Poems

Medbh McGuckian

Poems

1   The Elsewhere Empire

 

In a glint of red candles and throat pleats

The house feels composed. White chrysanthemum

Revolution. The starling’s black bill turns yellow

In the spring, fake bird of Paradise.

 

I had you living beside me, a young saint,

Glorious cub of the household. I invented

A sister for you, named Paula, her possible soul,

Our eternal possessions, our digital perpetuity.

 

Sometimes our concern with moonrise,

Its insistence on midsummer and midwinter,

Is like a detail of a burial of any unsettled souls

In a sea of electrified language, dashes of lime

 

On the wall itself. The smoke grey coat

Of a laceworks of death – mavrone, for me,

There is no after the war, the rain of an earlier day,

The balmy elsewhere of winglets past the flowers

 

In their rifles. The diet was so poor, men’s voices

Did not break till they were twenty, not really believing

What they knew. And every time I turn on an electric

Light, I believe that love, The Orchid Hotel, South Flower St. 

 

While she was rooted to her bed along braided

Pathways, I saw an advertisement that the mountain

Was for sale, frost wedging extra virginity

Woven around the dark nutmeg seed.

 

She is buried with herbs of love, ghost fishing.

The sound of one’s footsteps start to fade,

The stairs feel like they descend further than they do,

Or feel like a room in themselves, an afterthought.

 

Comment

The first poem is one of the last written and should really be at the end. It is typical of long meandering poems I’m writing now in the leisure of retirement and particularly the frozen state of the state in the viral present. There are lots of colours in it which battle against each other like the underground continuation of a war. The soldiers in the poem are roughly from the 1916 rebellion, some of the details, it is saying nothing is over, nothing is finished, to use electricity is to belong to that power, to depend materially on the very implements you are talking about freedom with. The natural properties surrounding the voice are praised and treated with gratitude, but illness and death drag the speaker down to a place where the actual composition of the country can be written off. The way Lough Neagh is still in the possession of a British landlord, the largest stretch of water in the British isles, where prison ships still lurk, in case.

 

2   While Stationed on the Border 

 

One officer jotted down what it would take

To seal the whole length: 310 miles of mesh fencing,

A vehicle track along the entire length,

A hinterland security fence,

360,000 explosive charges,

165 miles of vehicle hazards such as ditches

And steel spikes, a hundred pillboxes,

A hundred observation towers.

 

The defence would also need command posts,

Bunkers, dogs, dog runs and thousands

Of arc lights – all that before

The boots on the ground are considered.

 

Comment

The statement in the second poem is from the other side of the fence. It is one of my mathematical pieces and an excerpt from a real article, based on a real announcement. It is a satire really on the way they actually think and the way many powerful governments operate to keep their control. So it could refer to the birth of concentration camps or the way borders are reinforced in any war. This is actually the calculated amount of military equipment needed to insulate one part of the country from the other. It is not in fact realised except in people’s heads, but is a pattern of defence which seems more like an act of aggression.

 

 

3   The Unanxious One

it seems she killed an officer point blank

 

The unintended beauty of this map

Of bomb damage crosses lines

With the names of the winds. Brown

Mountains rise in chains and brackish lakes

Reveal the river’s past, its dark tints.

 

Cherubs look through a telescope

From outside the sky, through a layer

Of different coloured stars, or flown

Stars, bits of a star gone wrong, placing

Weapons there, the wreckage from retired satellites.

 

Master of sleep, she gave me her limp hand

and returned to the oiling of her automatic,

Her revolver, which she kissed affectionately,

Then a rude crucifix made of black metal

Till a lip of metal formed, beads on her forehead.

 

Leaflets of green paper with black edging

Remoulded the breast of the menstruating moon,

Dark even in India. Blind flowers scorched

The quaint psyche knot at the crown of her hair

At the price of cutting Ireland in two.

 

The lake’s moodswings and its tame listless saints

Put me in thinking of a field of kinland I once owned

And its seven different names, its heaping up of stones.

It was free draining and could be ploughed dry

Even after a deluge.

 

Comment

The third poem is about Constance Markievicz, alluding to a poem by Paul Muldoon where he neither condemns nor approves her involvement in the street fighting. So it sets the context in Ireland and in the universe as an important breath-taking moment. The country and the planetary influences support the doomed army. The picture of the countess is of an absolute aristocrat in love with her calling and adopted religion. Her femininity both preserved and betrayed her. She is often depicted as a fanatic rabble-rouser yet I bury her here with dignity not as one who espoused ruthless murder but who loved Lissadell. She had unparalleled courage.

 

 

4   The Sands of St. Cyprien

 

Frozen sand: it looked so innocent.

It erased footsteps and soaked up blood

Like water.

 

Behind the barbed-wire perimeter

Of that motley group of huts,

His very being was fistfuls of hardened sand:

 

Sand running through his veins.

Neurosis of sand. Sand induced fits.

The pull of molecules of sand.

 

In the sand-jail where consonants burned away,

The air was filled with particles

Of excrement, little L-shaped pieces …

 

Discoloured liquid

From standing pools of urine

Blew their imagined wholeness in their faces.

 

I don’t know if I read it in a newspaper,

Or if someone told me,

Or I heard it after twenty-four hours had gone by:

 

But nothing reported could have been

Further from the truth,

How slowly, slowly, crushed by sadness

 

From a skeleton in a blanket

To a carcass in manure,

He backed into the calyx of the brown flower.

 

Whose tin can of champagne sticks in our throats

So we barely make it go down

Because God is forbidden to perform miracles in this place.

 

 

Comment

The fourth poem is a very old one and coded to reflect on the hunger strikes and so called dirty protest in the Belfast prison in the early eighties. I link these events with the camp in France where Spanish people evacuated from the Civil War. They were not well received or even fed, many just died on the beaches. This was a contextual comparison only I was not making a complete reason for why someone might in this day and age be driven to self his name-sacrifice. I make a play on his namelike a musical refrain. I use quite vulgar or disgusting language to strip all beauty from the physical horror of the time, which I think has still to be reckoned with.

 

 

5   The Beastliness of War

 

One night the depot suffered an intense bombing,

320 horses being hit, of which

About 180 were killed outright and had to be slaughtered.

 

I was on continuous duty for 48 hours.

The dead horses were piled on top of the other

To the height of one’s shoulder.

 

Perhaps the ones at the bottom of the heap

Were still breathing, some with their legs

Blown right off. I had to get them out

 

As best I could, my revolver was almost too hot

To hold. One poor fellow, I remember,

Had both hind legs blown off at the hock

 

And was standing on the stumps,

Looking like a bewildered rocking horse.

I could not get his head down for the usual brain shot.

 

I shot him just in front of the ear and leapt quickly

To one side as he came crashing down,

Nearly on top of me.

 

All next day I was getting the milder cases

Off on the one mile march to hospital

Before they had time to get too stiff to move

 

Under their own power, and loading the worst cases

Into ambulances. Right into the second night,

I was still extracting splinters

 

Where the missiles had not

Penetrated deep enough to require

Special facilities for their removal.

 

Comment

The fifth poem takes on the voice of a medical officer in the first World War, out at some front. The emotion connected with the vast numbers of dead and wounded is diverted towards the terrible pain and suffering of the many horses involved. The officer could be from either side in the battle. He is appalled and shocked but manages to retain his composure. The tone is very similar to the Sands poem, gruesome images of death are given a kind of heroic relevance.

 

 

6   Removing the Martian Sky

 

Yes, Mars is darker since we switched off Spirit.

Spirit’s third winter feeling out the rock

On Mars, was her last. I know this and still

Go searching for some trace of love’s infolding.

 

One way of reading white is all it takes

Not to buy anything else. Sometimes when the moon

Is young, birds fly to the moon for the winter

And become moon clues, our chemical cousins.

 

So there is less and less sweetness in the quieter

Countries (in which the story pauses a little),

The darker, thinner birds blacken the sky,

Their washed away nests soft bark under twigs.

 

With little or no honeysuckle, all flowers

Are knocked to the ground, in forest patches

Months ago, when autumn came, damp pearl

Essence of the blue lily, as winter deepens.

 

Comment

The sixth poem situates the world and Europe in it in a planetary negativity. The space effort has run aground, all creatures are hunted and retreating their habitats. Plants too as well as planets weaken and disperse, technology fails to support the essence out of which it derives.

 

 

7   The Moondial 

They avoid providing their fingerprints by burning their fingers

 

Cups of night time water

are all that lifts easily

to another’s lips. My ever-giving body

must have self-lit from any red

interruption to the grey they offer.

 

The city seems to fall into pieces,

steered into a sliding cloud, goes rib

to rib, leans in to run the warning

out of my body where many

wintry things keep adding up.

 

At least I recognized the yellow thought,

caresses of an arm in days gone by,

or some Februaries that match,

geranium kiss inside the rain.

The flags are frozen, don’t move in wind,

 

they carry no sentiment. Flowers freeze

in liquid air and thick lake-effect snow.

For nineteen days I do the candles

to uncertain saints (why are the saints’

feet silver?) The brown garden,

 

fatal flower garden, stores a threadbare rose

of pressed blue until the bone blinks through,

until the cease-fire ceases. A sky not bare

of leather stars stands over their heads

in the hunched chapels. Clearly for them

 

everything had become words. When she read

her sibling’s diary, those deserving mother/daughter

dreams, (time can be shared), the blood had begun

like the morning. Cleaning buildings

late at night makes her bleed slowly,

you are that below, river wave.

 

Comment

“The Moondial” is one of those circle-on-itself winter poems, vaguely political in the middle, with colours and flower imagery. Centring on Belfast, on femininity, how women are linked to the moon, a trope I never tire of trying to understand. One is trying to generalize this experience for all women, not just in Europe.

 

 

 

8   Back in 1894

 

The president of the Belfast Chamber of Commerce,

H.C. Lanyon, estimated:

I find the length of yarn produced amounts to about 644,000,000

miles, making a thread which would encircle the world

25,000 times.

 

If it could be used for a telephone wire

It would give us 6 lines to the sun

And about 380 besides to the moon.

 

The export of linen during the year

Measured about 150,000,000 yards

Which would make a girdle of the earth

At the equator 3 yards wide,

 

Or cover an area of 32,000 acres.

Or it would reach from end to end

Of the county of Down, one mile wide,

 

Passing down the canyon

Of the Crumlin Road, the tall forbidding mills,

The ornate warehouses

The largest human moving objects ever made.

 

Comment

So the 1894 poem is again in the mood of a calculator but unlike the beastliness poem there is only arrogance and greed, no concern with the workers who run the mills, not even an interest in the buyers of the cloth. So it is full of grandiose estimations and a certain amount of imagination. The mentality culminates in the last line where the industrial and commercial dominance in Victorian Belfast leads to the creation of the Titanic and her short-lived rite of passage.

 

 

9   The Hotel Picardie

 

Slack-jawed, floridly unwell,

I disassembled the television

In my reverie-plus and wallowed

The contents over twelve hours’ sleep

Without repair, pounding hemp.

 

I awoke to find myself filled

With time, every mark was another

Small victory for the clock.

There was no touch from the peephole

That punctuates the door.

 

The not-yet events lose

Their lustre: you need to wade

To unhook from the past, from

The specialist winter-over syndrome.

There were more parts than I began with.

 

Comment

The Hôtel Picardie obviously plays with the most deeply resonant place name of the first European war with all its romance tragedy and patriotism. It is framed around manic descriptions of incarceration and the mechanics of mental hospital sectioning where one learns to recover by going back to the basics of learning. So it is another of these mathematical poems satirising poetry as the masculine art of numbers, and war itself as a competition of numbers, whichever side kills the most wins.

 

 

 

10   Landslides in Sensitive Clays

 

Little can be said about the apricot frost

That added white to the darling harbour,

The weather we meet and the different

Ways in which it rains ‒ the rain in the poem

 

Wasn’t falling. They were tearing out

The middle lane of the beltway near

Our home while the slightest deviation

From the conduct expected of her

 

Was caught in loops of thinking, in

That image thought gives itself

Of what it means to think, or dream

Through the internal clouds coming to

 

In the muscled heart. Unabated

Haunting in the daylight by extreme

Close-ups of her mouth crumpling up

In the withdrawal of her lips

 

Brightened the curtains with initial

Light enhancing waters. Small reflections

Shine on books. We taste the accumulated

Silence of the fierce, drab, absurd,

 

Streets of Belfast’s

One vast clinic

We fall prey to hope

In limited sun.

 

Comment

“Landslides” like many of my poems situated the unwell self in an unwell city, the imagery playing back and forth between. I suppose Belfast or the North is always a place they are trying to fix, there is always something wrong with it. There is natural beauty but the river it is built on is a symbol of the precariousness, the repressed violence that can erupt like an earthquake any minute; so it resembles the front, the trenches, the peace lines that divide so bluntly.

 

 

11   1812

 

Can one be revolutionary enough?

I seized the chasm of anarchy

And ordered the chaos.

A constitution should be

Short and obscure.

I purified the revolution, ennobled

The people and reinforced kings.

I encouraged striving, rewarded merit

Of all sorts and pushed back

The limits of glory.

I suppressed sixty

Of the seventy-three newspapers.

 

What can one blame me for?

What is there that a historian

Cannot defend?

What can you possibly do

Without an army?

 

On the 17^th the Cossacks

Finally moved on to Frankfurt.

The state of their encampment

Was indescribable.

It was strewn with dead and half-dead

Horses, the intestines and hides

Of slaughtered livestock,

Pitches, bottles, pots of butter,

Cheese, honey, beehives, flour,

Apples, nuts, whole heaps of spoiled

Hay, bunches of fruit, ladders, crockery,

Firewood, poles, sheepskins, whole

And cut-up sacks they had received

Full of oats, dried meats, all taken

From our region. On leaving

They burned their straw huts.

 

I have fought sixty battles and learned

Nothing I did not know

At the beginning.

 

Will they say I hindered liberty?

Will they accuse me of having loved

War too much? I was always

Under attack.

 

Comment

This poem is an attempt to reconcile two sides of Napoleon’s character and how he led the way to all the other wars of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. On the one hand he is arrogant in his innocence and self-righteousness. On the other he describes the Russian camp with a real disgust for the wastage and destruction. Obviously such a hugely important European figure can only be guessed at in a lyric poem.

 

 

12   Exhibits

 

King William’s saddlecloth, presented to Thomas Coningsby, his quartermaster general

King William’s gloves

A pre-1770 Williamite toasting glass

The Grand Lodge minute books from 1798 to date

The metal plate used as part of the process of printing the 1912 Ulster Covenant

Shrapnel from a car bomb used by the IRA to blow up the House of Orange in Belfast in the 1970s

Small collarette of George Best when carrying the banner strings as a young boy in the Creagh estate.

 

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