled you from me,
down that corridor, confused,
without a backward glance.
And when I had done it,
I cried, out on the road,
hitching a lift to Galway and away
from the trouble
of your cantankerous old age
and rage too,
at all that had in recent years
befallen you.

All week I waited to visit you
but when I called, you had been moved
to where those dying too slowly
were sent,
a poorhouse, no longer known by that name,
but, in the liberated era of Lemass,
given a saint's name, ‘St Joseph's'.
Was he Christ's father,
patron saint of the Worker,
the mad choice of some pietistic politician?
You never cared.

Nor did you speak too much.
You had broken an attendant's glasses,
the holy nurse told me,
when you were admitted.
Your father is a very difficult man,
as you must know. And Social Welfare is slow
and if you would pay for the glasses,
I would appreciate it.
It was 1964, just after optical benefit
was rejected by de Valera for poorer classes
in his Republic, who could not afford,
as he did
to travel to Zurich
for there regular tests and their
rimless glasses.

It was decades earlier
you had brought me to see him
pass through Newmarket-on-Fergus
as the brass and reed bank struck up,
cheeks red and distended to the point
where a child wondered whether
they would burst as they blew
their trombones.
The Sacred Heart Procession and de Valera,
you told me, were the only occasions
when their instruments were taken
from the rusting, galvinised shed
where they stored them in anticipation
of the requirements of Church and State.

Long before that, you had slept
in ditches and dug-outs,
prayed in terror at ambushes
with others who later debated
whether de Valera was lucky or brilliant
in getting the British to remember
that he was an American.
And that debate had not lasted long
in concentration camps in Newbridge
and the Curragh, where mattresses were burned,
as the gombeens decided that the new State
was a good thing,
even for business.

In the dining room of St Joseph's
the potatoes were left in the middle of the table,
in a dish, toward which
you and many other Republicans
stretched feeble hands that shook.
Your eyes were bent as you peeled
with the long thumbnail I had often watched
scrape a pattern on the leather you had toughened for our shoes.
Your eyes when you looked at me
were a thousand miles away,
now totally broken,
unlike those times even
of rejection, when you went at sixty
for jobs you never got,
too frail to load vans, or manage
the demands of selling.
And I remember
when you came back to me,
your regular companion on such occasions,
and said: ‘They think that I'm too old
for the job. I said that I was fifty-eight
but they knew I was past sixty.'

A body ready for transportation
fit only for a coffin, that made you
too awkward
for death at home.
The shame of a coffin exit
through a window sent you here,
where my mother told me you asked
only for her to place her cool hand
under your neck.
And I was there when they asked
would they give you a Republican funeral,
in that month when you died,
between the end of the First Programme for Economic Expansion
and the Second.

I look at your photo now,
taken in the beginning of bad days,
with your surviving mates
in Limerick.
Your face haunts me, as do these memories;
and all these things have been scraped
in my heart,
and I can never hope to forget
what was, after all,
a betrayal.
...

A room in the house
and a seat in the car to Mass,
that was the promise made in wills
to look after those
who did not travel,
but chose instead
to ride High Nelly bicycles to church
on Sundays, where they knelt
in the women's aisle, and listened
to visiting missioners thunder about
the sins of the flesh, and how
Queen Elizabeth had died,
rolled in a ball in agony, screaming
for the one True Church. It was too late,
of course, and it was a good feeling
for even a little while to be pure.
The Child of Mary medal was a consolation
and would travel with them
to the grave. And in the room guaranteed
you could ‘prepare your black'
and save shillings from sales of egg and butter
for porter at your wake.
‘Relatives Assisting',
they called you on the forms.
You had no acres, no lovers, no children,
but you had
what was more important,
a room in the house
and a seat in the car to Mass,
and in the meantime,
your High Nelly bicycle
and your prayers.
...

It was in the age of Granola
When you had long flowing hair
And people turned when we laughed
For they deeply coveted the reason
That we with so little
Were free

It was in the age of Granola
That our bodies were supple and thin
And our friends kept asking how you did it,
You had such beautiful skin.
But at night you told them of Miso,
On buses they wondered
When you went all serious about Zen.

It was in the age of Granola
When you wore a massive black hat,
That I burned the rubbish of guilt
And it really didn't take much effort
For love to find its way in.

And that's why we never really saw it,
The wave that was coming our way.

In Moscow they're queing for McDonalds,
In Tokyo Bud is the choice
And freedom brings pills to the South.
And we never saw that it was coming,
The whole world was going to be free.
...

It was from those barren
moments
that the cloth is woven
of a black suit
of death.

The weaving is not the
work
of a single night or day
but of that thin season
where no fire
lights the darkness.

It is not a season of prayer,
a dry time
when the sap
is not in ebb
but has left.

The death of the loved one
is rehearsed
a thousand times
by lovers
who prepare their black
of the heart
in awful anticipation.

That black is sewn
from a thousand times
of rejection
when the turn of the body
of the loved one
is not read
as the sign of light
in darkness.

The season of prayer
is the time of life
and love,
of look and touch.

And, when the time comes,
it is those moments
that inform the great pain
of a hole in the heart.

The magic of the healing
does not come from
rehearsal
of the weaving of the black
but from an intimacy
of look and touch
in the season of fire.
...