Though it was in mid-August 2013 that I
came back from my months in Paris, London, Scotland, Wales and
Dublin, I didn't finish posting photos until late September. And I
never really summed up the experience and won't try to at this late
date. But I had planned to get back to blogging long before this –
a week shy of three years since returning. Better late than never –
maybe.
I used to sit in my recliner next to
the window in my bedroom. For most of the time in tis house, the
window was high and I couldn't see out without standing. Three years
ago I remedied that situation and had the window expanded. Then I
bought a recliner from my friend, Bruce, when he moved to Nepal.
Heaven, but only briefly. Bruno came into my life and he took over
the recliner for a year-and-a-half. I'm a softy (really!), so I
didn't kick him out. Then Bruno died in April at age 14. It took me a
few weeks to reclaim the chair.
Bruno in the recliner
The first time I sat in the recliner
again was an afternoon when I wasn't going to work. I work part-time,
four afternoons a week, and this was an afternoon without work. This
was one of those one-in-five free afternoons. So I sat in the
recliner, put a glass of rosé
on the windowsill (now at the perfect height), and opened a book of
poetry. And I read for a couple of hours and pondered the poem I was
writing for Terry Ehret's poetry workshop.
At the end of the day, I looked back on
it and thought about what a relaxing day it had been. Then I realized
that I had gone to a landscape client's and measured her yard, taken
Maggie to the dog park, gone to the Board of Supervisors with Marni
Wroth and Elaine Holtz to talk about Victim's Rights Week, gotten
some exercise, made dinner and watched an episode of “Downton
Abbey.” In addition to the couple of hours in the recliner!
But it felt relaxed – just right. I
think it was Eavan Boland's poetry that did the trick! Boland's
political poetry makes a large political point through the telling of
intimate stories about individual lives. That's what I wanted to do
with the poem I was working on. Those hours in the recliner helped me
achieve the same thing, I think.
Whenever I get really busy, poetry gets
cut from the schedule. Big mistake!
Here is Eavan Boland at a poetry festival I went to in Paris.
Here's a poem of Boland's followed by
mine. I did not read hers until I was well into mine, so it was
exciting to find this. You'll see why.
Sea Change
by Eavan Boland
What did he leave me, my grandfather,
Who lost his life in a spring tempest
At the Chaussée
des Pierres Noires
At the edge of Biscay?
With is roof of half-seen stars
His salty walls rising high and higher
To the last inch of the horizon
He built nothing that I could live in.
His door of cresting water,
His low skies skidding on the waves
His seaman's windows giving on
Iridescent plankton never amounted to
home,
And no one lay at night
Seeing these unfold in their minds with
That instinct of amendment history
allows
Instead of memory.
I was born in a place, or so it seemed,
Where every inch of ground
Was a new fever or a field soaked
To its grassy roots with remembered
hatreds.
Where even if I turned to legerdemain
To bring land and ocean together,
Saying water meadow
to myself for instance,
The distances
remained.
A spring night in
Dublin.
Neap tide on the
Irish Sea,
To the north of
here in the Garden of Remembrance
The dead are
defined by their relation to land.
When he looked over
the ship's rail at midnight
Into his ocean
garden
All he saw was
oxygen unfrocking phosphorus
Lacing the sea with
greens.
Salt
by Susan Lamont
for my 5th
great-grandmother, buried at sea in 1751, wife of John, first name
unknown
I imagine cormorants, black against
rinsed sky, fog
a second skin, your hands on the ship's
slick rail
steady against the tide that day you
fled. I imagine
your leave-taking, rough unpainted
door, hedgerow
of hawthorn in bud, blue song-thrush
eggs safe in their nest,
left behind with your idle loom.
Ulster's kings of commerce
no longer trade in linen, raised the
rent, pressed your life to the margins.
Your and yours can only imagine freedom
and plenty somewhere that is not home.
A rough migration along the curve of
the earth leaves the Irish Sea behind,
your ears filled with wind, heaven past
the horizon, just out of reach.
I imagine ingots of light igniting the
waves as smallpox ignites
your cheeks, your fevered dreams of
home, the hawthorn buds, open,
their honeyed scent, a thrush's fluting
song, while on this ship,
three children, John, Jacob, Sarah,
clutch their father's homespun shirt.
I imagine a life, a death, your memory
a whisper,
nameless. No shroud save your linen
apron. No Memento mori
on
lichened stone. The salt of fever and tears joins all the
unnamed
beneath the waves, your life just so
much salt in the wound of the world.
Though my poem has a very serious
subject, it was really enjoyable to write. I got to do a lot of
research for it. I found out which birds and plants are native to
Ireland. I looked up industries of the time. I researched the
politics. I wanted to know why people left Ireland 100 years before
the Great Famine. I even looked up the most common epitaphs. Momento
mori was not my first choice,
but the others were too long. Since writing it, I have found out more
about my unnamed great-great-great-great-great-grandmother, but
that's a story for a later date.
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