That's It
Chatting Her Up
The Undertaker's Assistant
The Calf-Man
Last Dance
Bloodline
War of Independence: Unrecorded Incident
Primroses
With Niamh in Harcourt Street Children's Hospital
Another Dreamer
A Night Out
Chinese Painting: Young Lady with Butterflies
Influenza, 1918
Dancing with the Germans
Exile
Lambing Time
Stronger than Death
No Sanctuary
Once Off
The Greatest Teacher in Western Europe
The Meat Man's Rant to the Vegetarians
Eco-Warrior
Unfinished Work
Taking the Plunge
How it Begins
The Female Geriatric Ward
Treasure
A Note to Patrick Morrin, Deceased
The nurse hoisted him into the car,
shoved the wheelchair into the boot,
pecked him and said goodbye and meant it.
He was a shell, not full of years but emptied of them.
As his daughter drove past the gagged
windows of the old tobacco factory
towards the bright ribs of the new stadium
he spotted a girl walking, eighteen or nineteen,
white trousers stretched tight.
Great big arse, he thought.
He managed a twitch. His daughter said,
What you thinking about Dad? He said,
That's it, great big arse.
That was it all right. She did not ask again.
Published, 2003, in Ambit, Issue 172.
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A boy and girl drag themselves to the back of the bus.
He mumbles the slurred syllables of methadone.
He intends to impress his dark haired, dark eyed girl
who folds her hands like a nun and contemplates the windscreen wipers
while he displays for her admiration
the tapestry of his suicide attempts.
He took the sharpest kitchen knife to bed
mother in an oooh of horror found him too soon.
On the empty stairs of the flats at two a.m.
he slung a rope across a bannister and would have launched himself
but for a man from God-knows-where hunting down a deal.
I would jump from the balcony he says but with my luck
they'd have built a fucking swimming pool there before I hit the street.
She giggles, then sits in silence
watching the rain smack against the windows
thinking perhaps of sipping multicoloured cocktails
by hot Spanish poolsides in the healing sun.
Published, 2003, in Ambit, Issue 172.
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The undertaker's assistant puts her finger
to the tip of a tilted coffin
to guide the inexperienced pallbearers.
She stands at the ready in black livery,
perky buttocks in clinging trousers,
jacket pushed out by cocky breasts.
But what makes me stare is that black ribbon
looped around her saucy pigtail.
Published, 2002, in ROPES (Review of Postgraduate Studies), Issue Ten, NUI Galway.
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Three or four times a year a van drove into the yard,
the calf-man climbed out and unlocked the doors
to show to my father, who feigned scepticism,
two or three calves, blinking, lying in straw;
they gawped from the dark of the calf-smelling van;
the calf-man poked them with his stick to get them up.
My father's resistance always unravelled in the end
and the two men prodded a gangly calf to a shed;
then the calf-man came into the kitchen to be paid
towering, reeking of cattle, his dung-stained coat
buttoned tight, his cap scarcely covering his great skull.
He refused tea while my father wrote out the cheque;
they argued a little over the luck money
before he left, the van moving up the hill
past the elm trees, to try his chances in Malone's
and only then, if he thought he had got a bargain
would my father look at us and grin shyly
while outside the calf lifted her head and bellowed loss.
Published, 2002, in The Rialto, Issue 51.
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A knot loosening in his brain
has closed the book of expectation.
He shuffles for miles in purple tracksuit bottoms,
mumbles the thing again and again.
What comes out of his mouth defies meaning
what matter now are words already spoken.
The suits have gone to the charity shop
but for one that will do later.
The job was good, they let her keep his car
it sits in the driveway looking big.
He dines on scrambled eggs and meat cut up small,
the same for her, she can't be bothered.
The bedroom-slipper shimmy the nightly dance
she catches him on the street trotting home to mother
and partners him back to the room
the smell of cigarettes and disinfectant.
While she sleeps he shuttles between lock and lock
muttering the thing is, some step to be taken, but what?
Published, 2002, in The Interpreter's House, Issue 20.
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We seldom speak of you in this house
where you stabled your plough horses.
You are that silence between sounds we rarely note.
Are these hedges compositions from your hands?
Did you grunt in these ditches,
drag out slippery weeds
from dark, sucking mud?
We changed what you thought might last
past your time of horses and scythes
- they crumbled, there is neither bone nor rust left -
we sliced off one river bank,
weeds dance in your ditches;
a motorway storms through your High Field
like a bully roaring in a schoolyard.
There are still apple trees, chestnuts, a few primroses.
We carry you in our blood into the fog.
Published, 2000, in ROPES (Review of Postgraduate Studies), Issue 8, NUI Galway.
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Willy Murphy is not in the war.
He carts gravel and clay
along the birdsong roads of Kildare,
milks a cow, can shoe a horse
draws turf from the Bog of Allen.
He is not in the war. The Tans do not know this,
nor do they care: all are guilty.
When he hears the lorries stop outside
he leaves his bed at midnight,
flits by the hedge of the field
to the sheltered pond at the far corner, slips in.
He thinks of men dragged behind lorries,
torment in the barracks, an infant shot for sport.
The lorries start up. Engines fade towards the Hill of Caragh.
But sometimes they leave men with guns behind, to wait.
He waits. Mud seeks to suck him into its black mouth
whispers your time came then, you have no business here.
The lorries do not come back.
The dark lightens and a bird sings.
Another day in the story begins.
Published, 2001, in Poetry Ireland Review, Autumn issue
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Arthur Morrin and Peter Kane
built our house in a patient time,
hoisted blocks, hammered nails,
gouged window spaces out of hostile
stone in the walls of an old stable
while chestnuts fattened on the trees outside
and while snow fell and froze and melted.
Our dray always lurched into this hollow
in the shimmering heat of Summer
when we swayed on top of a load
of hay and waited in fright to fall off.
We had a tractor alright, an old
monster on giant wheels that could have done the job
but my father would rather horse and dray.
Rust and rain have taken the tractor,
the horse is slaughtered, the dray decayed
the motorway buried the lurching hollow
where we perched on the hay in terror.
But primroses which someone
- perhaps the grandmother taken by an epidemic
in the 'Twenties, one of the lost millions -
planted on a bank appear every Spring
and the children still laugh at the good of it.
Published, 1999, in Snakeskin, February issue
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The intravenous drip machine doggedly
hums through the night,
breaks into fits of frantic ticks
as if it wants to fight its way out of the room.
I have my comforts: book, newspaper, flask of tea
and most importantly: a naggin in my briefcase.
A child wails on the wards, always;
shoes clack on tiles;
you, inscrutably
suck on your soother;
I eye the briefcase.
Published, 2000, in Snakeskin, September issue
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The grocer sits and smokes behind his counter
- pock-marked lino top with tobacco burns -
explains to any listening idler
how to get rich, run a country, rear children.
As he speaks he flicks
tiny tobacco flakes off his lips.
Customers seldom come in:
there is little to want on his hungry shelves.
He addresses the few with certainty.
His yellowed fingers weave the air.
His navy suit, thin as tissue paper,
dances on his shoulders.
He confounds his listeners
with big-money cant
conned from the business pages
which turn yellow
while the light dulls
to the cold of three decades
and the dark moves in
thick as the walls of Fort Knox
with all America's gold
locked up behind them.
Published, 2001, in Ropes, issue 9
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Wife and husband wordless,
tongue-tied in the Corrib Lounge.
She looks away, her face is closed.
He scowls into the dregs, plods to the bar.
She regards the bottom of her glass;
her lip twitches. He sidles back
with a thin smile and another pint.
Nothing for her: she will do the driving tonight.
Published, 2001, in Ropes, issue 9
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See how the butterflies quiver round the shoulders:
it's a delicate little piece, isn't it?
Yes, I mean the painting, not the girl, you scoundrel!
See the way they sweep and swoop, hover and peep,
see how she skips in fright, look, she's terrified!
And the dress, the way it swirls, look at those folds, that silk!
It will add to your home should you decide to buy.
Yes, terrified! She flings her small hands in the air
but as she hops away she keeps her poise
and - yes! - the butterflies seem to flirt with her!
And she seems to frolic with the flirting wings
- a man of your discernment would appreciate such grace -
and as they dance around the shoulders, as they soar and drift,
see how she sheds her formality -
(as I'm sure you know that was no small thing
for a Chinese girl in the court in those days)
- in dismay
yet keeps her gracefulness despite her fear.
She skips so daintily because the feet are bandaged,
the toes bent back, it would hurt too much to flee.
They say that inside the bandages the feet went bad
but a man of your learning would know that already.
Wonderful how art can transform such material
into something you would pay to put on your wall.
Published, 1997, in Snakeskin, August issue
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The dying woman roars again
and the stench of lavender and disinfectant
attacks our revolted senses.
Her awful roaring tears through the bedrooms
and echoes through the great floors below
and down into the dark cellar
where their father sketched a dragon
across the wall for the children at Halloween.
Her roars hammer at the children's heads
and terror stains the deepest well of their minds.
The influenza will fling her howling
she believes into everlasting hellfire
and though she is a guiltless woman
she roars in her delirium
for God to pardon her and cleanse her soul.
Her pallid husband goes in and out of the room.
The women shush the children away
for fear they will tumble with her into the pit.
The softness in her voice is gone;
its hard horror dries up their mouths.
The cattle bellow in the yard outside
and the doctor's Model-T Ford
importantly rat-a-tats up the avenue.
The gravel patiently awaits
the wheels of the inevitable hearse.
The women drink tea but terror drives taste away.
They reek of disinfectant and lavender.
They long for fresh air, trees and flowers,
a man yoking a horse to go to the fields.
The woman roars again: forgive me!
Her children press their hands over their ears
but now it is too late for that:
her terror has begun to ring
and echo down the passage to their graves.
Published, 2000, in Poetry Ireland Review, Spring issue
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At the start, our women itched for exotic Germans
who stuttered with empty tanks from neutral skies,
London, Bristol, Liverpool, crackling behind them,
and drifted onto soft, Irish grass among bored cattle;
where we arrested them, rattled them swiftly to camp
to plot impossible escape, brood on Fatherland,
wait for triumph or shame, finality, a new start.
We were not hard on them (we got no thanks),
paroled them to public houses, dance halls, our girls.
When they stepped out to Jimmy Dunny's Orchestra
they tantalized the Newbridge women
for they were novelties, starched, stiff,
every man an officer, or as good as!
Then on a chilly Saturday night at war's end,
shrivelled faces framed in barbed wire fences
stared awkwardly from a newsreel at our women;
who learned new names: Belsen, Dachau, Treblinka;
innocence shuffled away. Bands tuned up in dance halls;
later in Lawlor's Ballroom Jimmy Dunny played
smartly polkas, old time waltzes, two-steps, but no-one wanted
to dance with the Germans, in the shocked silence.
Published, 1999, in Snakeskin, September issue
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His childhood died in a nightmare.
He was in the front garden
of a country cottage
like a cottage in a story;
his father was there too, digging:
everything was perfect.
Then the child looked across the fields
to the small hills, like hills
out of a children's book,
and a mushroom cloud loomed up
from behind the small hills,
sombre and monstrous,
as colossal as a mountain.
The child knew the world was dead.
A cloud of grief and despair
unfolded in him.
His father noticed nothing
and kept on digging through the death.
The child woke up but it was true:
the cloud was there, the world was dead.
He still wants to return.
Once I saw him look in winter
over the city's snow capped roofs
and past the icy suburbs
and across the white fields
to the hills behind the city,
and I saw him shake his head
and flick his cigarette
into the slushy street,
where it hissed and died.
Published, 1999, in Snakeskin, October issue
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You could read a book in this light! the boy cried
laughing at how the moon lit up the field
as his father moved softly from sheep to sheep
as they gave birth in the brilliant moonlight
to glistening lambs who got a lick from the ewes
and shook themselves as if they had no time to lose
and went straight for the teat and got down to work
and it was like magic, like something in a book
to the wondering boy who knew nothing yet
of the hour of terror in the abattoir
of machines for driving spikes through heads
of blood darkening on tiled floors
under brilliant slaughterhouse lights.
Published, 1998, in Snakeskin, February issue
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Death introduced himself to the country boy
in a sweet smelling, rank fruit market,
in a great loud barn by the quays in Dublin
where he stood all agog beside his aunt
listening to the uproar he never heard before
of forklift trucks, clanging and commotion,
men bellowing, iron screeching on iron.
His aunt seemed quite at home, bargained
for oranges, apples and pears for the shop
until a man came up, whispered to her
of sorrow, a phone call and death.
All stopped, they raced to her van,
hurtled back to Caragh and the country
through frenzied traffic that terrified him.
His aunt seemed to him to be possessed
by whatever dreadful thing she had been told
and said nothing. He did not know what to say.
She left him at her mother-in-law's house
amid whispers, silences, clasping of hands;
his grandmother gave him tea and cake
and told him his aunt's father was dead.
He recalled a tall, thin man with glasses
smoking one evening on his grandmother's sofa;
now he saw what was meant by death:
bad news flying up the Dublin road,
strangers whispering in the market place,
shocked and frenzied women hurrying home.
He longed for Ladytown's fields and his mother:
since death came screeching into his life,
he felt as if he had been gone forever.
A key clicked in the door. His mother stood there.
He will never forget his delight
that one who was stronger than death had come
to save him from this knowledge and this place.
Published, 2000, in Cyphers No. 48
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Doesn't it sound like peace in this chapel?
Stooped old men in a dark choir, girded with rosaries
peer from monks' hoods with wrinkled faces,
raise voices to god in harmony,
swelling and soaring, the stained glass windows seem to listen:
you'd think humanity had surpassed humanity.
One of these men will walk from this church in anger,
one will leave with a sly smile twisting his lips,
one will plot and plan and pretend
and one will strike a bitter blow to fix
one who played a bitter trick on him. Yet
the faithful visit here for peace and for goodness
and these men's hands make miracles of stone and earth
and miracles of ink and paper, lives and voices;
every patch of grass, every field and corner
speaks of peace and of work and of goodness.
But here too men speak spitefully of other men
and here men thwart other men for bitter decades,
detestation and dislike make friends
and men who whisper ill of other men are praised;
men plot to deny their brothers' advancement
and go to the grave with curses for prayers.
Peace visits this place no more often
than cities that glare with neon,
than streets where good things are done and hearts broken,
than streets where hearts are mended and bad things done;
and there is no refuge from the world in the end
in this place there is no refuge,
there is only the world in the end.
Published, 1999, in Snakeskin, September issue
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On a burning childhood day,
in that corner of the field
where our small, slow river
meets the farm next to Malones',
where the bank of the river
swells into a little hill
- where once, years ago,
men bare to the waist
worked in the water,
laboured with shovels
and struggled to dredge
the riverbed choked
with reeds and weeds and silt
and in that corner
flung a mound of mud
that became the hill -
I pulled off my clothes
and ran down the slope
into the meadow.
But beneath the bare blue sky
a breeze touched my flesh
and whispered of danger:
What will they say if they see?
So I sneaked on my clothes
before I could be caught
and walked home wondering
at the daring of the deed.
I was eleven, maybe ten.
I did not do it again.
Published, 1995, in Navis (London)
New version, 2001
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I am the Greatest Teacher in Western Europe, Larigy said.
Under the taut skin the skull grinned. The glasses glinted
when it was time to beat the boys - his favourite time of day.
Brother Larigy never hit us straight away for our incompetence
but loved a feast of beating at the break, so he saved us up.
Once he let us off, we thought, to play in the first snow of winter
but when our frozen hands started to thaw and began to hurt
he took the leather out - a slim leather, nine inches long, and stiff -
and lined us up and slapped us, doubling our pain and his pleasure.
He liked to threaten to pull boys' trousers down and watch them squirm
but once a boy whose house Larigy used to visit turned and hissed
'I'll tell' and Larigy let him go and flinched as if he had been hit.
One day we were sent up to the water tower to see the dentist
when we came back a Higgins twin couldn't say the prayers for bleeding
- Our Lady of this pray for us, Our Lady of That, pray for us -
Larigy slapped his face until the blood poured out. We resumed praying
with blood streaming out of Higgins' mouth at each Our Lady.
The greatest teacher in Western Europe? As far as we could see,
better had he been a bachelor scratching a living up
a mountain, spending his nights muttering in the pub.
Published, 1998, in Snakeskin, February issue
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Eating shite out of a plastic box again,
you moaners and whingers who eat to live?
Eat? Greens, beans - and not the beans you get in tins -
roughage, dear God, chewing, mandibles straining.
Eating as an act of public contempt
for gobblers of steak and bacon and chicken,
for scoundrels who want sugar in their tea.
Looking at ye eating would make a man sick,
taking out your plastic - ha! - lunch boxes,
opening them reverentially,
commencing to chew with grim little smiles
whatever sludge is contained inside.
Eating you may reflect on your goodness
compared to those who have not seen the light
or lack the moral - if you can tolerate a pun - fibre.
I would rather be marked down as a sinner
in the book of vegetarian crimes
and sentenced to a hell of roast beef and gravy
than dine in paradise on the likes of that.
Published, 1999, in Books Ireland, May issue.
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He crouches
like a leopard
over dials
sniffs out prey.
Like a man who shoots little birds on Sundays
at the edge of the forest
he hunts decibels
on hard margins by motorways;
tracks transgressors in company registration files
studies spoors in county development plans.
He sucks sustenance for his long stalking from environmental impact studies,
perches now and then on trees
daring growling chainsaws,
happy as a child in a garden
absorbed by action who has become the doing itself.
Published, 1999, in Books Ireland, December issue.
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The rat trembles on the lawn like a leaf.
Our cats have snapped its back. They look bored.
I pray for them to finish it
and drag it to a neighbour's garden.
Instead they piss off and leave the job to me.
Published, 2000, in ROPES (Review of Postgraduate Studies), Issue 8, NUI Galway.
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The boy in the photo hangs above the Atlantic
like a drop of rain from the edge of a leaf,
paused in mid-air between diving board and water
on tiptoe, arms spread,
like a dancer, balanced between this moment and the next.
He seems to delay, motionless,
where delay is forbidden,
where what's permitted is a plunge from past to future,
the now a rush of sky, waves and shouts of friends.
A camera clicks, he does not hear.
One day he will look at the picture and declare:
That's odd, I don't remember a thing.
Perhaps that dot in mid fall
was not me at all.
Published, 2000, in canwehaveourballback.com, issue 4
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Her breath is rank with booze,
she fumbles a carnation
into his hand, murmurs
I've always fancied you.
A flurry of too-sweet scent
catches in his throat;
she whirls and titters
at someone else's joke.
Published, 2000, in Snakeskin, September issue
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The girls are beached in geriatric beds,
life got fed up and broke their legs and fled,
abandoned them to grim faced nurses' aides
in realms of commodes and walking frames.
Poor Sleeping Beauties, their fun is at an end,
no prince is on his way to rescue them.
Princes have more to think about than this,
than waking up old ravers with a kiss.
Published, 2000, in Books Ireland, September issue
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A tide washed her to his solitary island,
left her intact on its wet stones.
Morning uncovered her in first daylight.
He contemplated her from all sides, appraised.
Her eyes were slightly open. He held his breath,
edged icy eyelids back: eyes brown, black-shadowed,
earth-warm amber turned to cold;
red hair - she must have been a whip-tongued scold in life.
She dressed for her final act in a denim jacket,
lumberjack shirt, warm amber to match the eyes,
navy jeans plastered to thighs by sea water;
her skin so cold. Quiet: nothing stirred: wave, wind or bird.
He spent hours with her in night's privacy,
her cold beauty a wonder to his trembling hands,
her cold flanks smooth like sea-worn stones,
her mounds, her hollows, burning marvels.
In morning's indifferent newness he carried her back;
water sidled in, lifted her up, took her out.
He dried her clothes - sour smell of steam from his range -
folded and smoothed them, shoved them under his bed.
That night he drank, remembered mounds, hollows,
fingered her clothes, fumbled inside her jeans,
thought of her appearing out of water, naked,
dripping salt, warm, to perch on his lap.
He packed her clothes into his smouldering range,
cremated them one by one - a night of stoking, poking -
felt in hot ashes for zips, buttons,
stumbled in unforgiving day to his solitary beach
to fling them into suffocating water,
pressed fists against his island's wet stones
to cool a violent pain from her burning zips,
scalding buttons, gold and silver of her estate.
Published, 2000, in Snakeskin, February issue.
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Your grandchild Elizabeth stood on the altar
- you died long before she was born or the church built -
and read verses you wrote forty years ago
about death and rebirth, winter and spring
in front of your son Laurence's coffin,
he dead at seventy four, she stunned with grief
beautiful too as she read your lines
to the congregation. A child
cried, Mammy I want to go home.
Laurence's sons lifted his coffin heavily
onto their shoulders, conveyed him through incense
out of the church, down the hill, under dark skies,
hedges dripping silently, tarmac glistening,
up the wet gravel road to Caragh graveyard.
He lies near his brothers Edward, Arthur, John,
a short stroll from the old graveyard
where you await resurrection
by Robinsons' field.
Published, 2000, in Snakeskin, February issue
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Padraig O'Morain was born in Ladytown, Co Kildare in 1949. He now lives in Dublin where he works as a journalist with The Irish Times.
Email: pomorain@iol.ie