Kaleidoscope II 
Frank McGuinness
Coming and Going: Imagining Europe
July 2020
Two years ago a serious illness stopped me travelling. I had plans to conquer the world as the first stage of my retirement from my long decades of teaching in Coleraine, Maynooth and for more than two decades back in the concrete cloisters of University College Dublin. Ah yes, the best laid plans of mascara and men ... A near fatal encounter with cellulitis, St Anthony's Dance to give it the precise Renaissance diagnosis my specialist scraping my wounds informed me, this St Anthony stopped my gallop. For the first time in my sixty healthy years of life, I had to stay in a hospital, utterly dependent on doctors' and nurses' most kind care. A lesser bout recurred last summer, this time needing surgery, completed successfully but waking again the first panic. And the great panic, big fear, centred around travelling. Even to my beloved London and my adored New York, getting to either was beyond my nerve. Terror mounted at the images of my body breaking again, terror intensified by the possibility of another attack, this time in a country where English was not the spoken language. When nothing else could calm me in the clinic, words could, from my most living and attentive friends, from my gentle Serbian carers, my tender but tough Chinese surgeon, my English and Irish medics that made me better. And what aided and abetted that improvement in my health was the knowledge less than a mile away my house and garden waited. Was I turning into a certified, if not certifiable homebird? The scars from the physical shocks to my system were and still are obvious. But on my mind, my imagination, the scars concentrate on my dread of treading beyond the confines of the island of Ireland. This mental restriction is new, and I loathe it. Utterly and absolutely. I must be rid of this. That is why I have deliberately set out to write poetry that will bear testimony to my debt and my devotion to the continent of Europe that since my first excursion as a young guy to Florence in the 1970s I have tried to learn, appreciate and, alright, devour when the humours takes me, and the humour always takes me for like many citizens of the Irish Republic there is within me a hunger, a great hunger, that might be denied ‒ Ourselves Alone? Really? ‒ but that hunger will inevitably out itself and insist on being filled. Now in the again enforced seclusion of 2020 I have busied myself with the mental task of returning to locations, to visions and voices, that beckon and thrill and birth me once more in the continent that is my home, my hope and above all my desire, my insatiable desire matching that hunger which is my historical and geographic lot. Here are some poems then from the places where they sprang ... I think.
THE WOMEN WITH NO SHADOWS
Germany, after Richard Strauss
For Kieran and Maurice
I
The women with no shadows,
They were all born in May,
Twenty-second if you must know,
When asked, that's what they say.
The women with no shadows,
They never cross red water.
Lough Derg is then a no-no.
St Patrick lacks a daughter.
These women search the forest
To find a lost child,
A prince, maybe a beast
Turning the wild things mild.
They wait as the moon unwinds
Through the calm of clouds,
Believing in ties that bind,
The pockets in a shroud.
II
The women with no shadows,
They wander where they please.
They bargain with friend and foe
The prices of rubies.
The women with no shadows
Fought like devils in Petersburg,
Frozen city, frigid, haloed
In the mists of Lough Derg.
Do these women wake at night
Devouring the dark?
Switch on the electric light.
Let sorrows leave their mark.
They drench the sky, they kiss the sea.
Flowers in Maytime grow.
They have me as they reared me,
The women with no shadows.
LAMPEDUSA
Italy
An eagle snatched from its eyrie
Eggs and runes that Vikings hatched
Carving their names on ivory oars,
Their boats churning enchanted islands,
Clutching at straws underneath the waves.
Who brings psalms from brightest Africa
Chanting Lallans hymns in kirks,
Scorning Lucifer and all his works,
Finding refuge in Lampedusa,
The steel of boots caged in water?
SCAVENGERS AT WATERLOO
Belgium
Cawing like crows they come, choosing to feed
On blades of dew in stony fields, scissors
Piercing tunic buttons, trousers bloodied,
Pocketing the lockets, coinage, notes, rings,
Billets-doux pencilled in haste, kept pressed to hearts,
Swearing though distracted they will come home
Remembering what needs remembering,
The morning after, sunlit breakfast rooms
On Merrion Square, and China willows ‒
Debris on plates of pork and egg, rind, shell,
As ships sail to war, rogering his boy,
The Captain vows they will see Canada
And let their love rampage through the prairies,
Or else plight their troth thawing the Tundra.
Pray that his fellow survives the battle.
Stop scimitars, stop canons, the horse falling
Between the sturdy, splendid legs he freed
Through nights caressing time taking its time,
Swearing vengeance against the French legions
Of camp followers gathered a God knows where.
Who will wash his corpse? Who will close his eyes?
Finger his rosaries through his two hands?
Where is his face? The lips that cracked a smile?
Emperor Bonaparte, I'll break your teeth.
An oath made on missals soldiers carry,
Witnessed by the Queen and the Ace of Spades
The scavengers at Waterloo dealt them,
Stripping spoils of flesh under uniforms.
COCO CHANEL
France
Let Paris fall
At my nail-varnished feet.
Put that under your hat,
Your wide-brimmed hat.
Hear Notre Dame singing
Dies Irae, Dies Irae.
Drenched in blond cologne
Strapping German boys
Smoke my Yankee cigarettes
And dream about home.
I pin my hopes
On a little black dress,
A scarf will do
For requiem mass,
Splendid, sensible pumps,
Matching stockings,
The caress of soap
Five times five purified
With jasmine, thyme,
Lily of the valley.
In carbolic convents
Nuns reared me roughly
As an orphanage apron
Hemmed with lime.
They burned on my breast
The brand of my name,
The archangel Gabriel,
His wicked fairy tale,
The Holy Ghost cooing
Sanctus, Sanctus.
A woman's bones
In the grave may be snatched
From the dry tomb of
Her hard marriage bed.
You may kiss the bride,
You may raise her veil,
Her dust unto dust,
Her ash unto ash,
And believe in doves
Rasping prayers for the dead.
I still pin my hopes
On the same black dress,
Extract of vanilla, thyme,
And sandalwood.
The world heeds
When men holler Hosannas.
Put that under your hat,
Your wide-brimmed hat.
Let Paris fall
At my nail-varnished feet.
THE MILKY WAY
Greece
What are we to do with that bull,
The infant Heracles?
How is he to be fed?
Who will suckle him?
Say nothing about that.
Zip your profane lip.
This child grapples snakes.
He can choke them.
His father the god among gods,
Unashamed to be a man's man,
Zeus can change shape
In the space of a breath.
Let him turn into his wife,
The fiery Hera,
And pity the poor baby,
Ravenous for her breast.
He gulps down her milk.
It spills in galaxies.
He laps it off stars.
And he calls them mother.
THE FOUNTAIN HOUSE IN PETERSBURG
Russia
- said our leader fears me.
My spells, my riddles, my enigma.
I tame the river Neva,
And my strange husband, Petersburg,
I marry each white morning.
Our leader fits me inside his glove,
A wimple for my head,
My hair tasting of salt,
His of swamp and syrup,
A brutal pomade.
Our nun he calls me.
I pray to him to change the world
Or save my menfolk's skin.
I plead their cause to planets,
And Venus seems to listen,
My evening song of stars.
The city echoes silence.
It spills like turquoise milk.
It stains the poisoned icon,
My Modigliani drawing.
Kiss it, and it's said you die.
He sketched me then as I am now,
A black figure in pencil,
His Anna abandoned
In the fogs of Leningrad,
The port of Petersburg,
The quays of Petrograd,
Which city continues?
I am my own mystery,
My spells, riddles, enigma,
And someday I will eat my soul
And whet steel on stone.
CHAOS 1945
Ireland and Europe
To pay his respects
At the German Embassy
De Valera calls.
Hitler has died.
For overtime at work
My mother earns
An extra shilling.
She stitches army shirts.
De Valera shakes
The washed hands
Of the Reich's ambassador.
The done thing.
My mother buys
In ones and twos
Woodbine or Sweet Afton.
The pipes of peace.
Kaleidoscope II