|
|
GO TO MLC HOMEPAGE
ONLINE BOOKSTORE FEATURED TITLES
Songs of Earth and Light
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
|
|
Running with the Immortals (This poem was commissioned by Cork City Council to mark the conferring on Sonia O'Sullivan of the Freedom of the City of Cork.)
Cobh is a great bell of silence as the sun breaks over the harbour and the lighthouse at Roche’s Point gleams, a torch held out to the sky, to the eternal sea. Something has woken me early, a drum tap, footfall echoing in the empty streets. I’m at the open window. Too late—whoever it is has already gone by, climbing the hill, steady and sure.
A clear mid-winter morning, frost on the slate beneath me, tumble of roof and chimney down to the water. Already the ferry tracking out towards Haulbowline, the world about its business at this ungodly hour—and someone out there running the steep blue streets. Hard work. Cobh is nothing if not uphill and downhill, the uphill and downhill capital of Ireland.
On a morning like this, a girlchild out early would be thinking of glory— the tall bowl of the stadium, black roar of the crowd, the red track, the bend to the straight, the finish just visible through the haze. Easy to dream of gold, olive-wreath, ceremony and applause, the tricolour snapping to the arc-lights overhead, brass blaze of trumpets— harder to rise to these winter mornings, these punishing hills,
yet somebody’s up and out there, out there unseen and unknown, climbing and falling with the street, breath raw in her throat, pushing towards the sun, pushing against a wall of cold. Bells from the Cathedral break over the waking town while she keeps running on self-belief into the dawn, an ordinary girl, head down, keeping time with her shadow.
I turn my face to the climbing sun, remembering another world, a tall girl surging to the line. I want to find that child’s soul and say: talent is not enough, belief is not enough in this world; you must push out into the lonely place where it all falls away— and then, if you’re lucky and blessed, the friend at your shoulder, keeping pace, will be long-legged clear-eyed Artemis herself.
©2009 Theo Dorgan
Author Links 'Gaffer': Poem and Interview in Magma Dorgan poems and extended bio at Poetry International Web Audio, bio and books at Dedalus
|
||||
©2009 Southword Editions and Munster Literature Centre |
|
|||||||
Theo Dorgan is a poet, prose writer, editor, scriptwriter, translator and sailor. His books include Greek (2010), the long poem Sappho’s Daughter, his prose account of a transatlantic voyage under sail Sailing for Home, praised by Doris Lessing as “a book for everyone”, and, in 2007, A Book of Uncommon Prayer, which he compiled and edited. A further prose book, Time On The Ocean, A Voyage from Cape Horn to Cape Town, was published by New Island in 2010. He is the editor of Irish Poetry Since Kavanagh, and co-editor of Leabhar Mór na hÉireann / The Great Book of Ireland, An Leabhar Mór / The Great Book of Gaelic, the anthology Watching the River Flow and the acclaimed collection of historical essays Revising the Rising. His translations of the Slovenian poet Barbara Korun (in collaboration with the poet and Ana Jelnikar), were published as Songs of Earth and Light. He translates from the Irish and French and his own work has appeared in Italian and Spanish editions. He is a member of Aosdána. 
