#derry
When great aunt Maggie passed away years ago, the one thing I really missed was her angelic voice.
The swaggering, sing-song lilt of the mid-Derry accent was as sweet as the confections she used to pass out to us as kids:
The inflection, the intonation, and the slight lisp she brought to it was so gloriously unique but was never heard again.
I often wish I could go back with a tape recorder to capture it in all its glory and relive how wonderful she was.
Now all I have is a untranslatable memory that can't be brought back to even vaguely approximate what it meant to me.
And now here I am again with the same obstacle.
The same tones, the same inflections albeit through a different light have just been extinguished before me.
This time there was no digital device rushing in to capture our time before it ran out.
No instinct for preservation was forthcoming - we were too busy having fun & 'being here now'.
No, once again I am bereft:
All I I have is here (in my heart) and and here (in my head)
The loved sounds I miss will always resound there albeit without backup
Voices lost but not forgotten.
Nov 13, 2018
Nov 13, 2018 at 8:04 AM UTC
Glenshane Pass separated you both.
23 miles away in the same time, same place as my father’s childhood.
So when you talked of your da digging Toner’s bog and waxed lyrical about sheughs, I knew in our English class what exactly you were saying (when others didn’t).
Your words float over time & space to me now.
A celebration of the intimacy of our homelands.
A holy adoration of long gone voices that still resonate.
You never strayed, never.
It was always in your heart, always:
the land, the forgotten lanes, the broad fields, the lost language of it all.
I keep a certain comfort now with your lines as I Iay in my southerly home,
knowing that I am forever tithed to the townlands of our shared ancestry.
I thank you.
May your words stay alive as song as Ireland still has its beauty
and may their illumination still shine on us all.
Sep 12, 2018
Sep 12, 2018 at 5:46 PM UTC
An uncanny and unfamiliar view: the sun gazing over the Sperrins.
Light granted sight and in the
smarting, sticky glow of day the range seemed endless.
Every peak,
protruding from plate like
vertebrae of the obscene Oilliphéist, aspired to pierce the clouds (had there been any) and
swelling like the ego of that Boeotian hunter, set Olympus and Rheasilvia to blushes.
An omnidirectional parsec of perpetual nihility that,
swallowing the senses,
renders proprioception void.
Everything suspended for a second or century under the watch of that inert sentinel, whose
magnitude mirrored the Cosmic Turtle.
Say some stray tenant of Mountsandel
had wandered through these ancient fields and looked, as I do, upon the eminence of this glen;
From now til then, this Precambrian master had aged but a second.
Words are feeble against this primordial Schist and cannot hope to evoke it.
But all perceived as hard then shifts; I see the hulk in its youth suffering
the divorce of Rodinia; drifting further from its peers – drowning.
Even now the car traced the scar carved in the little pinnacle.
Granted, it bore us tourists stoically on
Granite too pure for poetry.
Yet still I see, as clear as Sawel, the young stone struggling to breathe the noxious air;
Freezing and thawing with the trends of the earth and
Bearing it all alone.
No wonder it had become catatonic.
How fitting, that every traveller on their
commute between the Pillars of the North,
should be forced to stare
Eden
in the eyes and acknowledge
where
earth began.
Jul 21, 2018
Jul 21, 2018 at 6:20 PM UTC
Lent's painful labours yielded results,
When the now-bouyant child was found.
Still in the water, an infernal image of
Youths perfection lay drowned.
Prone to the tide,
His soft undulations suggested that by chance
His arrival had breathed new life
Into this hellish circumstance.
A fraught family on the shore,
reunited with their prodigal son.
Knowing that the time to lay him to rest
For eternity had come.
The final plans - the wake and funeral,
Will soon be underway.
To truly mark, in earth and heart,
The minors final day.
Any joy leeched from the event,
Was marred and stained with loss.
Knowing that to reconvene,
They'd paid a deathly cost
And identifying the body
Had yet to formally be done.
For some poor relative,
A haunting image of a loved one
That would reappear when you shut your eyes,
And ***** your mind with claws.
And weave into your memory
In place of what once was.
A closed coffin ensured
Only one person met that fate,
A morbid idol etched in their mind,
Surviving til this date.
The Catholic Shame surrounding
The unforgivable sin,
Fearing that God would not forgive
Or seek to welcome him in.
As for Heaven or for Hell,
I know not what will be.
But being laid to rest by familiar hands,
Is better than The Sea.
Jul 21, 2018
Jul 21, 2018 at 6:15 PM UTC