Aimsir

Ceangail Gharbha

by Jamie O’Toole

Cold air from the mountain

Cold air from the mountain comes down like a collapsing lung.

by Ursula O’Sullivan-Dale

A curving moan that cools to numbing like the eye’s warmth when it meets that blue-on-blue-on-blue of sky, pleating inwards into roundness, suppleness.

Your turning body is just like ours un-peaked and sinking into earth.

The last of your cold unfurls, and is lost in a spring breeze.

A name-calling, a ritual from the old world. A voice, broken-through

Aimsir

Birdsong

You are under wings, under wing bones, pulled taught, structured

by Aisling Ní Choibheanaigh Nic Eoin

(response to William M. Roth’s novel Birdsong)

You look up at the brown undersides of feathers, speckled, they keep out the weather, keep that bold mouth of yours dry,

Some strange noise goes through those bones, through your own, like bits of static, caught by one another, pulled and thrown together, static through those wing bones, through the bones of your feet, pressed against the twigs and moss.

It is the sound of your niece singing her birdsong.

See (ii) of Notes for more information on Birdsong.

Lamb from Milk

by Niamh Hughes

Aimsir

Broken Seasons Still Turn

Ag druidim leis an ngrianstad

by Clare Ní Lanagáin

Something like a frost at last. All up to this point was a mild, elongated, unresolved autumn. Along the road, late sloes persist in the spot of blackthorn, the dusting of light mildew on the purple-black berries looking like frost. The song thrush started up its paired refrains this morning in the sycamore, and there's another one at the end of the line of trees just before the bridge. It glows orange in the sun, oval breast expanding, recklessly spending its precious warming energy on the twinned notes it has no choice but to sing.

An abrupt explosion of hailstones, and the day grows dark as an eclipse. Thunder booms and the almost leafless sycamore trees rattle in the wind. The cat's ears swivel forward and back, following the noise. After a few minutes, the sky becomes livid with diluted sunlight, and the hailstorm is shot through with luminosity.

A cloying warm gale strips across the farmland. The rain has no origin; it explodes out of the air in invasive bursts, like himalayan balsam seeds. A sparrowhawk is hanging above a hedge of whitethorn, held in its fluttering bobbing as much by the wind as its own effort. It yields to another gust, flattening its wingspan against the iardheisceart force and is swept away across a ribbed and silage-smelling field.

The end of a wasted bright day. Nothing but clouds till December. I'm walking into the sunset whispering the old pining songs in order to feel something like a human. A plane's trail slices white and thin and bright across the sky. The tail dissipates into a few white untethered gems while its head rears over the early waxing moon. The starlings are whining the evening in and that whitethorn hedge is secretly full of goldcrests.

Later, an icewhite full moon chills Mars in its heels. Το φεγγάρι και τ'αστέρια. Most stars are muted by the moon's blank gaze. Alderaban is a dull red flicker down to its right and Rigel oscillates from white to mintgreen to silver, hanging above the chapel roof to the east. Valiant Capella is nearly drowned by proximity to the moon, but tiny Elnath at the edge of Taurus is a chilly blue pinpoint, unsparkling. Castor and Pollux are behind the tree to the northeast, visible in glimpses through the branches, a complacently-stacked pair. The moonlight is the frost’s John, making clear the way, calmly rinsing with affectless light the hardy plants that will survive it, and the tender leaves that will be curled and black by morning.

Yesterday we visited the Blackwater, cois abhainn, across from Templemichael. Redmond Barry's split-trunk tree drooped dark grey against the black woods. It was sunset and the sky over the weir at the river's swerve was citric gold. It reflected pale over water echoing the screeching egrets, gabbling ducks and curlews’ precious bubblings. Rooks began summoning each other for night, sweeping in from all sides and blooming into a clattering cloud around the dark spire of Templemichael Church, heading northwest. Ar bruach na habhann tender plants had been burned by frost, but the grass and dock leaves endured. Mist rolled like steam over the dark mobile water surface, and the robins, finches and wrens didn't rest for a moment, always in motion, searching for survival.

Two fishermen wound in their lines, snags of riverweed rising at intervals from the silvery water as the breath-thin cord pulled in. They packed up their seats, leaving their brazier near the old ferryman's cottage.

An stad agus an casadh

It’s a fine cold bright day. Why do I feel sad and on edge?

On the train up and back both times I had the low sun in my eyes. It’s around the time of St Lucie’s day, the solstice of the metaphysicists. At noon cool butterlight, at afternoon cool orangelight. Πορτοκαλιά. A direct beam to the eye, the sun and I paired, pregnant raindrops of light. Its blue and purple copies, its seacoloured children, are flickering and floating across the sphere of my iris. The sun is moving into Taurus, the broad iced bog is rising up to claim it. Soon the sun will be replaced in the southeast by Sirius, fluttering its own mountain-mauve and electric blue sequence of spheres.

A flash of glamour in the leafless riparian trees: a bullfinch. A rosyfeathered male ag dreapadóireacht up the tree, his voice dropping in quick, short, almost inaudible coos. Under the branches the river trots along. The dippers are whipping back and forth from the north bank to the south, under the bridge’s arches, scoping out the crevice where they will build their nest. The shortest astronomical day has already passed and the solstice is starting its three-day guard, the sun taking three days as a soldier standing to attention before returning to the road.

That rarest of things: a sunlit solstice day. It rises to the southeast, closest to the south. A covering of peach cloud is lightly burned away by the first few leakings of

Aimsir

orange light. The small forest to the north, on top of the hill, is gradually illuminating and shadowing the branches. A tiny airplane trail high in the eastern sky is lit into a white kinch. The edges of the rooftops are glinting. A small committee of crows start up their voices, while the goldfinches at the nyger seed feeder pay no attention whatsoever.

The walled holy well at Stún Carthaigh nó b’fhéidir Teach Mhic Cárthaigh is flooded; an embarrassment of holy soakage covers the ivy and the brambles and what’s left of the ferns. The sun glints on the water, glamorous rays illuminating the mud on the wellbed. There is an ancient hawthorn tree clinging to the outer wall, part of its trunk embedded in the earth, its weathered, aboveground roots sprawling over the stone, winding and wandering through grooves filled with moss and lichen. The top of the tree leans away from the trunk, the well, the water, its sharp inverted L softened by an agglomeration of dead ivy branches crawling up the side and cloaking the sceach-spined branches. A minute red spiderwebbed mushroom grows in another, much tinier L out of the lower trunk, its cap bronze and wrinkled, its stem smooth and pale ginger-coloured, like a fox cub’s belly. A meantán mór complains thinly from a spiked branch, then switches its position from branch to wall, and its call from squished creak to high-pitched bray. Northwest of the well the remains of a forgotten bridge run under the road, one half-buried arch out of alignment with the broad line of water draining away from a gap in the stone wall. A tree beside the road is heavy with dried berries and catkins. What tree is this? Must check when the leaves come out. Not so long now, not from today.

Now comes the spring as a day in midwinter

The temperature shot up fifteen degrees, the skies unloaded. All is mild and wet. A tailless wagtail balances on the edge of the pavement, its round bum in a pantomime of bobbing, its phantom limb bouncing over the gutter. After overwhelming downpours, a subtle dusk. The sky is coated with thick navy cloud, except for a modest line in the west. The dark cloud leans heavily on the horizon’s border of clear bright lemon sky.

On Stephen’s day the starlings, speckled breac, gather at a seaside cafe, balancing on the glass fence, tirling and whistling with their greenbluenavyblack feathers lifting, imitating the squeal of the gull surfing the strong southerly wind, whitebright against the blue sky. The wind blows the dog’s shiny ears inside out.

Na crotaigh dheireanacha os comhair an earraigh

A new year’s eve sunset in the gulf-streamed southsouthwest of this island: the sky behind the trees bluegrey except for a blurred pink column, an inverted triangle ending in a bleeding orange half-circle. The light crisps the tops of neighbouring clouds with shavings of flame-pink.

Μεσάνυχτα. A bell rings in the cool mild night. The diffused light of the half-clouded moon reflects sheerly, softly on the estuary. The southern sky is pale, like the western sky at midnight at the summer solstice. The clouds amass in the horizon but the circumpolar zone shows a few stars and asterisms: honey-coloured Capella, Perseus faint behind clouds, copper Mars and Orion hanging in the southeast.

The old bronze bell is rung by the farmer for exactly two minutes. It is deep and long, with only a small ring for a handle. Around the outside it’s decorated with embossed dancing figures and a Celtic knot trail. It was pulled from a shipwreck by another farmer, diving for salvage, well over sixty years ago.

Fireworks go off in neighbouring villages; low blasts and dull flashes of light in the cloudy horizon. The noise wakes a curlew, one of the hundred and fifty breeding pairs left, and it makes a gentle complaint into the night.

On the first night of the new year, like the poet long ago who stayed up all night listening to the now-silenced nightingale, I stand in moonlight and listen to the bubbling of one of na crotaigh dheireanacha. The moon is reflected in a puddle, quivering like it did in that long-dead infant’s eyes. Moonlight glows the edges of the ferns and dead bracken spilling from the wet hedgerows; a livestock animal whuffs and stomps lightly, invisible in the field beyond the roadbank, Sirius sparkling just above it. The whitethorn trees pattern black branches in a network against the sky, while the curlew bubbles and an oystercatcher squips from the estuary.

The clouds are swift and pale. They mute and unmute the full moon as they sweep over it in the soft night wind, pearlescent fluffy grey, refracting a rainbow around the moonglow. The starred sky left behind as the clouds are blown past looks washed and clean.