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Songs of Earth and Light
Richesses: Francophone Songwriter Poets
Munster Literature Centre
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Chuck grew up in the Finger Lakes of upstate NY. In protest against the Vietnam War, he and his wife, Nell, moved from St. Louis to Switzerland in 1966, where he worked as a teacher of literature at an international school. They purchased a farm on Cape Clear Island, Co. Cork, in 1986, where they moved permanently in 1992. He’s won the Bryan MacMahon Short Story Competition ’03, The Dubliner Short Story Contest ’02; the “How do I love thee?” ’04 Poetry Competition (UK); the Shinrone Poetry Festival ’02; and the Cork Literary Review’s 2000 & 1998 Short Story Competitions. His poems have appeared in The Aisling (featured poet in ’02), Books Ireland, The Burning Bush, The Cork Literary Review, Matrix (NZ), Northeast (USA), Painted Bride Quarterly (USA), Poetry Ireland Review, Reality, The Recorder (USA), Revival, The SHOp, Southword, The Stinging Fly, west47, Wild Ireland. In 2005 a second collection of his short stories, Between a Rock, was published byBradshaw Books. In 2008 a collection of his poems, entitled Sourcing, was also published by Bradshaw. His book Cape Clear Island Magic, published by The Collins Press, was first issued in 1994 and reissued in ’95 and ’99; in 2008 the Cape Co-op published an up-dated version. He’s a regular on RTE’s Seascapes, Sunday Miscellany, and the Quiet Quarter (until it recently shut down).
Buzz and Squawk and So It Goes
From behind my back bursts a grouchy two-note squawk that so swivels me I have to go east, old man, not west, to rest my eyes on the chest and white-ring neck of the lord cock pheasant proclaiming himself to herself from atop the royal dry-stone wall between our neighbour’s farm and me. Wherever whoever she is is clearly loudly proudly somewhere in his domain.
Through scope I watch scarlet wattles jiggle, ear tufts twitch, and hear the whirr of wing- flopping that follows hard upon the crowing display of what I too was once about in my own brazen way, you know, back when those other swivelling days began.
From my vantage point, once he disappears into his kingdom of come, I peer north, and there, below the shingle before the priest’s eminently empty house, stands a solitary grey heron. I zero in on her, and she, if she she is, simply stands there in the shallow calmness of a quiet April sea. Occasionally she seems to swallow, as the top of her neck bulges out halfway to her beak, and then returns to supple subtle pipe-stem throat. For a quarter of an hour not a peep, not an attack upon a sprat or prawn, just this paragon of patience, there, waiting. Two steps slow-motion forward, and again she’s there, waiting, and I see how raw-rich Willy boy could have come upon the philosophy he bequeathed his momentary man: “The readiness is all.”
And then the buzz, the buzz of busy bumblebee about my ankles. Up he angles, up, fast tight rambunctious circles before my now callused knees, but when he starts to whiz around my face, wind from wings against my cheeks, I shake my head, flap arms— and he’s gone into the garden, a buzzed off buddy.
I’ve been frisked and set free by a guard of natural luxury. And then I wonder, who’s catching up on me? Ah, that old grey crow perched in what we call our apple tree? What conclusions might he reach if he dares to eat that peach if he even needs to bother?
I hear another double squawk: His lordship sits atop the same old wall. For him too, I gather, “the readiness is all”.
Buzz and squawk and so it goes as I swivel my way around on this blessing called the ground.
©2010 Chuck Kruger
Author Links
Kruger in the MLC Writers Index Video of Kruger reading 'Sister Skellig' Landing Places: Immigrant Poets in Ireland
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