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Songs of Earth and Light
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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John F. Deane was born on Achill Island in 1943. He founded Poetry Ireland – the National Poetry Society – and The Poetry Ireland Review in 1979. He has published several collections of poetry and some fiction. Deane also won the O’Shaughnessy Award for Irish Poetry, the Marten Toonder Award for Literature and poetry prizes from Italy and Romania. In 2008 he became the President of the European Academy of Poetry. A member of Aosdána, his latest collection of poems is A Little Book of Hours, Carcanet (2008).
An Eldering Congregation
‘That masterful negation and collapse Of all that makes me man. . .’ Dream of Gerontius
I am confronted now with the weight of body and the spirit’s blank, half-willed ascendancy; in the dark night I wake, uncertain if the sounds I’ve heard
are insinuations from the dead, or smallest creatures scurrying somewhere between slates and ceiling. Sleep is not won easily; dreams recur, old arguments, futilities;
vision blurs, perhaps from too much seeing and memory has become a marshy bog; to you I pray, Jesus, old fox and clever-paws, old wily-snout, deal
gently with me now. High tide by afternoon, Atlantic purring like a tom-cat under sun, swollen moment of plenitude before the turn. The years, taking on themselves
the fortitude of dreams, have been passing swift as dreams; my hair holds like tufts of fine bog-cotton, skin crinkles like the gold of gutter-leaves; the ribs of splayed half-deckers
are the days of my well-loved dead cluttering my own low tides; whether my fall is to be hard or I’m to drift away under white soft-billowing sails, I would that they could say of me, yes
he lived, and while he lived he gathered a few, though precious, poems lacquered with brittle loveliness, like shells.
*
Nicolai Gedda is singing from the front room:
Sanctus fortis, Sanctus Deus, De profundis oro te, Miserere, Judex meus, Parce mihi, Domine.
It is high summer in Ireland, and darkness grows mid-morning, rain falling, the meadows sorry-looking, passing trucks raise muddy spray;
Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul! Go from the world! Go, in the name of God. . .
evening, tractors in the fields are in a rush for harvest, the green hay baled and wrapped in black plastics, crossed in white chalk
against the crows; Gerontius, old man, having died, begins a new journey and Elgar’s music – chorus of souls – catches the old dread, the terror:
Go forth upon thy journey, Christian soul! Go from the world! Go, in the name of God. . .
*
Grandfather, in his last months, took to sitting in a fireside chair, contemplating
the shifting turves, the ash filtering itself soundlessly down; he’d stand, at times
to knock the bowl of his pipe against the grate, take slow minutes with the plug, rubbing it
in his dried palms, inhaling with satisfaction. Sometimes he'd rise, sighing, make
unsteady way to the workshop, memory of old excitement stirring him, and stand
watching in amongst old workspaces, gazing at his fingers as if there was something he had lost.
He disappeared upstairs, then, and the house hushed.
Now his grave, in the island cemetery, is a riot of neglect, long bramble-vines and grasses taking hold;
rushes and meadow-sweet flourish in the wet-daub acres of the field;
rain falls along the stones, lichen eats away the histories, the names, the century.
*
Firmly I believe, and truly God is three and God is one, And I next acknowledge duly Manhood taken by the Son. . .
*
You may step off the old stone pier onto rocks at the ocean’s edge, over boulders, salt-braced rocks, erratics; the sea idling, long
arms of kelp sashaying in the swell; you may be part of something, between-wheres, between-times, the distant islands shrouded,
the inland meadows dulled. In soft off-the-Atlantic and persistent mists, you will stand absorbed, flesh-heavy, anticipating spirit-shapes
and their whisperings as they pass, incautiously, by; up on the mountain road the toiling engine of a truck is an intrusion
yet a strong lien holds you to the invisible and almost-visible, while you are relishing the all-embracing ovoid bone-structuring
of the earth. Too soon this solitary existence will have become so exquisite you will call out urgently for companionship.
*
Elgar’s cellos draw out the final moments: and Gedda sings:
I can no more, for now it comes again, That sense of ruin, which is worse than pain. . .
*
And father, the strict one, faith-inclined, stood, in his final months to lean against a boulder on Keem strand, his body red and blotched after a swim; he was shivering in a wind that swept
in off the Atlantic though he held himself erect, eyes watching out over the bay to the wild horses of the ocean. He moved, at last, in under the shelter of a cliff, out of the world-wind, to light
his pipe; small pools waited at the roots of rocks for the tide that would swell them into seas; dunlins raced along the lace edgings of the waves; high over Croghaun grey clouds moved by; and I believe
his mind hung heavily on sorrows. He, too, disappeared into pure air, into Word, and into these, my words.
*
I sit in church, one of an eldering congregation; 15th Sunday in ordinary time; the lector reads St Paul, letter to the Romans: creation still retains the hope of being freed, as we do, from this slavery
to decadence. . . And there they are, kneeling and motionless, two pews ahead of me, on the men's side, grandfather, father, upright and straight, their beads rattling gently against the bench-wood, like the insistent
regular tap-tap-tap of a metronome; I pray Agnus Dei, then Domine non sum dignus; I rise into the line behind them up to the altar-rails, to share the bread, the wine, to speak consent to the world and to its Christ: Amen :
©2009 John F. Deane
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