Take all my Loves my Love by The Linnet's Wings

Take All My Loves, My Love

Veil of darkness, veil of light Veil of bliss and olden blight. Veil of sages and stage fright. Veils that fall in spring’s sweet flight.

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n placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt—a wind to freeze; Sad patience—joyous energies; Humility—yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity—reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob’s mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel—Art.

Herman Melville ( August 1, 1819 – September 28, 1891

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“Advertisement” THE SORROW POETS IN ACTION Wilfred Owen Rupert Brooke Julian Grenfell Charles Hamilton Sorley William Noel Hodgson Alan Seeger Edward Wyndham Tennant Arthur Graeme West Ernst Stadler Alfred Lichtenstein Robert Ernest Vernede Francis Ledwidge Hed Wyn E. Alan Mackintosh John McCrae Isaac Rosenberg Philip Bainbrigge Robert Ziege Alfred Lichtensteinl 1914-1918 -TLW, 2018

Bill West, Stephen Zelnick Oonah Joslin Pippa Little, Marcus Bales James Graham Tina Cole Tom Sheehan Kathleen Thorpe J S Fuller John C. Mannone Caroline Hardaker Megan Denese Mealor, Lesley Timms Tina Cole Barry Charman

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A Glimpse Lines Written in Early Spring I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man.

A glimpse through an interstice caught, Of a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar-room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark’d seated in a corner, Of a youth who loves me and whom I love, silently approaching and seating himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, A long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and oath and smutty jest, There we two, content, happy in being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word. Walt Whitman (1819–1892)

Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; And ’tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure:— But the least motion which they made It seemed a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there. If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Nature’s holy plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man? William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

WIZARDRY Sonnet 40:

Take all my loves, my love, yea, take them all: What hast thou then more than thou hadst before? No love, my love, that thou mayst true love call— All mine was thine before thou hadst this more. Then if for my love thou my love receivest, I cannot blame thee for my love thou usest; But yet be blamed if thou this self deceivest By wilful taste of what thyself refusest. I do forgive thy robb’r y, gentle thief, Although thou steal thee all my poverty; And yet love knows it is a greater grief To bear love’s wrong than hate’s known injury. Lascivious grace, in whom all ill well shows, Kill me with spites, yet we must not be foes. William Shakespeare (1554-1616)

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DUE OUT SOON

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With spring to hand her friends plot /to add ingredients to winter´s painted plot

THE LINNET´S WINGS

“Fallen Eagles” A Coming of age collection by BRUCE HARRIS

Table Of Contents Fallen Eagles

Hour of the Wolf

Pictures of Paula

The Lampedusa Passage

Making the Grades

First Night

The Bard of Brookvale

Millie Elliott – Learning the Drill

Being Desdemona

The High Dive

Word of Mouth

The Judas Tree

Planes of Paper, Dreams of Smoke High Tide

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December 2017

We walked through the grounds

A dinner table stands,

in daylight. Saw the trailing wires,

on the drenched croquet lawn,

of cold, vacant fairy lights

a chair overturned. In anger?

and myriad dangling droplets,

A moss-covered bed, laced with leaves,

of rain, tentative,

haunted by long rotted lovers.

hanging from boughs and cables

Mouldy books strewn over mulch,

in the foggy afternoon.

a wardrobe door, to Narnia maybe. I imagine it tonight,

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transformed by magic forms and flares, son et lumière. We reach the country fair, rides and booths, canvas-covered. nestled in the castle’s shade. Tarpaulins mute the magic until twilight fades to night and fairy time sparkles. Retracing our steps, we wind each other up, get tangled yet again, and trip fall and sprawl on wires of our own. Hand grabs hand for steadiness, not joy or passion. And yet, our own grey gubbins still carry currents, charge our lights, chase darkness from the night. Our plain and naked bulbs will shine and flare, bright against the squid-ink sky. Title: Down the Rabbit Hole © 2019, MLF, Linnet Design

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Should you ask about these stories? About these legends and traditions, With the odors of the forest With the dew and damp of meadows, With the curling smoke of wigwams, With the rushing of great rivers, With their frequent repetitions, And their wild reverberations Like the music found in phrases And the pictures found in symbols Should you ask me then I´d tell you Go and buy the “Hiawatha...

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“Lives of great men all remind us, we can make our lives sublime and, departing, leave behind us, footprints on the sand of time” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hiawatha

“A LINNET´S WINGS” CLASSIC

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POETRY:

A literary work in which the expression of feelings and ideas is given intensity by the use of distinctive style and rhythm; poems collectively or as a genre of literature.

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PROSE: Words that elicit feelings create effects “Mockingbirds don’t do one thing except make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat up people’s gardens, don’t nest in corn cribs, they don’t do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That’s why it’s a sin to kill a mockingbird.” – Harper Lee, “To Kill a Mockingbird”

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All rights reserved No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical reviews and certain other noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, mail the publisher at: thelinnetswings@gmail.com ISBN: 978-1-9164622-7-4 March 2019 First Edition 03/2019 Book and Cover Design: MLF, 2019

Frontispiece: The Swans on Lough Owel: PS, MLF, 2018

The Linnet´s Wings Other Publication

"The Song of Hiawatha" by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ISBN 1 3: 978-1 4801 76423- https://www.amazon.com/dp/1480176427 "The House that Jack Built" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 483977669

Chapbooks

"One Day Tells Its Tale to Another" by Nonnie Augustine ISBN-1 3: 978-1 4801 86354 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1482730995 "About the Weather-- Spring Trending" by Marie Lynam Fitzpatrick ISBN-1 3: 978-0993049330 "Disabled Monsters" by John C. Mannone ISBN-1 3:978-1 522869504 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993049389 "Three Pounds of Cells" by Oonah V Joslin ISBN-1 3: 978-0993049378 https://www.amazon.com/dp/0993049370

Poetry and Photography

"This Crazy Urge to Live" by Bobby Steve Baker ISBN-1 3: 978-099304909

Short Story Collections

"The Guy Thing" by Bruce Harris ISBN-1 3: 978-1 98111 6409 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1981116400

Poetry Series

Contributors´ Quarterly Spring Poetry, 201 5 ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 2051 225 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1512051225 Spring Poetry, "Ghosts," 201 6 ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 7567637 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1517567637 Autumn Poets, 201 5, ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 91 57827 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1519157827 Autumn Poets," There´s Magic in the Pictures" 201 6 ISBN-1 3: 978-1 537361 659 https://www.amazon.es/dp/1537361651 Summer Poets, 201 5 ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 4761 71 7 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1514761718 Summer Poets, Just Like "Peer Gynt" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 53286511 4 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1 533245886

Christmas Series

The Linnet´s Wings: "A Christmas Canzonet" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 51 9581 686 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1519581688 The Linnet´s Wings: "A Christmas Canzonet" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 540454935 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1540454932 A Christmas Canzonet: "Dreamers" ISBN-1 3: 978-1 977809070 https://www.amazon.com/dp/1 977809073 Poem on the Wind: Art and Poetry Series "Purple Kisses" by Priya Prithviraj ISBN-1 3: 978-1 978203266

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TABLE OF CONTENTS Art, Herman Melville 5 Masters on Form, 8 Love´s Philosophy 9 Enchanted Garden at Belsay by Ceinwen Hayden 12

PART ONE

The Scent on the Wind Classic Artists, Van Gogh Summary 28 A Marker Made of Rain, Barry Charman 30 Psalms, Stephen Zelnick 34 Narratives of New Netherland 1570-1970, Sean Farragher 50 Queen Cardium, Bill West 60 Fallen Eagles , Bruce Harris 64 Grandfather Johnny Igoe: Spellbinder Remembered, Tom Sheehan 79 Classic Yeats 85 What Fruit She Bears, Judith A Lawrence 89

PART TWO

You Make a Drawing of your Breath 94 Enchanted Lands, Oonah V Joslin 96 Voices from a Near Dimension, Oonah V Joslin 98 Of Trick Shots and Empty Pockets, for Morgan, rp Verlaine 102 The Haunting of Niall of the 9 Hostages, Ann Egan 104 Niall - Hostage of Fantasy, Ann Egan 106 Niall Ponders on the Tenth Hostage, Ann Egan 109 Olfactory Ghost, Miki Byrne 113 Winter Lane, Tom Sheehan 115 I Have Roots, Miki Byrne 117 The Orchard Hour, James G. Piatt 119 The Space Between, Ron. Lavalette 121 The Phantom Trout, Tom Sheehan 122 Abandoned Jumper, Dolores Duggan 125 remembrance, Dolores Duggan 127 Library Reading Room, Jan Wiezorek 129 Where is my Haunting, Jo Ann Newton 130 Driving to the Dementia Convention Anne Donnellan 132 The Dream of the Roscommon Emigrant, John Igoe, 135

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Editors for the Issue Managing Editor Marie Fitzpatrick Senior Editor Bill West Poetry Editor Oonah Joslin Web and Database Peter Gilkes

Design Stopping by Design:

Carla Martin-Wood

Carla Martin - Wood debuts her photographic art in this issue. Her work has appeared in The Linnet’s Wings a number of times in the past. A widely published poet since 1978, she has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize more than a dozen times, for Best of the Net twice, and is listed in Poets & Writers. Her most recent full-length book is The Witch on Yellowhammer Hill (The 99% Press, 2016). Carla’s chapbook, Garden of Regret (Pudding House Publications Chapbook Series, 2009), resides in the Special Collections & University Archives at Stanford University, contributed by the renowned Russian poet, essayist and dramatist, Yevgeny Yevtushenko.

Judith A. Lawrence

Judith A. Lawrence is a self-taught artist, poet/writer, and the editor/publisher of River Poets Journal. She is currently final editing her memoir, “What Fruit She Bears,” a second book of short stories, “Uncharted Territories,” and a book of Lune poems with art. Several chapbooks of her poetry have been published, as well as fiction/memoir/art in various anthologies, chapbooks, online and in print.

Offices

Online: The Linnet´s Wings Submission Office Design: Motril, Andalucia, Espana Publishing: Corkaree, Mullingar, Ireland. Print Layout: MLF, 2019

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Snow Babies, Oxford, 2019

PHOTOSHOP

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© 2019, MLF O´Henry at the Lake 29 The Crowning of Skulls 51 Faeries and Monsters 96 The Edge of the World 108 Apple Picking 118 Hay Makers 120 Clif Jumpers, La Chucha 124 Burying the Dead 126 Graveyards, 131 Feeding the Swans 132

PHOTOGRAPHY

© 2019, Carla Martin – Wood A trinity of roses 9 Mother , Dorice LaFaye Gunn, goes to Ireland, at last 94 Through space, through time 98 Into the vortex 100 Reaching for spring 103 moonseafire 104 moonseafire - 2 106 Attar of roses 112 Nostalgia 116

ART

The Cockle Scraper 61 Scottish Munros 64 The Lake Isle of Innisfree 78 City Stoop -Judith A. Lawrence 88

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“With A Geometry OF SUNBEAMS The Soul Lays A Foundation For Nature” Emerson

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Part One The Scent on the Wind Classic Artists: Van Gogh Summary 28 A Marker Made of Rain by Barry Charman 30 Psalms by Stephen Zelnick 34 LW Archive: Narratives of New Netherland 1570-1970 by Sean Farragher 50 Queen Cardium by Bill West 60 Fallen Eagles by Bruce Harris 64 Grandfather Johnny Igoe: Spellbinder Rememberedby Tom Sheehan 79 Classic Yeats 85 Heaven, Hell, Damnation, and Brother George by Judith A Lawrence 89

VINCENT The Linnet´s Wings

CLASSIC ARTISTS

10 FACTS

• Vincent was named after his grandfather and his stillborn brother who died one year before Van Gogh was born. • Van Gogh was 27 years old when he painted his first camvas. • Vincent painted flowers, landscapes and himself, because he was too poor to pay models. • Van Gogh suffered from temporal lobe epilepsy, a chronic neurological condition characterized by recurrent, unprovoked seizures. • Vincent painted “The Starry Night” while staying in an asylum in Saint-Remy-deProvence, France. • In a period of ten years, Van Gogh made approximately 900 paintings. • His brother Theo, at his side when he died, said that Vincent’s last words were “La tristesse durera toujours,” which means “the sadness will last forever.” • Vincent Van Gogh visually depicted turbulence, an incredibly complex (and still unsolved) mathematical principle in several paintings during a particularly chaotic time in his life. • Vincent only sold one painting during his lifetime.

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O´Henry at the Lake MLF : 2019

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Photo: The Color of Rain by Judith A. Lawrence

by Barry Charman an’t hurt to ask, Jim thought as he sent off the email. It’d taken him a while to find the grave. His mother had remembered all she could, but it had been years since she’d been able to visit it. He’d had everything double checked, then he’d written his brother’s name on a handmade cross and put it in the ground himself. Damn groundskeeper had come along a week later and mown it down. After this, Jim had said he’d get a headstone. The cheapest he could find

was already in the hundreds, then there was the cemetery fee-

I can afford an inscription, he thought. How much could it cost? All he needed to know was how much more it would be. Brian McKenna. January 7th 1970 – January 7th 1970.

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Just some words on a stone, only permanent marker he’d leave in the world. Jim had chased up the details with the council, found his brother’s unmarked grave right where it was meant to be. Five feet behind Tom Tanner, one grave to the right of Eleanor Jones. It had felt like he was following a map, except this was something far more valuable than buried treasure; the weight of a life long past. Brian had gone before he’d even been born. It felt strange now, trying to connect, to reach out in some way to his brother. It was a thought that had both immense weight and none. They shared the same middle name. She’d let that slip earlier, like it was nothing. Funny thing to have never known before... Jim was thinking of that, the bond that there’d never been, when the reply to his email came. He blinked. It was the smallest, most modest headstone he could find. How much? Per letter? He tried to think of a word, letter or number that could be omitted; but none of it could be lost. What little there was, was the entirety of his existence. Jim rubbed his face, wearily. He knew there was a lot of money to be made in death, but this was beyond him. He stared out the window. Rain splashed like little feet across the glass. Where are they going? he wondered, absently. She didn’t have any mementos. No photographs. These days they did tiny plaster casts of the feet. A 3D printed face that became a sculpture you could kiss. All sorts of things for you to hold onto. And he couldn’t afford 40 characters on a bloody stone. Who was he kidding, he couldn’t afford the stone. She’d understand. Finding him was enough. He could always make another cross, and another. He could make as many as they could destroy. Brian would understand… He let that thought go, surprised by how it caught inside. You’re my brother, mate, that’s enough. Jim watched the little feet run across the glass, watched them run until they faded, until they ran out of sky. ***

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Day Break: And birds were tweeting blows With wind that settled in night´s soot. Their song was piercing ice with prose That night had packed in metric foot. And there was dawn awake and chilled! And Then

In the Dock Anum Sattar Peter Feng Ron. Lavalette Patrick Thoren Erickson Beate Sigriddaughter Tom Sheehan Ceinwen Haydon Dolores Duggan Lesley Timms C. Mannheim

Susan Tepper Kandy Abuelita Mochilera Bruce Harris Ramesh Avadhani pavle radonic Oonah Joslin Megan Denese Mealor Tom Sheehan James Graham Jeff Jeppesen Michael Wooff Akeith Walters Arthur Callender

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“ADVERTISEMENT” Blackbird Dock www.amazon.com/dp/1723303941 Two song birds seized the sun: Each took an end To tug and pull the rain-bow blend And up Dock flew to run And flow across the way. And from her deck the sweetest song , A blackbird’s song’ Sailed on the breath of day

D The

ock

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[King David – warrior, outlaw, musician, ecstatic dancer, poet, fornicator, murderer, master politician and sneak – was beloved beyond all others by God. Whatever he was, he was always shockingly alive.]

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by Stephen Zelnick To insist that Psalm 137 is not vengeful is to forget Zion and its sufferings. When we are done with holocausts, we can afford to mistake the ferocity of Psalm 137 for something sweeter.

The Book of Psalms includes 150 poems written from the 10th C. to the 5th C. BCE. Although Psalms is attributed to King David, scholars doubt he penned more than a few, if any. For Jews, Christians, and Muslims, these poems address a range of experience -- triumphs and calamities – pursuing God’s perfection. We expect hymns celebrating God’s grandeur, praise on parade, and some do. However, Psalms also explores our wavering faith, anger, vanity, even despair. Like Shakespeare’s Sonnets, the psalms voice events of heart and mind. They are rhythmic, sonorous, with memorable language. Less obvious, many enact urgent dramas. As with much of the Bible, the psalms are so revered, that few imagine them related to our lives. Clever modern people toss the bible aside, preferring testimonies documented by science and hard objects – that choice has not made us kinder and more self-aware,

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[Shepherd as Christ lacks the forcefulness of the Hebrew shepherd of the 23rd Psalm] Psalm 23 The 23rd Psalm is perfectly familiar, yet harder-grained than we notice. The Lord as shepherd is commonplace, but what do shepherds do? Often portrayed as benevolent, the shepherd is forceful and punishes his sheep. He makes them do what they otherwise would not because it is good for them. We appreciate forceful care when we have lost our way. How forceful? The shepherd employs his rod and staff. Sheep are wayward and stupid, so the good shepherd must tug and strike to drive them to the right path. When we go wrong, we suffer; it is God’s way of reminding us we have strayed. Afflictions are His guidance. Reward comes in the right path. “Still waters”, unlike babbling brooks, run deep. The Lord restores the parched soul with abundant refreshment, a poignant image for a desert people. 1: The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2: He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3: He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name’s sake. 4: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD forever. (King James Version) God’s bond with His people is certain; their success supports His fame. Fear of the evils that might befall us during our journey through “the valley of the shadow of death” is not overcome by a promise of heaven – this is not a Christian poem. Life, here and in this world, is full of of terrors; they can be met only by faith that God provides immediate protection and steels the spirit for life’s struggles. God prepares a luxurious table for us, all the sweeter because our enemies look on in dismay. Vengeance provides the special sauce as the victorious Hebrew relishes his blessings while antagonizing his neighbors. Although the King James Version imagines us dwelling “in the house of the Lord forever” -- a fine Christian, other-worldly prospect -- in Hebrew, the psalm says, “for many days” sometimes rendered “my whole life long.” Psalm 23 is more in-this-world than other-worldly.

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[Who needs the media commentary of Carl Sagan and Neil de Grasse Tyson, when God’s creation announces its grandeur … and without words?] Psalm 19 Psalm 19 would not be out of place in Hamlet or Pope’s Essay on Man. It is a sure-handed, declarative, unflinching celebration hymn. Is God’s grandeur a mystery? Regard every day the miracles around us! In the night sky and in the cycle of day and night, God the craftsman demonstrates His skills. God’s creation needs no boasting words or explanations but tells its tale directly.

The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands. 2 Day after day they pour forth speech; night after night they reveal knowledge. 3 They have no speech, they use no words; no sound is heard from them. 4 Yet their voice goes out into all the earth, their words to the ends of the world. In the heavens God has pitched a tent for the sun. 5 It is like a bridegroom coming out of his chamber, like a champion rejoicing to run his course. 6 It rises at one end of the heavens and makes its circuit to the other; nothing is deprived of its warmth. 1

The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul. The statutes of the Lord are trustworthy, making wise the simple. 8 The precepts of the Lord are right, giving joy to the heart. The commands of the Lord are radiant, giving light to the eyes. 9 The fear of the Lord is pure, enduring forever. The decrees of the Lord are firm, and all of them are righteous. 7

They are more precious than gold,

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than much pure gold; they are sweeter than honey, than honey from the honeycomb. 11 By them your servant is warned; in keeping them there is great reward. 12 But who can discern their own errors? Forgive my hidden faults. 13 Keep your servant also from willful sins; may they not rule over me. Then I will be blameless, innocent of great transgression. May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer. (New International Version) 14

The poet’s spirit is aflame with what he sees. His images are bold, verging on Nature worship, forbidden to Hebrews: Dawn is a bridegroom emerging from his chamber, “a champion rejoicing to run his course.” The sun paces the heavens with the power of a heroic young man; after a night of love-making, the hero runs his race in the celestial stadium. Humankind enjoys the heavenly splendor, the daily drama of the sun’s course across the sky, but in addition, God shaped our minds to grasp this in dynamic images. Poets always fail proscriptions against graven images, against figuring God through the senses, the one world we know. Before the tedious procession of words, there is the flash of images that brings all this home to us. God’s heaven demonstrates His creative force, as does our erotic and athletic joy, and the secret other languages that drive home God’s handiwork. While thankful for bodily joy and imagination, the psalmist identifies a more surprising gift. The material world and our imaginative apprehension of it are wonders, but God’s law is His supreme gift. Heathens experience the glory of physical being, but for Jews God’s law supplies the scaffolding for freedom. The law, so often resented as limiting our freedom, is precious beyond measure: “refreshing the soul”; “giving wisdom to the simple”; “rejoicing the heart”; and “enlightening the eye.” A just law makes us rejoice, but unjust statutes make us bitter. The law, considered abstract and bloodless, is rarely the focus of poetry. While the law is a marvel of intelligence, the law also entices us to consider the confused creature we are and guidance we need. But how does the law “refresh the soul” and “rejoice the heart”? God’s law is “perfect,” “trustworthy”, “right”, and “clear.” Our world swarms with possibilities, endless and multiplying desert pathways, headed everywhere. In this anxiety of multiplicity, God’s law is certain. The soul sinks easily into doubt; the law’s perfection revives the spirit with comforting reassurance. What better proof of a loving God; and how rarely we notice! The law warns us of errors, rewards us for following the true path, and supports our best interests and those of the community. For the psalmist, the law’s wealth is beyond gold; it is sweeter than honey from the honeycomb. Psalm 19 thinks sensually, savoring the law’s sweetness on the psalmist’s tongue.

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[How odd – the law is sweeter than honey from the honeycomb! How has this thought come to seem obvious and natural?] Amid this meditation, there is an astonishing claim, that in contemplating God’s law the spirit soars, rejoicing the heart. God’s law differs in this from man’s legalisms, mostly dreary and unfair, and too often arming a priesthood or setting only mild limits to the aggression and greed of the wealthy and powerful. Mosaic law draws lines in the desert sands. “To honor one’s parents,” parents too must be honorable. A prohibition against lying pre-supposes a general intolerance to falsehood. People reduced to servitude have families and family feeling, and masters bear obligations to serve them well. This is lost in our jurisprudence of bits and pieces. Imagine the law school class where the test for the law is whether it brings peace and understanding to those who are subject to it. Despite the law’s majesty, we go wrong: “But who can discern their own errors?” We are devious beings, lawyering God’s law to license our lawlessness. In our arrogance, we concoct laws for ourselves and misconstrue God’s laws, despite their perfection. Our inventiveness breeds our treachery. Psalm 19’s closing prayer brings this observation into focus: “May these words of my mouth and this meditation of my heart be pleasing in your sight, /Lord, my Rock and my Redeemer.” The psalmist asks that his words and thoughts cohere so that neither casts a shadow of difference upon the other; for only then would God accept them. This is the hard rock of being, of our re demption from lawlessness that otherwise overwhelms us.

Psalm 39 Our desire for the excellence of the good burdens our lives. The speaker in Psalm 19 hungers for perfection, inspired by God’s skill and law. Contemplating the perfect language of things, the speaker wrestles with the deviousness of consciousness and the gap between thoughts and words. A slip-shod life would be less troublesome; but once we grasp God’s magnificence and perfect coherence, how can we embrace something less? Jews joke they wish He had chosen others since bearing God’s demands for moral perfection is torture. In Psalm 39, one of the darkest, the poet extends this complaint and implores the Lord to leave him alone and let him breathe. Psalm 39 indicts God for afflicting our bod[ Ten Commandments: law beyond dispute] ies, leaving us ignorant of what this pain and terror means, and then inducing guilt in us when we complain. Like Job and Ecclesiastes, Psalm 39 supposes our lives may be meaningless, and that God may be more hindrance than help bearing the absurdity of our existence. The speaker’s voice is cross-hatched with frustration; listen closely and hear Jackie Mason.

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[This Greeting Card sticker entirely mistakes the force and terror of Psalm 39.]

I said, ‘I will guard my ways that I may not sin with my tongue; I will keep a muzzle on my mouth as long as the wicked are in my presence.’ 2 I was silent and still; I held my peace to no avail; my distress grew worse, 3 my heart became hot within me. While I mused, the fire burned; then I spoke with my tongue: 1

‘Lord, let me know my end, and what is the measure of my days; let me know how fleeting my life is. 5 You have made my days a few handbreadths, and my lifetime is as nothing in your sight. Surely everyone stands as a mere breath. Selah 6 Surely everyone goes about like a shadow. Surely for nothing they are in turmoil; they heap up, and do not know who will gather. 4

‘And now, O Lord, what do I wait for? My hope is in you. 8 Deliver me from all my transgressions. Do not make me the scorn of the fool. 9 I am silent; I do not open my mouth, for it is you who have done it. 10 Remove your stroke from me; I am worn down by the blows of your hand. 7

‘You chastise mortals in punishment for sin, consuming like a moth what is dear to them; surely everyone is a mere breath. Selah 11

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‘Hear my prayer, O Lord, and give ear to my cry; do not hold your peace at my tears. For I am your passing guest, an alien, like all my forebears. 13 Turn your gaze away from me, that I may smile again, before I depart and am no more.’ (New Standard Revised Version)

As with most poems, psalms require us to ascertain the setting and situation that make the poet’s voice so urgent. The narrative of Psalm 39 is peculiar and unsettling. Until well into it, we cannot understand the speaker’s intensity. Until verse 10, we do not know that the speaker has suffered a stroke, a scourge, a plague; a blow so disabling that he thinks now only upon his mortality and the emptiness of life. From the dizzying ledge of death, life has no meaning: the wealth we gather so feverishly goes to others; our beauty is blasted by illness; we are poor sojourners groping our way as aliens to an inscrutable God, like strangers in a foreign land. From his sickbed, the speaker condemns the injustice of his suffering. He has been honorable towards God, keeping quiet his misery, silencing his doubts, both in the presence of the wicked, who enjoy boasting a victory for their cynicism, and among the good, who might lose heart. A valiant soldier, he has held his peace; accepting that his affliction is God’s doing and makes sense only in some way he cannot grasp. We are mist, a breath, mere vanity; we pass like phantoms, chasing empty desires. Robert Alter’s translation captures the spare energy of the speaker’s grim fears: Hear my prayer, O Lord, To my cry hearken, To my tears be not deaf. For I am a sojourner with You, A new settler like all my fathers. Look away from me, that I may catch my breath Before I depart and am not. In his distress, the speaker begs God to hear him. If God will not justify this suffering, then the stricken man asks that He look away and dispel the sufferer’s feeling sinful for complaining … at least allow him to breathe easy, find a way to smile, relieve his anxieties before he vanishes. Relief comes only with his evaporation into nothingness, a torment better endured without God’s disapproving gaze.

[ Conquering Judeo-Muslim-Christian armies carry the spirit of Psalm 46 into the bloody horror of war.]

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Psalm 46 Psalm 46 is a joyous battle hymn. It celebrates a warrior God who insures His people’s victory against their enemies. In its famous words: “God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble.” Earthquake, tsunami, volcanic eruption – none will inspire fear to a people God protects. The City of God rests safe amidst the river’s turbulent destruction; settled in bedrock; “she shall not be moved.” 1: God is our refuge and strength, a very present help in trouble. 2: Therefore will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea; 3: Though the waters thereof roar and be troubled, though the mountains shake with the swelling thereof. Selah. 4: There is a river, the streams whereof shall make glad the city of God, the holy place of the tabernacles of the most High. 5: God is in the midst of her; she shall not be moved: God shall help her, and that right early. 6: The heathen raged, the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted. 7: The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. 8: Come, behold the works of the LORD, what desolations he hath made in the earth. 9: He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire. 10: Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth. 11: The LORD of hosts is with us; the God of Jacob is our refuge. Selah. (King James Version) The hymn is martial and aggressive. Although “the heathen raged, [and] the kingdoms were moved: he uttered his voice, the earth melted.” The promise assures that war ends in peace: “He maketh wars to cease unto the end of the earth; he breaketh the bow, and cutteth the spear in sunder; he burneth the chariot in the fire.” The Psalm concludes in God’s own voice, assuring His people that the Covenant with Jacob remains firm and unchanging: “Be still, and know that I am God: I will be exalted among the heathen, I will be exalted in the earth.” God promises that he will subdue the heathen nations and make them worship the one true God, bringing universal peace. Psalm 46 reminds us that the psalms are musical performances, choral and instrumental works, obviously of different musical treatment, depending on their themes. As quiet, and inward, and steeped in odd tonalities as Psalm 39 would be, Psalm 46 is public and rousing, with thunderous instrumental support in a major key, as is our own “Battle Hymn of the Republic.” The “Battle Hymn” in its brilliant imagery depicts God fighting alongside His human agents: “He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of Wrath are stored; He hath loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible Swift sword;…” (Julia Ward Howe, 1861). While mute on means, Psalm 46 asserts that the long arc of history belongs to God, that methods are beside the point. God will provide the five smooth stones, He will bring David to the battle field, and David will slay Goliath. Psalm 46 sings out its rousing confidence that the enemies of God’s people will be overcome, and the City of God will prevail and flourish. Psalm 55 Psalm 55, in contrast, is the troubled lament of an embattled and subjected Israel. The enemies are within the gates, and bitter factionalism has set the power-seekers against the pious. The speaker invokes God’s help against his antagonists who torment him and the others who oppose the new regime. He suffers “fear and trembling” and wishes for the “wings of the dove” to escape his suffering. The wicked patrol the ramparts and create terror and deceit everywhere. The psalm depicts a “1984” totalitarian culture, where guile and threat

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have silenced those who respect the Lord. Worse yet, the source of the speaker’s lament is a friend who once worshipped with him at the temple. The speaker addresses this traitor who betrayed their friendship and the community of the faithful.

[Big Brother looks out from the parapets, vigilant against the enemy within, keeping watch upon a terrorized city where brother betrays brother. How old is this nightmare?]

Hearken, O God, to my prayer, and do not ignore my plea. Listen well to me and answer me. In my complaint I sway and moan. From the sound of the enemy, from the crushing force of the wicked when they bring mischief down upon me and in fury harass me, my heart quails within me and death-terrors fall upon me, Fear and trembling enter me, and horror envelops me. And I say “Would I had Wings like a dove. I would fly off and find rest. Look, I would wander far away, And lodge in the wilderness, selah Would make haste to a refuge for me From the streaming wind and storm.” O Master, confound, split their tongue, for I have seen outrage and strife in the town; day and night, they go round it on its walls, and mischief and misdeeds within it, Disaster within it, guile and deceit never part from its square. No enemy insults me, that I might bear it, no foe boasts against me, that I might hide from him. But you – a man to my measure, my companion and my familiar,

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with whom together we shared sweet counsel, in the house of our God in elation we walked. May death come upon them. May they go down to Sheol alive. For in their homes, in their midst, are evils. But I call to God, and the Lord rescues me. Evening and morning and noon I complain and I moan, and He hears my voice. He has ransomed my life unharmed from my battle, For many were against me – Ishmael and Jalam and the dweller in the east, who never will change and do not fear God. He reached out his hand against his allies, Profaned his own pact. His mouth was smoother than butter – and battle in his heart. His words were softer than oil, yet they were drawn swords. Cast your lot on the Lord and he will support you. He will never let the righteous stumble. And you, O God, bring them down to the pit of destruction. Men of bloodshed and deceit will not finish half their days. But I shall trust in You. Robert Alter Translation The speaker calls down God’s vengeance upon those who have corrupted the peace and harmony of His law. The speaker’s anger is emphatic: “God shall hear, and afflict them, even he that abideth of old.” But amid this political condemnation, he returns to the heart of his dismay, the betrayal by a friend. The speaker wishes to keep his complaint general, but the pain of his friend’s treachery keeps erupting into his formal supplication to God: “The words of his mouth were smoother than butter, but war was in his heart: his words were softer than oil, yet were they drawn swords.” The speaker appeals to God to punish the enemies of His peace and civic harmony, a political matter. However, his friend’s treachery rises both as emblem of civil discord and source of his bitter sorrow, a very personal matter. God’s law upholds the inner peace we seek. The law and our desires seek the same ends; the personal and the political cohere. The psalms express the human measure of the law; the dawning recognition of what this means emotionally. The speaker of Psalm 55 wishes to organize his complaints within a formal framework. However, his friend’s personal betrayal strikes him more forcefully than his friend’s betrayal of God and God’s community. His friend and he grew up together, they prayed together in the temple, they were one person; and now this friend exercises terror and guile against him, having broken the covenant with God but, more important, the covenant of friendship.

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Psalm 137 Psalms are poems, not only because they have meter and imagery and elevated language but because they tell a story and express emotions. We go wrong in sanctifying the Psalms and missing the human drama. Psalm 137, for example, could be domesticated into a fervent statement of allegiance to Zion. But the force of Psalm 137 is its anger, and we can appreciate that appeal to violence only by reconstructing the circumstances of the poem, as the poem insists that we do.

[As is so often the case, this peaceful image betrays the harsh moment enacted in the Psalm.]

By the rivers of Babylon, we sat down, there we sat, oh we wept, when we recalled Zion. On the poplars there we hung up our lyres. For there our captors had asked of us words of song, and our plunderers – rejoicing: “Sing us from Zion’s songs.” How can we sing a song of the Lord on foreign soil? Should I forget you, Jerusalem, may my right hand wither, may my tongue cleave to my palate if I do not recall you, If I do not set Jerusalem above my chief joy. Recall, O Lord, the Edomites, on the day of Jerusalem, saying: “Raze it, raze it, to its foundation!” Daughter of Babylon the despoiler happy who pays you back in kind,

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for what you did to us. Happy who seizes and smashes your infants against the rock. Robert Alter Translation The Edomites, ally to Babylon, have destroyed Jerusalem. The newly enslaved Israelites are being marched by their captors to foreign soil. Along the way, their enemies require of them a joyful song, for which Israel is famous. The Babylonians chose carefully the survivors of that holocaust, garnering people of talent in crafts and arts. This group is made up of musicians, carrying their lyres with them. They seem to be women since their curse is aimed at their counterparts, the daughters of Babylon. The request of the Babylonian captor is outrageous, and the speaker suitably enraged. The captives bravely resist; hanging their instruments in the poplar trees, they refuse their masters’ cruel request. They are adamant; the hand that would pluck the strings should wither, and the tongue that would sing, forgetting Zion, should stick to the roof of the singer’s mouth. This fierce devotion is more intense than joy or solace. The psalm’s conclusion is shocking. The revenge recalls what they have witnessed and suffered; the cruel murder of their infants, shattered upon the rocks before their eyes. The women bless those who will slaughter the children of Babylonian mothers, so they will know what they have done. To preserve the notion of Biblical sweetness -- some insist the cruel image ending Psalm 137 is not vengeful – is to forget Zion and its sufferings. When we are done with holocausts, we can afford to mistake the ferocity of Psalm 137 for something sweeter.

[This verse is not a bit of biblical wisdom but a near-mad cry of mothers frantic with the hellish images of their children smashed by enemy soldiers. Whose child is pictured here?]

Psalm 139 For those who ask where God is, Psalm 139 answers. The organizing force for good is everywhere; in the womb that forms us, deep in our bones and hearts and mind. God is with us always, and in our most private places. Before we utter a word, God knows what we will say and what we mean by it, even when we would prefer not to. God resides in our pious thoughts and in our hellish ones, too. When our thoughts are dark, God knows what we feel and think, and judges us without evasion. God is the principle and force of truth and goodness, observing and judging our deviant selves. God upholds our better self when we know we are going wrong, even as we cleverly seek to justify our self-betrayal.

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[The surprising intimacy. God’s presence in the most secret places, provides an extraordinary vision of the mystery of our being and our desire to have that make sense.]

1 LORD, you have probed me, you know me: you know when I sit and stand; you understand my thoughts from afar. You sift through my travels and my rest; with all my ways you are familiar. Even before a word is on my tongue, LORD, you know it all. Behind and before you encircle me and rest your hand upon me. Such knowledge is too wonderful for me, far too lofty for me to reach. Where can I go from your spirit? From your presence, where can I flee? If I ascend to the heavens, you are there; if I lie down in Sheol, there you are. If I take the wings of dawn and dwell beyond the sea, Even there your hand guides me, your right hand holds me fast. If I say, “Surely darkness shall hide me, and night shall be my light”— Darkness is not dark for you, and night shines as the day. Darkness and light are but one. II You formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother’s womb. I praise you, because I am wonderfully made; wonderful are your works! My very self you know. My bones are not hidden from you, When I was being made in secret,

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fashioned in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw me unformed; in your book all are written down; my days were shaped, before one came to be. III How precious to me are your designs, O God; how vast the sum of them! Were I to count them, they would outnumber the sands; when I complete them, still you are with me. When you would destroy the wicked, O God, the bloodthirsty depart from me! Your foes who conspire a plot against you are exalted in vain. IV Do I not hate, LORD, those who hate you? Those who rise against you, do I not loathe? With fierce hatred I hate them, enemies I count as my own. Probe me, God, know my heart; try me, know my thoughts. See if there is a wicked path in me; lead me along an ancient path. (National Conference of Catholic Bishops) God is the perfect law, the way we are to live the best version of a human life. Psalm 139 gives voice to conscience, consciousness, and conscientiousness; that is, to the voice within that tells us the truth and shapes the will to live it. Here again the speaker is conflicted. He has sought to hide from God, to escape the burden of goodness and fidelity. But he has found, with much frustration, there is nowhere to hide. God is everywhere and always, but most especially within, the deep reality his ungainly self must somehow obey. He asks: “Probe me, God, know my heart; try me, know my thoughts. See if there is a wicked path in me; lead me along an ancient path.” But the speaker is also bargaining with God, hoping to show he is worthy of the Lord’s favor. He hopes his complete submission will please God and win for him God’s blessing. He invites God to inspect him from the vantage of the depths only the Lord can reach, and then confer upon him the riches only God can give. However, this challenge is presumptuous. As the third stanza recognizes, God’s designs are vast and far beyond our comprehension. The psalm is agonizing, the psalmist’s surrender incomplete; human understanding always falls short of God’s judgment, the dread of Job’s lament and our existential anxiety. The Book of Psalms, for many devout readers, is the victim of respect so suffocating the poems cannot be understood in themselves. They must be made to square with religious teaching and ardent hopes. These lyrics have each a dramatic setting. They gain their power from the drama of being human in specific circumstances, the speaker caught between aspirations to perfection and the travail of being incomplete and subject to vast and incomprehensible forces and events. As with all great poetry, the voices are distinct, and the passions are familiar. They cry out for understanding, and to be freed from the power of piety, and from other uses religion would put them to. ---

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“THE LINNET´S WINGS “ ARCHIVE :2008

Narratives of New Netherland 1570-1970 by Sean Farragher EXCERPT

“I am a viridian swell and a vermilion tempest. I am surly beast and have will to rectify murder; my death and other happenstance makes for irony with miniatures painted without sight in a golden locket never opened and not lost memories of those centuries before whatever instant diseased and bent with pock-marked face to -- how anger stalls without any pleasure or even the protest of strangled fowl. You can watch my stance without eyes and make me move without legs as I am only flood and tempest unbounded by schemes set down as blasphemed physic and truth.” –John Colman (1585-1664)

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Art: The Crowning of Skulls, PS MLF, 2019

Pref ace Prose Poem based on Robert Juet and Sources drawn from the history and environ of New Netherland including that magical land of Human Beings between Ackinsack and Great River in Pavonia. Personas and Documents As essential contradiction Edward Wyman, John Colman, Ska Nee, Lord Simon Colman Seymour, sons and daughters and many others speak unfettered as to the layers that time construed from and within the years 1970 to 1570 with reversed spinning globes and fool jugglers with blessed twisted hands. Every voice is luminous: layers of character without particular history struck bells to reach the last comma dividing centuries and millennia. Chronology was old song without intervals just as we cease to breathe -- while habitual schemes dry in our mouths when water lost cannot be had to make

The Linnet´s Wings red water piss against brown leaves or some beginning reconstruct so we may leap that terrifying wall of birth after death without obvious conceit drowned too young when spars broken and all the fine gobs driven to starve. Such my daily speech as folly writ as it could last until perdition waxed our skull with vermin. General Description of That Part of the World Called New Netherland Strawberries dye the wood red. Sometime in my country at the outward part of river wild flowers so fragrant I stand still not knowing what I am meeting; so many and rich the birds I can scarcely go through them for their whistling. Light can hardly be discerned where they fly; the fox chases them like fowl: Their notes salute the ears of travelers with harmonious discord, and in every pond and brook, green silken frogs warble their un’tuned tunes to hear a part in this music. Instantly I arm myself and rush violently into them never leaving till I have disrobed them of their color turning them into old habit.

___________ “I am viridian swell and a vermillion tempest.”

November 2, 1504,

John Colman Swims the Great River Divide now Called Hudson Before New Netherland When I was a child, I felt murder. There was blood on the stones that leaked through the streets into a great flood. I felt waves and I wanted to die and fail. Mother murdered as I wept. Vermilion clouds treasured me. The dagger did not cut my head clean. The heavens opened to protect my life.

The Linnet´s Wings My Lord Jesus saved my opinion and directed the colors of the winds from ancient space to keep my breath whole as I fell down to the rough gray stones by my homely street. In my lights Viridian sunset open my doors. I could not let my life fall down and become one of those awkward strangers hanging about the shore and muddy streets for an axe that struck off the head of my mother as she watched the vermillion waters of the great river quit. It was a fever. Mother had died five years past in Delft. She was ample vision here as the shadows of her red sand colored eyes loomed on the horizon so I conjured. Savages covered me. I saw the face of murder. I remember how he was struck down by a rock. He would die laughing and I would live. I did not drown. Stuck to the slime caught in the muddy noose I was buried in the earth when I was shaken by furious storm that blew through my spread hands as I held back the surge as only light that is earth green and salmon red can contain on the edge of the bush that borders Great River on the East. That city will be born there. It will strike us dead. I live in all my past escapes as a future specter ready to roll my calm, damp body white with death, and my red eyes alive when I am resurrected in 1970.

Day Two

The tempest struck; the rocks moved. They shift as I spin and I wished for a brief second that the rocks of littoral of this flooded river drove out all the sea demons and bring us back home safe. I know when I drink how anyone is safe if they

The Linnet´s Wings do wish their own end before they are struck with shot, or the axmen or the executioner shows fate to the end may you wish other oaths to keep you safe at least until your teeth are gone. If I had died, how would I have watched Ska Nee give birth? She had entered before my enlistments, Great River had swallowed up and I would never join the circle where wise men talked with their hands and hearts more than words. I understood it all; every flood drowns the man who swims the passage from the isle across to the tall red stones shimmer as antimony. My legs heal. My arms stretch from the sails behind to the ones in front. I get stronger. She who heals stirs at my back and loins with her fat rubbed hands and catches my shiver. She works my legs and sacred parts. She makes me move as she breaks me out of death. When my flesh blackens and I with fever shriek to other savage gods my denial and then yes, I do accept. Curses shift underneath the river of hands. The rain pounds my head slows my stroke. Caught by the cold water, I made me tight when the mist rose from the fire. Fish will be boiled. I entered the brook and soon it was hot and the heat slowed breath. The woman moved her breasts to my mouth slowly and holding my jaw, she feeds me that white blue broth. I am eager. She knows that I cannot exist with civil people. I get stronger every day. Red rolling fire branded clouds before sunrise drift against the back of my hands take them into my lives but I did not hurt. I made it to the broken rocks and lifted my sore shoulders up to drape my body on red moss.

The Linnet´s Wings One small beetle wore his half shell turned over and drifted I realized and found the brown rocks rose above the stumps of a forest of drowned trees. I rushed the shore. I couldn’t stop. Waves pushed at my head. I left Bristol. I left the skin of streets. I left my older first wife wondering if she would jump up when she heard my steps up the path close to the smoke house where we cured the bacon her father fattened. Stones were thrown. The wake of the ripples caught my hands and I was frozen in the water .......... Follows missing pages to the tale kept by his descendant Simon Colman and published in London in 1767

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Narratives of New Netherland

The Rage and Dreams of John Colman On 11 April 1611, the yacht Restless caught the flood and leaving Bristol moorage, my eyes fixed to the rolls and sway of the hot coals of the morning sky that wept black and gray as color stripped became the texture of a terrified dream recalled. I knew it my every day a breath diminished. Every night I stopped to dream the terror of my mother’s murder. I saw wide startled eyes descend from his killing hand to the lever axe and with one downward stroke my own fate as witness. My sister would almost drown in the blood as she nursed from tit and spit back red froth. Mother dragged to the ground by Murder who had gone mad became the template for the wooden ships I would fashion as I lived every day thereafter. I could never forget that deathly face. Mother and Murderer became the same scream. His mouth and eyes stretched from past to present. Terror would become the maps of my discovered 1and as I forgetting their coordinates became thoroughly trapped by that need to right the wrong that made lust mayhem an anthem for my child eyes and voice. Now, I am long past that day, a man with eager arms and back strong in the lifting of the sky and the mocking of God. I cry as in the murderers hall, as now, when I face my own last breathing, everything became black to mold with green and yellow peals as putrefaction crept through my throat to make my dreams scream again as they hit by that calamity become the foretaste of terror made and unmade as oath taken for revenge. Now, back on the docks as we uncoiled the last of the loops that kept us moored to this final place, I stepped up to the clouds and found myself by magic ten leagues above the deck of this ship. I could see myself from that deck as I floated both high into that heat and drawn down I fluttered into the limp, cold decay of my own grave. As I spoke softly to my feeling my bones stretched my legs to discover by their recoil the magic source that unmakes life as we curse dying we assume before our time. As I lifted up, my dreams froze as tar does oak. My body as circular cask unraveled into its steel rings and palsied steps. As I did every night I again live the theater of my mother’s murder. The troll used an axe. He cut her skull into twin parts and a smaller third while I gathered in her wake watched her fall as the blood ran down her arms. As she screamed quickly stilled, her blank face death before death caught the rings

The Linnet´s Wings of my eyes, I was no more after that motion of iron into bone. I walked backward down the close docks towards the marsh where flowers could be gathered. There I made my mother a wreath and bringing it to her bed, as she kept to it in death, the colors of the violence raped by her dishonor, so they said, kept still the muddy waters that would in my dream bring me to my downing. We are forty-two men in the company of rats and our own pestilence. Many will suffer that perdition of death on this journey to the East. Does this dream signify that we will fail to know the pathways to riches and the east? As I write down this speak I count three silver coins and one bronze piece. They were my inheritance. They became with melancholy my breed of knowing. I forget it all as I am covered with the dank sweat of drink and the heat of. I live inside that mask of my mother. I was nine when murdered by demons or as most say a human beast without mouth or teeth. He was flame that fire she said that burns from the inside. I will strip the heat from life. I will keep it out of reach. I will preserve the madness so it can be released as quiet dust or ashes from the dead. In this year of our Lord, 1611, I chart our following winds and tack easy through the Restless sales as this yacht points West by South West towards the end of the rocks and the beginning of the sun. Here now, as we gather in our hope, at that space above that last cloud the English land falls away into the shoals. So many rivers have no bottoms. So many last words before we murder our self on this great adventure. Perhaps now, I can forget the dream. Every calm night I suffer its recoil. My father gathers wood for a fire. Mother speaks her Dutch tongue cursing the night in her drunken fervor. As I watch her kiss strange hands and opening her eyes, she leaps the fires. Suddenly, caught, this man, this demon strikes her skull with an axe. She bleeds that face that murder caught. I cannot forget his scowl. He is a leper of words. His meanings forget themselves and he escapes into the back farms of Bristol and is heard no more. As I watch the sea rise up in a storm that would cost us on this first night two of our crew, I wrote down what I heard when I dreamed or did I dream. I sleep in the crease of her tawny skin. Her hair is thick with fat covering its base to show the strength of her neck. She breathes and slowly I can smell the ocean as the flood rises against those antimony cliffs that stagger down the river towards the bay. Every heron mocks my shadow as they peck at my path. My legs stronger every hour I rise faster up the short cliff and standing inside out looking out over the island where wild beasts keep company with the natives of this place. I am of this place. I cannot leave. I will die here. There is no ocean left to cross. I saw it disappear in that dark dream bred from my mouth when I sucked at that tea she made from some unknown hemp that they gathered as flowers. Every storm has no eyes. How can I see past honorable journals crafted from memory and distances we shift when melancholy stuff us stopping as desire leaves. We age even as we young raise up our hard arms and waving our instrument strut to keep the passion as some past stupor falls down into its own pail to denature as fetid stools beguile the beasts and mock the insects again rides the other stair well I am a stranger to myself. I did not drown. I caught the skin of the rocks and cut, my hand burned I lifted my heart up and pounded Ska Nee as she opened her wings and flew like that crow

The Linnet´s Wings captured from the fantasy and let down into a book where the chronology of ship and being are charted for some noble restoration of the wood. Can we plow our lives back into that life work where as stretching our bowels we find that our aches are not changed by rich rooms to fornicate as we quit again those maids with empty skulls that breed death and pestilence as we speak ourselves to murder that which has no name but the black spots and yellow eyes that freeze the jaw into its death and prize. Any private place can rise up out of waves or born from a lance drive up the back door and make certain we can do this all again swimming from disturbed thunder to bare brook and standing there naked we repeat again in some sexless birth. I do not lie. ---------------

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Byzantium The unpurged images of day recede; The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed; Night resonance recedes, night-walkers’ song After great cathedral gong; A starlit or a moonlit dome disdains All that man is, All mere complexities, The fury and the mire of human veins. Before me floats an image, man or shade, Shade more than man, more image than a shade; For Hades’ bobbin bound in mummy-cloth May unwind the winding path; A mouth that has no moisture and no breath Breathless mouths may summon; I hail the superhuman; I call it death-in-life and life-in-death. Miracle, bird or golden handiwork, More miracle than bird or handiwork, Planted on the starlit golden bough, Can like the cocks of Hades crow, Or, by the moon embittered, scorn aloud

In glory of changeless metal Common bird or petal And all complexities of mire or blood. At midnight on the Emperor’s pavement flit Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit, Nor storm disturbs, flames begotten of flame, Where blood-begotten spirits come And all complexities of fury leave, Dying into a dance, An agony of trance, An agony of flame that cannot singe a sleeve. Astraddle on the dolphin’s mire and blood, Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood, The golden smithies of the Emperor! Marbles of the dancing floor Break bitter furies of complexity, Those images that yet Fresh images beget, That dolphin-torn, that gong-tormented sea. WB Yeats

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Bill West he day started as normal. King Jim of Cockle Town donned his cockle hat and stowed his staff of office aboard the royal bicycle. He mounted and rode out of the throne room. His tyres hissed across marble halls clunked down staircases and his bell tinkled as he passed under the gatehouse arch and over the drawbridge. Jim reached Afon Dwyryd. The sun-burnished salt-flats were dotted with cockle maidens wielding rakes or pushing barrows. On the beach stood a brazier in which pan-fried turbot sizzled waiting for accompanying cockles. He smacked his lips as he scanned the foreshore. He loved to watch the maids as they toiled but always consulted the Court Astrologer to ensure their safety from tides and currents.

He propped his bicycle against a rock, stripped down to his silk underclothes and started his morning Tai Chi regime to work up an appetite. Out in the deep water, something bubbled and spat. Gulls shrieked and wheeled away, and mermaids dashed for deeper water. Something emerged from the depths. Bigger than a giant turtle, Cardium Regina, Queen of Cockles rose in her fury. Her ridged shell quivered with rage at the slaughter of her subjects, her red toe pulsated like a warning beacon. With flicks of her shell, she hopped across the waves towards the unwary King. Jim was completing a flawless sequence of moves, Waving Hands Like Clouds, Snake Creeps Down, followed by Golden Rooster Stands on Left Leg. It was while standing on one leg that he was struck from behind. She knocked him to the ground and proceeded to thump up and down on him whilst spraying salt spume in his face. Jim groaned and spluttered. Several of his subjects looked up at the ruckus, clattered their rakes into their wheelbarrows and

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The Cockle Scraper Watercolor by Judith A. Lawrence, 2019

with folded arms watched events unfold. The battle raged for hours. Several maidens retired to the shore for a refreshing drink of tea, biscuits, and slivers of cooked turbot before returning to the entertainment. Jim was a sensitive man. Despite his own pain which was considerable he detected from the Queen’s aura that something else was wrong, something beyond the obvious fact that she was trying to kill him. He sensed a dark clot of pain within her powerful carapace. He managed to grasp the edge of the Queen’s shell and force it apart. He slid his arm under the cold mantle of flesh questing deeper. His fingers found something remarkable. Slowly, inch by painful inch he withdrew his arm. Cardium calmed, relaxed with a sigh and slumped into the soft mud beside Jim. “You poor creature,” Jim exclaimed, “what pain you have suffered for so long.” Jim raised his bruised and bleeding arm to reveal a black pearl the size of a teapot. The maidens sighed, then clapped. Gently Jim cradled the cockle in his arms, raised her slightly and kissed her. The maidens gasped. There was a sound like cockleshells tinkling in a bucket and both Jim and the Queen disappeared in a swirl of smoke and flame. The maidens gasped at the transformation. Where man and cockle had once been there were now two giant cockles. ***

Just Released The Linnet´s Wings

This dramatic tale is played out in the heart of Manila, a city once called “the Pearl of the Orient,” now being destroyed by massive bombing, strafing, artillery barrage and mortar attack. “When the big historic tale gets told, this might be a part they let fall through the cracks. So let me fill you in. I’m not going to tell it pretty, because it’s a war story. And a war story is like a hunk of shrapnel. It’s got nasty ragged edges.” So begins young Johnny Oldfield’s account of his imprisonment by the Imperial Japanese Army during World War II in the Philippines – pivotal teenage years filled with danger and defeat, adventure and intrigue, cruelty and betrayal, starvation and death, survival and liberation. Johnny calls himself a WONK (from the Chinese won gau, yellow dog) a cur, mongrel, running with a pack of rebellious kids and viewing his society from the ground up.

Separated from his father by the Japanese invasion, he gets his life lessons from a diverse cast of characters: his mother Ruth, a nurse with a strong and independent spirit; Harry Barnes, a storyteller who arrives from China carrying the urn of a friend’s ashes; Southy Jack, an ex-pro boxer who trains boys in the manly art; Polecat, a mestizo pal with an all-consuming hatred for the Japanese; the Colonel, a wise old plantation owner who gives advice on survival; Haverford, a disgruntled alcoholic from Manila’s high society; and Abiko, the feared officer of the Japanese camp guard. WONKS is available at Amazon and Barnes & Noble, and in audiobook at Audible and iTunes.

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The Linnet´s Wings

Watercolor: Scottish Munros by Judith A Lawrence

FALLEN EAGLES by

Bruce Harris 66

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I was looking up so vertically that my neck strained to continue. Most of my view consisted of inaccessible black and brown rock, unforgiving, hard and sometimes sharp. But at the top, in silhouette, was the head and torso of a man, unmoving and unhurried, as my father always was. For him, the whole proposition was simple enough; he held the rope, his chip off the old block climber son was making his routine way up what he called the ‘apprentice slopes’ to be with him, and then we could sit triumphantly there, the summit achieved, masculinity fanfared, another solid brick laid in the foundation of my confidence. I already knew how to freeze my terror. He didn’t frighten me, my father, not in the conventional ways still quite usual in 1976; he had never laid an angry finger on me, he’d never come in drunk – none of that. But he was Dougal Murray, mountaineer, CBE medalled in his mid-thirties; I’d stood outside Buckingham Palace with him, watching that still, self-effacing but utterly self-confident smile of his. He’d held the award up, a big shiny thing with a ribbon, and they’d spent about thirty seconds snapping away at him before moving on to the next medalled celebrity. I’d been fourteen at the time, mute and little, bursting with pride but also aware of a cold douche of fear that I, his son Duncan, was no match and never would be. We were about four hundred feet up, a climb which, for him, was weekend recreation. By this time, the endless summer of ’76, I was sixteen, and my remorseless plod in his footsteps continued. I heard his words like hard and fast rules in a little well-remembered rule

book – ‘you are in charge, Duncan, your moods, your emotions, are entirely what you decide they will be. You don’t need to look down, or around; if it’s unsettling, if it breeds fear, you can just not do it. Your will is everything; your discipline is absolute. If you want it to be’. We were on one of the Scottish munros, the classified climbs of Scotland; he thought if I really had it in mind to carry on where he, sooner or later, would leave off, making my way up some challenging lower portions of a few munros would be the best way to start. Some of them could almost be walked up, even though walking is an inadequate way to describe a head bent against wind and rain while at the same time watching where the feet are very carefully indeed, in the knowledge that a few loose stones could set them and you off on a rapid descent which might well break a bone or two, or worse. He wasn’t coming out with any fatuous words of encouragement; he’d decided, I know, to start trying to treat me as a fellow climber, boy as I was. Instead of congratulating myself on living up to expectations, I was vaguely ashamed of perpetuating something of a con trick; I knew, or thought I knew, that my success in hiding my gut-turning fear was just another form of fear, fear of him, not of his displeasure or his punishment, but of disappointing, becoming the inadequate little pup who somehow happened to be his son. There was something in the stillness of his dark head above me which spoke of a restrained impatience, a resigned tolerance, which kicked at an emotion in me. I could see a foothold, dark and indistinct as it was, and my right foot lifted determinedly to it, almost of its own volition. At exactly the same moment, some enormous presence whooshed past only yards from my back; I edged away, lost my footing and suddenly I was hanging in fresh air, held on by a waist harness, as Scotland whirled around me, a long blue river snaking away into the distance, and within seconds, doing the same thing again. The harness strained against me, and a wild dizziness told hold, almost causing me to vomit; for one excruciating moment, I saw myself plunging downwards, and even at this modest height, the damage could be se-

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vere or even fatal. Apart from the harness, I had nothing on but boots, shorts and socks, and ridiculous as it was to imagine that more clothes would change anything, bareness accentuated vulnerability in my mind. And nothing, it seemed, stemmed the dizzy, whirling head and the torrent of sweat which must, by now, be obvious enough to my companions. Gasping and swearing under my breath, I finally got enough control to get my foot back on the hold I’d seen, and five frantic scrambling minutes later I had joined my father and his brother cum-gamekeeper cum-personal assistant Uncle Stuart on the summit, or at least the point about a quarter of the way up the mountain which was my apprentice climbing that day. ‘Well done, lad’, my father said, and it wasn’t ruffled or patted cheek, all the child stuff, it was a touch on the hand and away, like he did with Uncle Stuart when they’d completed another routine conquest. Stuart himself, as always, wore a non-committal, slightly contemptuous expression and ‘held his peace’, as my father described what I saw as my uncle’s politic silences. Uncle Stuart had been divorced for two years then, and everyone professed incredulity at the intransigence of my now former aunt, but Stuart was a dour, withdrawn, disapproving presence even with me, his oldest nephew, still young enough to want to get on with everyone, especially his relatives. As usual, my relief and sense of accomplishment took over, for the time being at least, from my nausea at the height and breadth of where we were, the Cairngorms stretching away on all sides of us as far as the eye could see. Then I saw what had whooshed past me, a great giant of a golden eagle, as close as I had ever seen one, and a thrill in itself, with its huge wing span fully extended. ‘There you are, son’, my father said. ‘We’re even higher than the eagles today. How will that do yo ‘He’s hovering for a kill’, Uncle Stuart said, in the deflating way he had. ‘Or he’s after bringing in the big girl. That’s why he’s so low’. ‘Yes, sure enough, Stuart’, said my father. ‘But he’s a sight for sore eyes, for all that’. And so he was, a beautiful, smoothly turning vision against the vast mingled blue/grey sky. And, of course, Uncle Stuart was right, as he tended to be when some dismal outcome was in prospect. Female golden eagles are larger than males, and we only had to look a short distance to the right to see our eagle’s arriving mate, the generous feathers of her great wings ruffling in the wind and her talons already out. The male eagle swooped downwards in an enormous, graceful curve, and almost immediately under the zenith of his arc, as if he was using himself as a downward arrow, were two forlorn figures, a ewe and a young lamb detached from the main flock, perhaps disorientated in the unfamiliar heat. Although it was July, the lamb looked no more than five or six weeks old; lambing happens when the weather changes for the better, and in the Highlands, that can take time. The female acted on cue immediately, diving with gathering violence down upon the sheep, its great talons sinking deeply into the back of the lamb. By the time the ewe had rallied itself from its panic, the lamb was off, head dangling, the birds coming closer to each other as if in self-congratulation and heading off eastwards. Withing seconds, the lamb’s body had stilled until it was no more than a little white sack with legs. Below, the ewe did a kind of revolving walk, bleating piteously towards nothing in particular. My father shook his head slowly in the philosophical way he had; Uncle Stuart’s eyes had narrowed, almost in admiration. They were not men for homilies or platitudes, and Stuart went straight to the practicalities. ‘That’s on Ian Lessiter’s land. If he ever sees it, he’ll shoot the pair of them’. ‘That should be against the law’, I said. ‘Huh’. Uncle Stuart was up on his feet, ready to go. ‘Fat lot Lessiter would care about that. It’s his livestock they’re away with’.

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‘Right enough, boys’, my father said, and my uncle’s eyes narrowed again at this lumping him together with me. ‘What comes up needs to go down, and I’m ready for a wee drink’. Two years on, and running, not climbing, occupied most of my fitness time, thanks to my father managing to track down the root cause of my terror at even modest heights. Absurdly, it wasn’t actually on a climb that the sudden revelation came, it was on a balcony in an Alpine hotel, not long before I was to attempt my most ambitious effort yet on a real Alpine mountain. I was seventeen then, and still steeling myself to stay in control of my balance and emotions. I knew my climbing had become a source of contention between my parents; my mother was convinced that I suffered from some form of vertigo, for some reason as yet unknown, but it certainly wasn’t overweight and could hardly be a lack of fitness. Dad was showing me the ridiculously beautiful snow-bound view from the hotel window; he’d stepped out on to the balcony to get the full advantage of it. As I started to follow him, the room and the view began to revolve around me; I clutched on to a door handle, and that noise made him turn. I suppose my appearance gave him the clue he needed. Before mountaineering more or less took over his life, in courses, rescue teams, lectures, tours etc., he had been a doctor, and once he was on to the signals, it all progressed quite quickly. We sat one evening in the conservatory at the back of the house, the glorious Scottish highland countryside descending before us, and no more than quarter of a mile away, our own private loch, Loch Murray we called it; strictly speaking, it was hardly big enough to qualify as a loch, but it was much larger than the average swimming pool and served as one when the weather allowed or we felt tough enough. ‘Your mother was right, Duncan’, he said. ‘As she is wont to be. You have something called Meniere’s Disease. It’s a condition of the inner ear which affects balance and hearing. Annoyingly, it’s one of those conditions where no-one knows the exact cause, though

there are heavy suggestions of genetic connections, and one of your mother’s brothers, your Uncle Peter, has suffered from vertigo since childhood, which is what made your mother suspicious in the first place; we may have a connection there’. I glanced across at him. I’d been permitted to join him occasionally in his single alcoholic indulgence; he drank good wine sometimes, if sparingly; there were no other alcoholic drinks he had any time for, and if anyone brought anything in that line on one of his climbs, they were likely to suffer for it. I saw him in profile, when, to me, his formidable character was even more evident than full on facial; the firm, very defined slightly stubbled chin, the long nose, the deep brown eyes that spoke of both strength and intelligence. Before I’d put together some kind of response, he turned full on to me, and his eyes were as warm as I’d ever seen them. ‘The condition is likely to deteriorate as you get older, Duncan, and much as it goes against the grain, I suspect for both of us, you will have to stop climbing now. But what I would say, son, is the efforts you’ve made in that direction are a testimony to your guts and determination, and you shouldn’t, you mustn’t, think any less of yourself because you cannot climb, because I certainly won’t’. He raised his glass towards me, and through slightly misted eyes, I understood that this was now the grown-up thing which would happen between us, and I raised mine accordingly. And so I took to fell running, every bit as challenging in its own way, and every bit as capable of preserving the fitness which was regarded as basic to life in my family. By the time I was eighteen and on the verge of university, my brother James, aged sixteen, had replaced me as the potential climbing heir, and Uncle Stuart’s daughter Alison, aged fifteen, had already started ‘nursery sloping’. Uncle Stuart himself, of course, remained unconvinced about my condition. Never in my life had he articulated any thoughts concerning my general wimpishness, and perhaps it was adolescent over-sensi-

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tivity on my part attributing thoughts to him which he didn’t have, but his taciturn and sometimes even snappy attitudes towards me made my interpretation credible enough. There was also a visible difference in his attitudes towards me and my brother that he didn’t appear to make any attempt to conceal. James would usually get something along the lines of ‘now then, young man’ and the expression which passed as a smile for Uncle Stuart; at least that’s what I took it to be, as I’d had precious little sight of it myself. As my eighteenth birthday passed, I deliberately dropped the ‘uncle’ and started calling him ‘Stuart’. The first couple of times produced angry glares, but then he settled to it with a kind of ‘well, what can you expect?’ attitude, and James became ever more the blue-eyed boy. James didn’t confess himself exactly exhiliarated. He already had a dry, laconic humour all of his own. ‘Well, aren’t I just the lucky one’, he said, and rolled his eyes. James had and has the ability to make me laugh out loud, and I think he enjoys doing so. One of my final runs, in early September shortly before I was to set off for what looked like a whole new life at Durham University, became a revelation in both good and bad ways. The great advantage of running compared with climbing is that it allowed me to think, rather than having to concentrate my entire being on controlling my terror. Watching my feet pounding as best they could through a particularly wet and rocky patch, it suddenly dawned on me very forcefully that I was my mother’s son much more than my father’s. My mother made her living as a journalist; I aspired to be a writer, as did so many millions of others, and my mother was one of the tiny percentage of us who did actually make a living out of it. It was on one of my father’s climbs that they’d met, in the hotel where they were both staying, my mother working on one of her travel pieces and finding herself intrigued by this mountaineering man that everyone seemed to know, though the mountaineering man was all of twenty-two years old at that time, the same age as she was. In one of his rare but gratifying

expansive moments, my father described his first sight of her. ‘She was in the bay window of the hotel bar, looking out over the view, as spectacular as Scotland can do. There was a sunset, Duncan, and part of the light of it was catching the side of her face, such an unblemished, wonderful face, and her long hair, oh that long free hair of hers, sweeping down to her shoulders. She was entranced by Scotland, and I was entranced by her. Her head turned towards me, and I know people call it a cliché, an apocryphal thing which never really happens, but it did. It really did. We knew’. From an early age, I noticed heads, usually mostly male, turn to look whenever she made an entrance, the one and only Mary Murray nee Sutherland, and it made James and I proud to see them together, especially when Dad was in his dinner suit, suave, tanned, sparkling-eyed, acting as a suitable consort to this stunning woman, whose sense of dress was as superb as her natural beauty. As for my natural beauty, I can’t say I’d noticed, although more than once, people, usually Sutherland relatives, had commented that I looked more like her that I did my father. In the way of Scottish boys of the time, I suppose, my first inclination was to take offence, or at least adopt the dour neutrality of indifference to adult remarks of this kind which tends to characterise boyhood. ‘Mummy’s boy’ was still used widely as an insult at the time. It took me until I was eighteen, sitting not very comfortably on a rock in the Scottish countryside half way through my daily run, to realise that, regardless of physical appearance, my writing ability, such as it was, came from my mother. Dad did write occasionally, for course material, reports, etc., but while I aspired to write creatively, she did exactly that, and while my largest audience to date was the few hundred who read the school magazine, her constant and loyal following ran into thousands and thousands. Her family might have kindly donated their Meniere’s Disease to me, but she had given me a precious gift way beyond that, and if

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she’d given me good looks as well, why should there be anything wrong with that? Thoughts chased themselves around in my head as I sat on that rock. The rain started pattering down and I got up and re-started; I knew just how far and how fast the rain came down in these parts, and while I’d been soaked often enough before, my train of thought was taking me to interesting places which the climate was not going to deprive me of if I could avoid it. The effort of running while getting progressively wetter darkened my mood, and as usual when this happened, my thoughts moved reluctantly in the direction of my uncle Stuart. One of the main sources of my resentment towards him, I realised, was the way he puppy-dogged around – there was no other way of putting it – my mother. Rumours abounded that one of the reasons why he’d broken with my ex-aunt Anne, who’d always seemed a pleasant and attractive enough woman to me, was because of his ‘way with the ladies’, people said quietly, in their euphemistic Scottish way. His way with my mother, fawning, praising, fetching and carrying when she wanted, and sometimes even when she didn’t, seemed to largely amuse my father, but it didn’t me, and perhaps it was this tendency of mine which had turned him against me. Boys always think they’re being clever enough not to show their real agenda, but it’s rarely true. And I had to confess, while the rain slowly turned me into a sort of mobile rag, that her sort of reciprocation at times didn’t please me very much either, this beautiful woman who must have become well accustomed to choking off unwanted attentions from men, smiling unnecessarily broadly at him, sharing his little jokes, even the more risque ones, and sometimes even in my father’s presence, amused as he claimed he was. Alright, Stuart had something of a mountaineering reputation himself – ‘the redoubtable Murray brothers’, I remember one headline calling them – but he was not to be compared to my father; he was smaller, uglier – to me, at least – and with a good deal less charm.

Eventually, I approached the house, looking forward to getting out of my dripping clothes and into a hot bath, but even the rain could not stop me from being arrested in my tracks by the sight I saw in our main living room at the front of the house as I approached it. The light was fading, and perhaps because they wouldn’t have been able to see much from the window anyway, my mother and Stuart were apparently engrossed in each other. She was at her writing bureau, as she called it, and he was leaning over her on her right; one hand was on her back, and the other was almost holding her hand. She had turned her face towards him; their heads were much too close together. His head went back and he laughed heartily, something I had never seen him do in my presence, and as he left her, moving towards the curtains, his hand again touched her back. As he moved towards the window, I began running again, and he was closing the last curtain as I clattered up to the front door. My eyes daggered at him, emphatically enough for him to pause and step back, but then he smiled his more usual contemptuous little grimace and the curtain came rapidly across to shut me away. Three years on, and the day forever seared into my consciousness like a branding. Wednesday November 18th 1981, not long after the start of my third and final university year, and on my way to a reputable English degree, according to my tutors, anyway. University halls were well behind me, and I was in a house share with three other students in Church Street, Durham. My room upstairs had an impressive view of the Cathedral. All of my trepidations about giving myself over voluntarily into the clutches of the English had proved unfounded. There were other Scots at Durham, of course; it took students from all over the country, but my three house mates included two Englishmen and a Canadian. It was a decent-sized house, for a terrace, and we all had rooms of our own. Sometimes I missed the wide open spaces of the Highlands, but I went back there during

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holidays and County Durham offered both countryside and coastline in abundance. I had been to the uni athletics club for a training night; I was tired and a bit dispirited by the November gloom. Even at twenty one years old and in the peak of fitness, the training run had been demanding; keeping both the fitness side and the degree revision afloat was not easy. As I walked up to the house, it seemed to be unusually quiet and sombre; at times, I could hear the cheerful rattle of the lads from half way down the street. This impression was confirmed as soon as I entered the front door. The television was on, in the main living room on my left as I went in. In the room itself, my three house mates were all standing, almost as if in respectful tribute. They only seemed to hear me when I whammed my bag down on a chair just inside the door. The Canadian guy, Brad Deanes, as easy going a lad as you can imagine, turned his face to me and it was almost pale. ‘Oh, God’, he said. ‘Duncan – buddy –‘ The other two turned together, and my particular friend here, Mike Wellfield, took a few steps towards me and started to say something, but he didn’t seem able to get the words out. ‘What is it, boys? What’s happening –‘ I said, just before the words on the televison started to seep into my weary brain. ‘It is thought Mr. Murray’s fall was the result of a faulty harness; there is little else that could explain such a catastrophic accident happening to such an experienced climber. Dougal Murray had climbed almost every challenging mountain in the world without incident; this Himalyan fall, of some 8000 feet, was both his first and his last’. I stood aghast, feeling as if I’d passed through a portal into some ghastly parallel universe. They even had footage, from a distance, of the group of medics and fellow climbers gathered around my fallen father. An awful feeling came over me that next they would actually be taking a camera in to look at his broken body.

Whether I should have been exhibiting some stiff necked Scottish self-control or not, I didn’t know, or care. I was down on my knees, and preparing myself to howl my head off like a beaten dog, when the phone suddenly rang. Brad went to answer it, and came back seconds later, looking even paler. ‘Duncan, it’s your uncle. Are you sure –‘ I got up, strolled into the hall and grabbed the phone. ‘Duncan, terrible news, I’m afraid – ’, Stuart started saying, in that so matter-of-fact voice of his, which infuriated me even more than it usually did. ‘Yes, Stuart, I know. I’m watching it on the news’, I said, calmly enough, but with an emphatic and deliberate sarcasm on the last five words. Something inside me screamed crazily through my whole system that this man, who spends half his life with my father, has not managed to get a single word to me until I’m watching a public news bulletin. I was about to unleash a whole broadside of obscenities at him before, for the first very conscious time but by no means the last, some force, some entity, outside me made my stay my hand. ‘I know it’s not easy for you either, Uncle, but could you not have got some word of this to me before now, or organised someone else to do it? Honestly?’ ‘I’m sorry, boy, O.K.?’ That ‘boy’ again. ‘This is the Himalayas – smooth communications are impossible –‘ He kept talking, but I didn’t hear him anymore, because at that moment, bursting through the front door using the key I’d made sure she had, was my girlfriend already becoming more than a girlfriend, Josephine Reynolds, known to all the world except her parents as Josie. ‘I’ll talk with you later, Uncle’, I said to the phone, and the next instant I was on Josie’s slim shoulder, her arms were around me, and I was crying like a big, heart-broken baby. She exchanged a few words with the boys, which I can’t remember, and then we went up to my room and I cried myself dry. She got hold of a brandy from somewhere and eventually, we just sat on the

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bed looking over Durham towards the cathedral. Maybe someone over there or in there could make sense of this, I thought, because I couldn’t. The next six months remain mostly a blur. I got through it, with the help of Josie, James and several others, in so far as I survived and kept myself on course for some kind of a degree, but nothing could be the same, I knew, and as the weeks went by, my mood darkened more and more. I could see it, and I knew those around me could see it as well, but there seemed no way to stop it happening, the growing cancer of suspicion and distrust within me. Dad had told me on more than one occasion when the subject of his safety came up, as it obviously will for anyone who spends a lot of time climbing mountains, that he and Stuart had a regular routine which involved thoroughly checking each other’s equipment, including the harnesses, before setting off on any climb. Since they were such experienced and respected climbers, I doubted anyone else would be involved. So if Dad had, for once, checked his equipment and missed something, might Stuart had made some decision about not picking up on it? Every time my thoughts turned in this direction, I would dismiss it as being absurd; my father and uncle were devoted to each other and always had been. But, also every time, that scene I saw as I returned from my run would come back to haunt me – his hands, his face, her apparent acquiescence – and the time it took me to dismiss the idea as absurd became longer and longer, until I reached the point of recognising that I no longer saw it as being absurd at all. My uncle was in love with my mother, so strongly that even doing away with his own brother had to happen to clear his path. 1982 is a year I will always remember with a shudder. As it went on, I felt myself to be in something like a trance, going through the motions – the funeral procession, with hundreds lining the street, the media tributes, from some famous people I didn’t even know my father knew, my drunken binge nights on the town

with James, trying to get into punch-ups and occasionally succeeding, my frantic, over-energetic love-making with Josie which sometimes alarmed and worried her – all drifted by in a kind of blur. Even Stuart’s stricken face at the funeral didn’t allay my suspicions, and the very physical way he and my mother were consoling each other didn’t either. Then, as I was readying myself to leave the University in late June, with exams over and results to come, the blow fell. My morale was low to begin with; Josie’s patience was at last wearing thin, I was not expecting anything more than a mediocre degree, 2.2. at best, and that probably wouldn’t help too much in getting the job which had so far eluded me. Yes, I could work in the family business, as James dryly described it, making a shrine and a musuem to my father, as well as continuing the courses and catering for them. But being permanently in the company of my mother and Stuart was more than I could stomach. A long letter arrived from my mother, written in the style she used when she wanted to persuade me of something she knew I wouldn’t like very much, cajoling, almost pleading at times, with a little judicious flattery thrown in. ‘I think the remaining family does need to be together now, darling, and James is being difficult about that, but he has always looked up to you, and rightly so, of course, and if you are able to come home and stay home for a while, it may also bring him back. No-one and nothing can replace your father, we both know that, but that’s all the more reason why we need to come together. I should tell you, Duncan, because there will be no secrets between us, that your uncle and I have made an unofficial engagement arrangement, with a view to marrying sometime next year, so as to not be too close to the loss of your father. I am too vulnerable now to go on alone, darling; your uncle is not your father, but he is the closest I have, I have known him as long as I’ve known your father, and starting again with someone entirely new would be too much for me, as would remaining

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a mourning widow for the rest of my life. Please try to be understanding, Duncan; I am still a relatively young woman and I knew your father well enough to know he would want me to find happiness with someone else if I could; in fact, he said as much to me on more than one occasion; in his profession, it is something we did need to talk about from time to time’. Yes, I thought, trying not to crumple the paper in my hand, but whether or not he had Stuart in mind I doubt. She went on, pages and pages of it, attempting to appease after dropping that thunderbolt into my life, and all she succeeded in doing was to confirm my every suspicion, once again with that scene in my mind, standing in the near-dark, wet and cold, while she and Stuart got it together. I knew people who were staying in Durham for the summer, either because they rented all the year round or because they had fixed themselves up summer jobs, so I teamed up with a house share and got hold of a bar job in the city. Letters flew between my mother and I, long and plaintive on her part, brief and evasive on mine – I needed to earn money until I had a good job, I’d taken a liking to Durham etc.. Josie was going home to her family on the coast at Scarborough, and I promised to go and see her when the opportunity arose, but by then there were tensions between us; this sullen, taciturn boy, racked by suspicion and resentment, was not the one she had originally known and she was a girl, not a saint. It was in September when the real evil grew in me. The Scottish shooting season starts on September 1st , and one of the biggest in our area was on the Lessiter estate, which did holiday accommodation and well-organised shoots, the main one in October, when the pheasants were in season as well as everything else. When the golden eagle carried a lamb away from the farm part of the Lessiter estate and my uncle predicted that Ian Lessiter would shoot it if he saw it, I had no problem believing him; Lessiter was an ex-military man and a crack shot. His shoot also had an admired range of

guns available for their guests. I had no doubt that Stuart would be going to the Lessiter shoot. Apart from neighbourly duties, he was keen on shooting, as was my father, if not quite as much, and my father had less time to spare. I used to shoot myself, in the days when everything my father did I had to do, so my confidence in my ability just served to feed the plot my fevered mind was concocting. I made myself believe that Uncle Stuart was a cancer in my family who had plotted to dispose of my father, his very own brother, in order to claim my mother in marriage. Predictably, my father’s will had left everything to my mother, meaning Stuart had not only stepped into my father’s matrimonial shoes, he had also effectively disinherited his sons. I planned to dispose of Uncle Stuart with the same kind of well-planned apparent accident he had used to kill my father. Everyone would mourn again, complaining of the viciousness of fate, the injustice of events, but my family would be free of Stuart and able to take our future back into our own hands. The most immediate problem was the interim period, when I would have to find some way of at least appearing to come to terms with the family situation. I wrote to my mother, one of the most careful and thought about pieces of writing I’d ever done, and even then, I’d done a few. The tone was that of the son accepting the inevitable, and I got it down, even if I was gritting my teeth as I wrote it. ‘Nothing can bring Dad back now, and I’m sure he wouldn’t want those of us who remain to spend the rest of our lives at each other’s throats. I cannot promise that it will be easy for me, but I will come home and stay for the length of the shoot and perhaps a few days afterwards. The shoot will mean many friends and neighbours will be about and we can cover the initial awkwardness with socialising and allowing people to sympathise and console’. She wrote back a long letter so full of warmth and affection that I almost abandoned the whole plan. But that scene on the television, which had been so am-

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plified and clarified by several documentaries since, of medical teams gathered around my poor father, came back to haunt me again, and at last I looked straight into the face of the real demon inside me. This wasn’t about rescuing my family’s future, this was no Machiavellian plot to save the Murrays. Vengeance is what I wanted, cold, hard vengeance, to answer the devil with the devil’s own works. On Wednesday October 14th, I went home in readiness for the shoot at the weekend. My mother received me with a long embrace as if a prodigal son had returned; Uncle Stuart grasped my hand as if he wanted to wrench it off and gave me his grimace of a smile. I was debriefed on ‘the plans’, as in the wedding scheduled for the summer of 1983, and I managed to remain mildly interested and non-committal, though my mother looked unconvinced. On Thursday morning, before we were due to set off for the Lessiter estate in the afternoon, I went for a run, for old times’ sake, and to clear my head for what I had now convinced myself I had to do in my father’s name, tough and bloody as it was. My mood caused me to take little notice of how far or where I was going, and eventually I realised I had almost run myself on to Lessiter land. Not far in the distance was the same munro I’d quarter-climbed with my father and Stuart at the age of sixteen, and that terrifying swing about in the Highland air came back to me in all its intensity. A glimmer of sense lingering around my embittered mind suggested I was now putting myself into the same kind of lost and dangerous position again, and then I saw a sight which stopped me, literally, in my tracks. A golden eagle, a big, female golden eagle, was draped indecorously across two rocks, with so many pellet holes in her she could almost have been shot down by a machine gun. Her long graceful head was hanging backwards like a broken toy, and the blood, bones and feathers of what must have been her long death agony were spread all about her. I sat down on a rock nearby and found myself

unable to prevent the tears coming. Yes, the eagle was a lamb killer, a merciless predator without compassion or pity, but it was also one of the noblest of our wild creatures, a law unto itself and an inimitably beautiful sight in the Highland sky. But, of course, it wasn’t really the eagle I was weeping for; I was a very young man still, and I could only weep for me. On the edge of manhood, and all my eagles had fallen; my wonderful father, brave and able, who I would cheerfully have died for and who would have been able to guide me through the increasingly challenging swamp land of my life; my beautiful mother, courted and won by an unprincipled gold-digger and probably a murderer, and my writing and professional future, amounting to a mediocre degree and a total absence of any gainful employment. Here was the proud Murray son and heir, sitting around weeping like a whipped boy who doesn’t know what he’s been whipped for. I stopped myself and worked on replacing my shameful sobbing with a murderous determination to bring to rough justice the man I conceived responsible for it. Improvising digging tools with rocks shaped for the purpose, along with my bare hands, I buried the eagle and all of its detritus I could find, washing my hands in a nearby stream. Two days later, in the early Saturday afternoon, I had found my strategic place. As a prominent member of the neighbouring Murrays, I was entitled to one of the best guns available, and with it stretched across my knees, I had concealed myself behind a rock at the base of one of the hills which I knew the birds would be driven over. I had moved ahead of the main group, taking advantage of the privileged freedom of movement allowed me, and I knew Uncle Stuart and his companions, including Ian Lessiter himself, were not far behind me and would soon come comfortably within range. As the birds came over the hill and flew on into the distance, I would raise myself up and shoot at them, though one or two shots would find their way into Uncle Stuart. Two, accurately placed, should do the trick.

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Derrycarne Woods, Dromod, Co Leitrim MLF, 2009

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Dreadful shooting accident, who’d have thought, well, it happens, for all that, it happens, when guns are abroad. And a boy still in mourning for his recently deceased father is maybe not such a reliable shot as he might otherwise be. Such a dreadful year for the Murrays. But there again, these things happen, don’t they? I knew it would be no more than fifteen minutes at most before the man I wanted to come into view did so. I had no intention of giving way to weak, irresolute reflections, but what then happened is something I have never really been able to categorise. Did he appear behind me, Dougal Murray in his prime, pale and shadowy like a phantom apparition? No, he didn’t. Did his voice come echoing down the hill at me, calling out like some lost spirit? No, it didn’t. The apparation was all in my mind, and the voice like a disembodied whisper which communicated ideas without having to articulate them in so many precisely defined words. Be aware. Stuart saved my life several times, as I saved his. Be aware. He loved your mother almost as much as I did, and he gave way because she chose me. Be aware. Once in a blue moon, harnesses fail; invisible deterioration, hitherto unrealised missing internal part, untraceable consequences of exposure to extreme climate conditions. Remember. Violence and vengeance are a downward spiral, kill or be killed, until, like the mightiest and proudest eagle, your own fall will come. Remember. The eagle’s blood is still on your hands, human blood is about to follow, and soon, inevitably, your blood will be on someone else’s hands. Remember. Your mother’s heart has been broken once; breaking it again will finish her for ever. Remember. You have almost discarded two people, your lover and your brother, who care for you deeply; you are about to break their hearts as well. Remember, Duncan, remember. These things are true, and you know them to be so. The words, sentiments, assertions, were invisible, but they were not there in my head because of my own independent consciousness. Someone external to me put them there. I found myself looking round me, ridiculously, for someone, anyone, who was in my vicinity. Nothing but the air, the sky and the braying conversation of well-bred voices, growing gradually louder. I was confused and disturbed to the point of being unable to move. I heard Uncle Stuart and his companions passing, followed by volleys of shots heading over the hill. I stayed exactly where I was, frozen to total immobility. And then I fell asleep. I woke, with an awareness of having been somewhere without knowing where it was. It was cold and getting on for dark; there still, ridiculously, seemed to be a gun across my lap. I made my way back to the imposing, ex-castle of the Lessiters, feeling strangely as if I’d just been released, like a penal sentence had been served. And near the front entrance, amongst all the SUVs and jeeps, was a more modest vehicle I recognised, a bright little orange Fiat which, however gloriously out of place it looked, meant more to me than all the rest of the vehicles on show put together. Josie was there in the house, and so was my brother James, both of them avowed non-shooters, but both of them expressing their anxiety for me, leading them to concoct their plan to intercept me here and find out just what was going on. What followed was one of the great nights of my life. The beast had lifted from my back, and suddenly the person I was had reasserted himself. And half way through the evening, I found myself sitting next to Uncle Stuart, there in the enormous foyer of the place, when whoever he had been talking to left him to get another drink or something, at the same time as my conversation with my intriguing cousin soon to be stepsister Alison, now climbing partner to James, stopped when a friend came to talk to her. We were both well mellowed with good food and drink, and I found myself looking him straight in the eyes, re-

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laxed, even friendly, now. Dare I, I thought, and discovered I did. ‘Tell me, Uncle Stuart, were you and my father ever in competition over my mother?’ He looked at me at first with a ‘what kind of a question is that?’ expression on his face, but something in my tone, and perhaps the use of the uncle again, seemed to reassure him. ‘Let’s take a little night air, Duncan’, he said. Outside, free from the noise and heat, I heard every distinct word. ‘Yes, we were. I was in the same hotel, and I fell in love with her at the same time’. ‘And you did what – withdraw in his favour?’ ‘No, not really. I would like to be able to say so, but there wasn’t that kind of nobility to it. I loved your father dearly, Duncan, but we were in competition in almost every respect from toddlers onwards, until we realised co-operation worked better. And in any case, your mother would not allow herself to be some puppet for us to fight over. She made her own choice, and she chose your father’. He looked at me with a sudden curious intensity. ‘And, of course, if you want to know the truth, every time I look at you, even now, I am reminded of his victory. You are both him and her, mentally and physically, the very epitome of their relationship. If I haven’t been as affectionate an uncle to you as I should have been, Duncan, that is some kind of explanation, but an inadequate one, I know I can never replace your father, nor will I try, but perhaps I can make up a little for not being much of an uncle’. We shook hands and managed a kind of clumsy embrace, and as I turned from it, I saw my mother standing at a window watching us, and there was an expression on her face which I hadn’t seen since my father died, a serenity and satisfaction that somehow signified a kind of closure for me. It seemed like the fall of my last eagle, perhaps the wildest and most vicious of them all, a wild beast hovering not for food but for vengeance. Poisoned by imagined grievance, it looks for some innocent lamb to vent its spleen upon. Only my father’s gentle but authoritative voice – because I shall remain convinced, to my dying day, that’s essentially what it was – was capable of downing that last eagle. In my mind, I buried it and all that accompanied it, like the golden eagle, in the ground of Scotland. Writing this has been cathartic for me. My mother, never as scrupulous about checking her health as she should have been, was diagnosed with a cancer too late to stop, and died in 2004, only in her late sixties. Stuart, as I called him until the day he died, was devastated and never the same again; he died in his bed eight years later of a sudden heart attack. So now, my good lady Josie and I, assisted by our full and growing family, rule the Murray estate, stewards of the land rather than rulers over it. The Murray eagles fly again, and that voice, whatever or whoever it was, is still there for me as and when either of us judges that it needs to be. ---

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Grandfather Johnny Igoe,

SPELLBINDER REMEMBERED

Title: The Lake Isle of Innisfree by Judith A Lawrence, 2019

by Tom Sheehan 80

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y Grandfather Johnny Igoe was a little Irish man. He stood a mere five-foot-six, but was a giant to me when his poetic voice rolled across the lamp-lit porch floor. He always wore a felt hat, a white beard, and often a pair of bicycle clips on his pant legs in the later years so he wouldn’t trip himself. His blue eyes were excavations, deep and musical, caught up in other places you could tell, places where poems rang and memories, old names, old faces, and the geography of mankind dwelled. They held places he had left and feared he’d never get back to. Each of his canes knew the back of your knees, the rump, in a grab at attention. Older townsfolk, walking by, talked to him at the open kitchen window, the curl of pipe smoke rising between them, while Grandma was at her oven, her room full of breads and sweets.

On our summer porch at night, the fireflies hustling about in the near fields, my Grandfather read William B.Yeats to me when I was a youngster. He rocked in his chair, smoking his pipe, making music and rhythm in his life, and in mine. I was, at the first of Yeats, about six years old. “Listen,” he’d say, pointing his finger up. “Hear the music. Know the sound. Feel the grab.” Johnny Igoe, spellbinder remembered. On that porch on Main Street, a mere mile out of Saugus Center, he and Yeats holding forth, his voice would roll into the field where fireflies lived and where Chuckie Shipulski’s house now sits. His words, mixed with the fireflies waiting on my bottle, captured a sense of deeper darkness where they could further show off their electric prowess. The times were magnetic, electric. I knew what attention was. Oh, I loved those compelling nights filled with Horseman, ride by; Prayer for My Daughter

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or old marble heads, captivating me with a sound so Irish I was proud. I will arise now and go to Innisfree oh, and the deep heart’s core. The lineage found me: I didn’t find it, and the echoes of those nights ring yet. But other things come repeatedly for him: Johnny Igoe only ate oatmeal in the morning, a boiled potato and a shot of whiskey for lunch. By and on other things he lived. On the handle of a cane he would rest his chin, his eyes on you making announcements you dared not lose. He made Yeats’s voice to be his own voice, that marvelous treble and clutter of breath buried in it, The Lake Isle of Innisfree popping free like electricity or the very linnets themselves. Maude was like some creature I’d surely come to know in my own time. Johnny Igoe also wrote his own poems, and yielded me Mulrooney and Padraic Gibbons as well out of the long rope of his memory. The knots of that rope untied all those Saturday evenings of his life and mine, on that porch. He launched many of my own poems here, by the dozens, and at the end, at 97, stained, shaking, beard gone to a lengthy hoarfrost, potato drivel not quite lost in it, he gave me his voice and eyes alive to this day, sounding out in his own way. Later, time hustling me on, in a Caedmon Golden Treasury of Poetry record, I heard Yeats read his own material, three short poems. I swore it was Spellbinder Johnny Igoe still at work. But first things first: I quickly remember him as the Dumpmaster at the City Dump in Malden, Massachusetts, where he ended up after his early travels and began his family. He had been the first Irish sailor of his family, sailing here alone, while his mother was on her death bed. All those long days and nights at the dump, the destitute came to him for warmth, for food, for a place to put up their feet on a freezing night. They came to him, the drunks, the homeless vets still wandering loose from France and WW I, street people who then had no such name. They knew the welcome of his fire, the monger’s stove to wrap around, hot curbing to prop cold feet, quick difference from the frozen air, wind-swept railroad tracks, bare entry ways, darkness where howling ghosts abide. Or, as often was the case, their last resort, the slim cardboard wrap. He burned clinkers in a little shack he made of scrap. The lost, lonely birds came to him to roost. They flew in at dusk. He stoked the fire to stir up flames, dried their feathers off. Just as often he left his lunch about like tasty suet hanging in the yard. On Saturdays I brought his lunch, dense laminates of meat and bread, thick and heavy and coarse as sin, brown banana we would not eat, molasses-brown coffee in whiskey bottles wound about with paper bags. I never saw even one pint bottle finished off within his grasp. I rarely saw his small hand feeling inside a paper bag. His birds did the picking, had suet choice, hens dining before the cock. That was as much his legacy as anything else he might have done or said. He cared for the downtrodden, those short-circuited by life, those who had paid their dues and somehow, through their humanity itself, had fallen prey to loss and deprivation. Mercy was what he preached, and that memory should be noble, and comfort to the aggrieved and succor for the pained should be a career. He made me observe the human condition. He made me look at man from the floor up, from his lowest grovel to his pinnacle, to realize that we end in dust before we move on, the manner of a man being God-like. This kind and thoughtful man for years dreamed of his return to Ireland, but he never made

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that trip. That lost dream trip pained him. His eyes said so, his voice said it too, and in his own poem: The Dream of the Roscommon Emigrant There is a land though far away that’s very dear to me, an island in the ocean most picturesque to see. As each day goes by I heave a sigh for those lovely native scenes: Ah! Isle of Saints and Martyrs, I see you in my dreams. I’m at the gate of Clooniquin, I hear the pearling stream now wend its way to Ross and then to far Culleen. I hear the thrush and blackbird in the holly and laurel tree; my soul says I must loiter in this fair locality. I cross the bridge and up the walk and toward that lovely grove; with ecstasy my heart does bound as onward I do rove. From the countless pines a shadow runs to meet me on the hill where the pheasant and rabbit doth wander there at will. Ah, solitude, thy charms are dear, to me how sweet they seem as I set me down and look around on Nature’s lovely scene. The hills of Ross are beautiful, and so the lovely glen and meadows fair that stretch between those hills and dear old Elphin. From Castlerea to Carrick I see the places all, from Roscommon down to Lulsk and to the Plains of Boyle. As I travel o’er that scope, with Nature’s gifts so strewn, I stop halfway where I was raised now aided by the moon. I look around bewildered on all that I behold; the tree of ash, the hawthorn bush, now burnished in their gold. The cottage I was born in and raised by parents kind, I enter with impatience but there I could not find the one above all others whose love was dear to me. She has gone to her heaven for all eternity. Father, brothers, sisters, I join in fond embrace as tears of joy and sorrow roll swiftly down each face. I see the gold old nabors, each remembered a pleasant day, and shake each hand with affection as I did when going away. In harmony we all did join and traversed those weary years since that eventful morning when I left them steeped in tears. Now fond adieu to all my friends around the dear old isle, though adopted by Columbia I am Erin’s faithful child; For the Stars and Stripes with the flag of green will line in unity. Adieu again, old Ireland, farewell my dear country.

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But others made the trip for him. On our honeymoon in 1973, my wife Beth and I visited at Elphin and the cottage where John Igoe was born, where I saw the star peep through the thatch roof and call his name, and where lived my mother’s last two living first cousins, Peter and Joseph Cassidy, since gone. My mother, with four daughters, was able to get over and visit there in 1987. And in September of 2003, our children sent us back for our 30th anniversary. The eyes are so pleased at times that the heart sees. I told them the following happened on our trip: One Monday noon I stood in an Elphin, Roscommon pub, a Guinness pint in hand, and said aloud to the dozen men at the bar, “Gentlemen, do any of you remember Peter and Joseph Cassidy who 30 years ago, when we were here on our honeymoon, lived outside of town near the statue to The Rising. They were well into their 70s then and long gone now, but I’d like to know if anybody remembers them.” All hell broke loose at the bar, eyes twinkled, smiles came galore, and one man leaped off his stool. “Eddie the Fiddler!” he yelled. “If Peter and Joseph were relatives of yours, Eddie the Fiddler is.” He yelled to the barkeep, “Dermot, get Eddie on the phone!” Twenty minutes later I thought my grandfather Johnny Igoe was walking through the door. It was a cousin of mine, Eddie Cassidy, in his sixties, I had never met and had not known about. We had a ball! It was a great trip and Johnny Igoe was with us every step of the way. He had bent his back in Pennsylvania’s and Illinois’ mines and swung a hammer north of Boston, poled his star-lit way down the Erie Canal, and died in bed. His years are still with me in the wind he breathed and storms he stood against and earth he pounded with his fist to fill the mouths of his children and my mother. When he was lonely he was hurt and sometimes feared the pain he could not feel because he knew it and knew how it came. He said a man had to think hard and often to be wise and nothing was useless to man: not a sliver of wood because it makes a toothpick; not a piece of glass broken from a wine-red bottle because it catches sun and makes wonder. Neither a stray stone nor brick were useless because they were wedges or wall-parts or corners like one, the first or the last, put to the foundation of the old gray house that clings to the light and had wide windows and doors that were never locked. On snow-bound mornings he laughed with us when daylight sought us eagerly and in cricket nights of softness that spoiled kneeling prayers. Sometimes his soft eyes were sad while we laughed. We didn’t know about the man down the street or the boy who died racing black-horse train against young odds. His prayers were not an interlude with God: they were as sacred as breathing, as vital as the word. And the politicians never got his vote because he knew the pain they intended and he hated hurt. Hated hurt. The floorboards creaked beneath him in the mornings and he brought warmth into chilled rooms and his coffee slipped its aroma between secret walls to waken us. The oats were heavy and creamed in large white bowls, and “Go easy on the sugar” was the bugle call of dawn. His books had a message that he heard, alone, quiet, singing with the life he

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knew was near past and yet beginning. He pampered and petted them like he did Grandma, and spent secret hours with them and lived them with us rehearsing our life to come, and teaching us. Then, a high-biting, cold spring day in 1955 I knew would be memorial, the sun shone but in snippets, ice still hiding out in shadow, winter remnants piled up in a great gathering, me bound to a shovel for the tenth day in a row. That’s when I heard of Johnny Igoe’s death so late in life. Grass and buds and shoots and sprigs of all kinds were aimless as April. All vast morning I’d hunted the sun, tried to place it square on my back. But the breeze taunted, left a taste in my mouth. Sullivan Marino, brother-in-law, boss who loved the shovel, sweat, doing the Earth over, walked at me open as a telegram. Sicilian eyes tell stories, omit nothing in the relation. “Your grandfather’s dead.” He was vinegar and oil and reached for my shovel. It would not leave my hands. I saw Johnny Igoe at ten at turf cutting, just before he came this way with the great multitude. I saw how he too moved the ponderous earth, the flame of it caught in iron, singing tea, singeing the thatch, young Irish scorching the ground he walked. He had come here and I came, and I went there, later, to where he’d come from; Roscommon’s sweet vale, slow rush of land, shouldering up, going into sky, clouds shifting selves like pieces at chess, earth ripening to fire. I saw it all, later, where he’d come from, but then, sun-searching, memorializing, Sullivan quickly at oil and odds, his hand out to take my tool away, could stand no dalliance the day Johnny Igoe died. And when he died, they came by the dozen to grieve the savior of their awful nights; the drunken, besotted, brothered band who so often drained his cup. The mottle-skinned came, so soured of life, the pale host of them, the warred upon and beaten, they came to cache the little man who offered what was left of God. The saga of Johnny Igoe is the epic of a nation; The root cell, Johnny Igoe ran ahead of the famine that took brothers and sisters, lay father down; became sick in the hold of ghostly ship I later saw from high rock on Cork’s coast. In the hold he heard the myths and music he would spell all his life. He remembered hunger and being alone and brothers and sisters and father gone and mother praying for him as he knelt beside her bed that hard morning when Ireland went away to the stern. I know that terror of hers last touching his face. He might be housed in this computer, for now he visits, or never leaves. Yeats talks on record but the voice is my grandfather’s voice, the perky treble, the deft reach inside me, the lifting out, the ever lifting out. His books still live, his chair, his cane, the misery he knew, the pain, and somewhere he is. In the dark asides before a faint light glimmers it is the perky pipe’s glow I see, weaker than a small and struck match but illuminating all the same. I smell his old

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Edgeworth tobacco faint as a blown cloud in the air, the way a hobo might know a windowed apple pie from afar. I hear the years of literate good cheer, storied good will, the pleasantries of expansive noun and excitable verb. I hear his ever-lingering poems, each one a repeated resonance, a victory of sound and meaning and the magic of words. I hear his rocking chair giving rhythm to my mind, saying over and over again the words he left with hard handles on them for my grasping. ***

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When You Are Old When you are old and grey and full of sleep, And nodding by the fire, take down this book, And slowly read, and dream of the soft look Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep; How many loved your moments of glad grace, And loved your beauty with love false or true, But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you, And loved the sorrows of your changing face; And bending down beside the glowing bars, Murmur, a little sadly, how Love fled And paced upon the mountains overhead And hid his face amid a crowd of stars. W. B. Yeats, 1865 - 1939

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In The Wings

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Lyric Poetry Prose Adver-tisment

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Title: City Stoop - watercolor by Judith A. Lawrence, 2019.”.

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Heaven, Hell, Damnation, and Brother George (Excerpt)

What Fruit She Bears A Memoir on Growing Up As a Foster Child by Judith A. Lawrence

Chapter 4 Being raised Catholic proved to be a confusing journey for me. I loved the rituals, the pageantry of the May Procession, the organ music at Sunday Mass, the pungent smell of incense, and the costumes of the priests and altar boys. Most of all, I looked forward to that paper thin mildly pleasant wafer slipped on my tongue, while avoiding the priest’s eyes each Sunday morning following my Saturday afternoon’s dubious confession. Yet there were certain Catholic beliefs that filled me with dread. Limbo for one seemed to be a terrifying place. There were pictures in our catechism books of unbaptized

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babies clinging to columns in Limbo, exiled for infinity. I tried to picture infinity, but each time grew faint thinking of living in nothingness forever. Hell was depicted full of demons and fire. I understood that it was where all the really bad people went, those who committed mortal sins. Despite my occasional violations of certain commandments, like fibbing and stealing sugar and candy, they were in the minor sin category. I hadn’t committed any major sins that I was aware of, so believed I would at least escape going to hell. Purgatory, while a disquieting thought, at least was temporary, so if I messed up enough along the line, I could still get to Heaven eventually, once I completed my punishment. But then Heaven was a mysterious place. In some holy cards, the blessed mother was a beautiful woman dressed in blue and white robes. Saints were either standing on white puffy clouds looking towards the heavens, or arms folded holding palms. Almost all had halos. Saint Michael the Ark Angel was pictured striking the devil with his sword. The devil appeared in so many guises, it was impossible to keep up with. The worst of the holy cards were the endless pictures of Jesus nailed on the cross, his face contorted with anguish. In some depictions, even after having been risen to heaven his heart and wounds were still open and bleeding. I was not so sure that in the end, I really wanted to go to heaven. Heavy thoughts for a child, but then I never really was a child, so thought about such things in all seriousness. I was comforted by the fact that it was very unlikely that I would end up there, but the other two choices were definitely not an improvement. I wondered if there was another place to go after purgatory, something more pleasant, though none were mentioned by the nuns in school. No, the choices were, heaven, hell, or purgatory. From everything that Zia Maria counseled, I would never be a saint, so where would I go? Would I wait between purgatory and the gates of heaven in hesitation forever, or would my guardian angel tired of waiting for me, take me kicking and screaming into the kingdom of heaven? I hadn’t felt her presence lately. Perhaps she had stolen away one day just as my mother had. The nuns were too formidable to ask my endless existential questions. I didn’t know how to ask Zia Maria in Italian, as I could hardly formulate the question myself. To this day, I’m not sure she would have understood. Zia Maria was a practical woman who did not trivialize in life or specifically a curious child’s unanswerable questions. In second grade some of the more pious girls wanted to be nuns when they grew up. My experience with nuns discouraged that kind of thinking from the start. Not that they were all mean, but I had been witness to a few that were exceptionally cruel. I looked forward to my First Communion when I was six years old. It was not the marriage to Jesus Christ I was studying my communion book so intently for, but the chance to wear a pretty white communion dress, and walk in the parade. A mother of one of the older school children in the Parish gave me her daughter’s white communion dress to wear. I felt like a bride with my frilly dress and veil, but must confess Jesus never entered the picture. I imagined I was marrying a boy named Nicky that my sister and I often squabbled over ever since he moved into a house that faced our back yard. ***

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While we lived in South Philadelphia, the neighborhood was broken up by Italians, Irish, and what was then known in that area as Colored. Each nationality was at war with the others. The division was by street corners. You could go six blocks in one direction and still be in safe territory, but one block further be on enemy turf. When it was necessary for Zia Maria to walk with my sister and me through various off-limits South Philly neighborhoods, she clutched her pocketbook under her arm tightly as if it held the family jewels rather than her well-worn coin purse with scant bills and change. Being the more rebellious child, her hand held mine so firmly the indentations were still there an hour later. No one trusted the cops in our neighborhood, so if you were in trouble, it was the last place you sought refuge. The gossip hags were content to sit on polished stoops off and on all day, to keep the guard. No movement escaped their watch, or their tongues. While they were a constant source of ridicule and complaints for their nosiness, most people in reality relied on them for reporting the comings and goings of everyone, while keeping a constant vigil on the kids. If you did something bad on the street, an hour later the whole neighborhood knew it. Worse, your parents or guardians were immediately notified, and punishment was swift. *** When we moved to West Philadelphia, the neighborhood we moved into was mostly Italian for many blocks in all directions. Mary and I were allowed to explore the surroundings. People sitting on rockers on their porches overlooking lawns and fences covered with heavenly scented roses or multicolored hydrangea would smile and wave as we passed, two little girls, one rosy and blonde, the other dark and wan, holding hands and skipping along.

Not long after we moved there, we found an empty garage in the neighborhood with a fire escape leading to the roof. We loved playing there, and it was an ideal place to survey the neighborhood. One day while Mary and I played with Old Maid cards on the roof, a cop heard us laughing, and began walking up the fire escape, yelling for us to come down at once. Mary and I were so afraid of cops, we ran to the other side of the roof, and jumped to the alley below, narrowly missing the steel spiked fence of the house next door. I can still recall the feel of my feet landing squarely on the ground with every nerve ending buzzing in shock. In spite of the pain, we took off like lightning. Our feet swelled, turned black and blue over the next few days, but neither one of us reported to Zia Maria what happened, not wanting to reveal our special hiding place. The following week, Mary missed playing with our deck of cards, and found courage to climb the fire escape steps to the roof top, with my role as the lookout. It had rained, and a few cards had scattered off the roof from the wind. The rest were a soggy mess, so she left them there. A couple months later, someone left a pack of regular cards on a park bench, and I quickly snatched them up. In life I grew to learn there were always small compensations if you took the time to notice and acted quickly. Coming in from playing late one afternoon, we found Zia Maria kneeling on the floor praying, thumping her chest, and thanking God. She told us that she received news about her hated cousin, whom she often cursed, and sent the malocchio (evil eye) each time his name was mentioned. He had fallen dead from a fatal heart attack while boarding a plane to the United States. We were at once dispatched to the Acme for cake and ice cream to celebrate. We never learned what terrible thing he had done to her, but it must have been pretty bad, because she was a much more cheerful woman after that. ***

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About this time, our five year old brother came to stay with us. We didn’t know we had a brother. George was adorable. He was blond and blue eyed, like my sister. Mary was extremely happy. She now had a willing daddy for playing with her dolls, which let me off to go read on the porch. Playing house was not my forte. On the contrary, George loved playing with dolls. I was delighted as I now had both a sister and a brother to play with and most of all to tease, which I continued to do at every opportunity. Although Mary and I were excited to have a brother, George was not at all happy about living with us. He did not understand our odd mixed bag of English and Italian dialect, and desperately wanted to go back home, despite having being mistreated there. He had been there since he was a baby, and it was all he knew. He missed the two older boys from his old foster home that played with him, and asked for them often. Due to George’s bedwetting, his elderly foster mother had been keeping a pile of papers on the closet floor for his bed where he slept each night with a pillow and an old blanket. Someone reported the woman to the Catholic Bureau, who then removed George and placed him with Zia Maria, while the other two boys continued to stay with the foster parent. George took to running away at least a couple times a week. At first, I would run after him, round and round the block, pleading for him not to leave, until I realized he was afraid to cross the street. After that, I sat and waited on the front steps until he grew tired. After a few laps, he would sit down beside me, neither of us saying a word, his small shoulders still shuddering from sobbing, until he quieted, and we rose together to go inside.

turning to school. George was contented to be going into kindergarten. He was told by the nun during his registration that there would be other little boys to play with. At school, my sister and I knew from the start that we did not fit in with these children, with their references to Mommy and Daddy, birthday celebrations with presents, new bicycles, street and ice skates for Christmas. These kids went to the shore every summer. The nearest we got to a body of water was the orphan’s summer camp the year before. I had never been in a pool, so walked straight through under the dividing chain to the deep-end of the pool and sank clear to the bottom. I had to be resuscitated. There were so many children in the pool, at first no one noticed. When I was revived, I was more embarrassed than scared with all those grown-ups standing around me, and tried to scamper off, but was instead taken to the infirmary for the day. On the same camp trip, Mary and I snuck out one night to explore. We picked and ate a batch of small wild onions from plants we found in the woods, tasty, but we got food poisoning. We spent the next couple days running in and out of the bathroom. In school I did not make friends easily. For me it was a lack of trust in pretty much everyone but my immediate small family. Not long after I returned to school, in addition to fainting spells, I would sometimes nod out, missing minutes of time during classes. I would come to, not understanding where we were in the lesson, and anxiously try to catch up. Some of the kids made fun of my dozing off spells. One day while walking home from school, a group of girls walking behind were taunting me. I *** was trying to ignore them but they persisted. One of the larger girls suddenly ran up, and slammed me to The summer flew by. Mary and I dreaded re- the ground so hard that my four front teeth popped

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out, and my chin split open. Seeing the volume of blood that spilt caused me to black out. I came to in the ambulance with a thick roll of gauze bandages tightly wrapped to my chin and the sour taste of blood in my mouth. After that I clung to the school steps at recess watching the kids play from a distance, and waited for the kids to disperse on the way home before walking on my own. It took some time for my chin to heal. It was difficult opening my mouth, but likely a blessing for Zia Maria, freed for a time from my constant chatter. It is surprising how much you use your chin in one day, and it was hard chewing without my front teeth so I replaced chattering with noisy slurping. *** School is like that, a min-schism of society in which you either are accepted, or rejected, until you break off from the pack and forge your own way. It is said by psychologists that personalities are formed by the time we reach six years old. I believe I still carry that six-year-old in the mind and heart of me. She clings on as a permanent part of me. I think I have spent my whole life carrying her to safety, while breaking off from the pack in one form or another. ***

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Part Two YOU MAKE A DRAWING OF YOUR BREATH Enchanted Lands by Oonah V Joslin 96 Voices from a Near Dimension by Oonah V Joslin 98 Of Trick Shots and Empty Pockets, for Morgan by RP Verlaine 102 The Haunting of Niall of the 9 Hostages by Ann Egan 104 Niall - Hostage of Fantasy by Ann Egan 106 Niall Ponders on the Tenth Hostage by Ann Egan 109 Olfactory Ghost by Miki Byrne 113 Winter Lane by Tom Sheehan 115 I Have Roots by Miki Byrne 117 The Orchard Hour by James G. Piatt 119 The Space Between by Ron. Lavalette 121 The Phantom Trout by Tom Sheehan 122 Abandoned Jumper by Dolores Duggan 125 remembrance by Dolores Duggan 127 Library Reading Room by Jan Wiezorek 129 Where is my Haunting by Jo Ann Newton 130 Driving to the Dementia Convention by Anne Donnellan 132 The Dream of the Roscommon Emigrant by Tom Sheehan 135

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Enchanted Lands: Editorial By Oonah V Joslin Few islands so small have engendered so much loyalty and nostalgia all from over the world, such violence and beauty, such tales and verses as Ireland, and those who were born there know why. It’s utterly enchanting. So for this St Patrick’s Day we give you 7 poems reflecting history, ancestry and remembrance. Yet there is enchantment in every place, if you seek it, and that is what poets do. Every place of enchantment, great or small, forms a landscape of words. Be they real or imagined landscapes, expansive as space-time or small as particles of scent, a single room, another world, a place of bliss and love or the dark, hollow chasms of grief, they create a desire in us to preserve their essence and communicate their wonderment.

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The Memorial Park. A bed of tulips, laughter and forget-me-nots shine their brightest in the long twilight of a dream. Mingled milling smells of dusty wheat, jute sacks. Hot chocolate, wafts of Old Spice aftershave. Shades shift shape and escape, childhood memories. Voices long cold recaptured warm and homely as bannock. The poet wakes; hammers out the infrared of words to illuminate what you could never see; the inner mind, hooded in dark where all that world exists. Oonah Joslin Everything changes. Nothing is lost. We hope that, along with our wonderful images, these poems will add colour to your life and bring peace to your heart. Are you a poet? If so our next issue is looking to the Moon for it’s magic. 50 years ago Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took us there on Apollo 11. Maybe like me, you are old enough to remember the world of 1969. Maybe not. Maybe you have other things to tell us about the Moon. We’d like to read them. Please send us something by April. ***

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Voices from a Near Dimension By Oonah V Joslin

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nce I had infinite capacity. I could elongate a moment or freeze a day. I sang bluebells and waterfalls. I saw the colours that surround people. I was the spectre in the crowd. I flew my magic carpet to the surface of the sun.

There was a time we walked together and I could touch your hand and hear your voice. I knew your scent. You showed me cosmic planes within, and hidden pearls in opal fires, the laser at the ruby's heart. Your currents set me free. The universe takes little notice of a passing body. In its vastness, we appear and disappear and that is all. In three dimensions, dawn and day and dark, you lose people. We learn the nature of shadow, and all are diminished. When you slipped from the edge of the world, I was afraid. Sometimes in the dark I would wake in a pillow of tears, eyes stuck fast. Stark and bright, noon casts no shadows. Bluebells are silent. Waterfalls tilt towards vesper. My magic carpet slices superficially through a world where nobody believes in magic carpets any more. I am thread-thin, no more than a sliver, a cross-section through walls, rooms, flesh. You pay no heed. You do not mind me. Last night I dreamt we stood on the edge of darkness at the end of time and you led me to a place with no ceiling where we could watch the last stars go out together. You held my hand so I wouldn't be afraid. But I was always afraid. Minds do not have cross-sections. You can never see into them. They are only a lifetime thick. Ask the physicists. Ask the psychologists. Perfume is thicker molecules than a mind. It exists in darkness. Memory is a salvo that can wound mortally. When the last star was gone there was light of our own making; white lightnings of thought streaking across the void. Whispers in the dream-time. Echoes dying. I cannot make you hear me now. Your silence is a total deprivation. You might think because I am no longer multi-dimensional, that I cannot truly suffer. Not mine the tesseract, not mine the cross. Not even the net of the cube is mine. I am two lines that intersect this thin graphite spread, drawn on, I know not by what hand. I dream and wake in fear, my tissue torn. I dare not dream of dreaming. Mind and body are a strange symbiosis. There is no knowing the one and no ignoring the other. The body enshrouds the mind in rags of matter. Yet the mind fears release. There are things that pierce me – the fear of lies and all that lies beyond the point where twilight colours fade. Edges dissolve. In three dimensions you walk in the dark, love in the dark, dream in the dark. You accept loss. The urge is powerful to know everything yet I know nearly nothing. I pass through your hands and leave no trace. Strange the damage hands

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The Linnet´s Wings can do; caress, control, dismiss with a gesture and wash themselves of blame. There is so much to grasp. Some say we will be transformed one day; that this great expansion will contract to a point where every mind is one again. Some say there will be no end to our thinning; that every part of every particle will one day be alone. All voices silent. There are up quarks, down quarks, strange and charm quarks and super-particles as yet unknown. We are all up and down and change and charm and fired beyond light, perhaps unmade. A little physics is a dangerous thing. Why persist in these linear thoughts? Look carefully now with all your heart. You may see a magic carpet slicing through. You may hear the whispered echo of a thread: perceive at last, the shadowy cross section of a mind. Oonah V Joslin

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Of Trick Shots and Empty Pockets for Morgan

By RP Verlaine She wants a religion older than the new testament she tells me. I show her my new high end cue most pool hustlers avoid as they do detectives or spotlights. But with picayune talents I need the edge to lose gracefully. Morgan serves me a beer with that half a smile Garbo gave to less than a few. As music’s rainbow of noise finds lost rhythms of clarity in a spotlight as Morgan dances on the bar in the east village. Where passion never quite kills doubts in those young enough to offer less than even odds in a pool hall’s shadowy dark. Morgan smiles kisses my new beer for luck/ gold in a glass. Where angels traverse lost swimming in each pool player’s

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corner side pocket of chance only ever half filled with the promise of one more last lucky shot

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The Haunting of Niall of the 9 Hostages By Ann Egan This man, he lives by my side, is with me in my every move. I know him better than my wife. Sometimes I fear I am him. I am his hostage, he is my keeper. But that’s a hull full of useless booty, for I am Niall, the hostage taker, not the imprisoned of this strange one. Let me call him forth from the depths

of my own making, bid him quake before me, mighty plunderer. Tremble like a timid servant sacked by his master, cross as a weasel, he speeds into a burrow, reaches rock, can’t go on, can’t go back as hounds bay for the taste of his wildness. O Tenth One, you are more real than my pilot who steers my fleet, trawls seas’ vagaries, sound’s calm.

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command all be still as

from your wealth’s wilderness, crown of amethysts on your head. Monarch of riches, ruler of gold. Bow before me, I imagine power

Samhain coming to Sliabh Mís. My pirates are peacemakers. You are alive in my nightmares. My Tenth Hostage of my dreams.

harnessed in your shoulders, your beard is neatly clipped. Long fingers to play the lute. You write letters, do you? Poems you chant to harmony I sense all about your bearing. I’m told you talk to hosts of your people, goad them to deeds of plunder, same as me. They believe in all you preach. No wonder you have caskets of precious stones, dazzling metals, promised by Manannán to the bold. I will make a great plan, to ensure I capture you, My best booty, dream man. You lull me to sleep with ballads finer than my file’s. You strut in costly mantles,

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Niall - Hostage of Fantasy By Ann Egan

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The Linnet´s Wings I hear it on the winds, my tenth one. I hear it from the ocean’s deep. Waves thunder my bark’s sides, whip away my sailors’ curses, scream we shall soon meet. My slaves prepare a place for gathering your wits after I’ve looped the lariat around golden reflections, as the crescent moon wheels into mysteries of her waning. My whip of seaweed and opal dust, wind borne from the world’s end, jumps and twists to my wishes, binds all captives’ howls to the bowels of my ship. It readies itself for you, rich man. It clouts the wattled pot my crone wove for its resting. Green and milky colours of opals confer with seaweed’s hunger, tell me in hisses and writhing soon I must open this basket. When the sea was in hiding,

She wraps curses with her heart’s loneliness into the coils. My spirit sings my longing to capture you, my tenth hostage, your wealth of fields, wealth of words. Before the birch leaves turn one last time on their branches, the moon grows round in her going and returning, I will unleash my sea lariat. Seagulls shrill your name, Patrick, tell me your kingdom rests around Cambria’s mountains and valleys while you listen to silver voices. When Manannán Mac Lir bids waves to be still in their standing, pacifies white flowers of the sea with lays recited in soft voices, have a care for yourself, your gold and rubies and your secret treasure. You will be lariat-bound for my homeland. Tenth hostage of Niall of the Nine!

the old woman plucked birch reeds and wove spells by the darkness of Samhain. I must snatch this rope of sea hunger and exile’s pain for my crew are in readiness to sail. My longing is deeper than the weaver’s for kind words she’ll never hear from her people who cast her in old age on the black mountain of the west.

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Niall Ponders on the Tenth Hostage By Ann Egan

I am the greatest sailor of the seas’ canny expanse. I know her ways, her passions. I can scan them as simply as the poet reads Ogham, that holds verses in memories of mountains and man’s heart when he chisels his feelings. I know all the inlets, curious lie of rocks that lurk like pirates, illusions of briny humours. Lustrous omens lure pilots, sunder beams and masts, commit captains like lost beings of waves’ gleams, bearing them, their prey, to the deep’s anonymity. I am the waters’ bosom friend, give gold to Manannán Mac Lir, listen for oracles to lead my voyage to his flowered haven. I’ll build a boat to sail the waves, gold ingots nailed to its mast, aglitter with falling moon, rising sun, playful stars. I will venture on a voyage to my tenth hostage of all hostages, Manannán declared will bring undreamed of riches to my island. I will be the slave master for I have my ways to snare him.

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Patrick The Younger

Notes In the early years of 400 AD Saint Patrick, then a prescient boy, in his Welsh homeplace, experienced visions and nightmares that mirrored many events of his youth and maturity in Ireland. Captured by Niall of the Nine Hostages, sold into slavery to Milchú, he spent six years as a sheep herd on Sliabh Mís. He finally escaped after having a dream that a ship awaited him. He found the ship, sailed to the continent, studied and became a bishop. He returned to Ireland in 432 after he had a dream of its people begging him to return and rescue them from paganism.

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Olfactory Ghost By Miki Byrne

It was an incongruous fragrance, delicate, floral, to rise from wrinkled skin. She had worn it for years, half my lifetime, From back when I remembered her dancing and wearing her uniform proudly with the coveted sisters buckle snug at her waist. She had grown through and past the title of her perfume. ‘Youth Dew’ conjures up visions of softness, peach-pleasant skin, clear and smooth. Yet each day she dabbed it on folds at wrist and neck, damped age spot and mole, let it mingle with a little mustiness and sweat, as thieves of age began to steal her mind. Even when she gave up washing it was there, to blur the senses, soak into clothes worn too long and grown too big. It stuck to everything. Lingered long after she had gone, oozed from drawer and wardrobe. It’s an olfactory ghost in my memory. Jolts me hard, when I pass someone wearing it.

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Title: Finding Home Oil on Canvas, MLF, PS

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Winter Lane

By Tom Sheehan Down the lane behind this gray house of 270 years, arms spreading, other white houses link the way ships of a harbor huddle at hawsers, then gush with transport, and take me places I've never been in other winters.

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I Have Roots By Miki Byrne

Apparently I went to Ireland but was too young to remember. So I imagined how my Da had lived. I know he was Dublin born. Lived in a slum, knew the back streets and what it was like to go without. That he didn’t have shoes except for church on Sunday and that he would dive off the docks to amuse the odd tourist, who gave him pennies for his bravery. He crossed the water for work, then enlisted and did his bit in the second big one. Fought for his adopted land, his family. He said he had lost sight of Ireland but I found it. In his Gaelic, his singing, The stories he told and in the soft accent that never went.

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Title: Apple Picking PS, MLF, 2019

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The Orchard Hour By James G. Piatt

It is a dreamlike hour in the orchard, It is tranquil, and silent, yet there is a powerful Message entering the air, It exists amidst the balmy breeze flowing through The tree limb’s leaves, sending them fluttering In the atmosphere, like green faeries, There is an energy that flows atop the bark walk too, and Into the flowers with their beautiful colorful faces And dark feathery leaves, leaving them vibrating, The birds nearby sense it too, and their chirping is Barely audible, but can be heard by a person who is Comfortable being alone, This indescribable atmosphere that causes all things To glow and create, is a message that is valuable To an old man who is living in fading hours, And as he sits on an old bench that is wearing down, Like him, he understands that the answer to it all, is not To question everything, but to just be.

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Title: Hay Makers PS, MLF, 2019

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The Space Between By Ron. Lavalette

She sets out for the coast, stops at the notch to admire the mountains, makes note that these are truly mountains, not the soft green rounded foothills she calls home. Left behind, he comes home from work to an empty house and thinks about her traveling through the mountains toward the sea she loves, driving along with all the windows fully open, waiting for that first whiff of salt air. Two or three times before the sun goes down, he steps out onto the deck to count and recount the giant hay bales in the field below the house. Miles and miles and hours away, under a just-past-full moon, the road ceases to unfold before her. She sits, gazing out at water, satisfied, having melted her mountains in the sea. Around midnight, before bed, he goes out to stand on the deck and count the bales one last time, the way a shepherd counts his sheep. He stares out at the horizon, thinking about how ridgelines remind him of waves.

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Title: Dromod Harbour, Leitrim PS: MLF 2019

The Phantom Trout By Tom Sheehan In a blue molten stream, occasional fires resuming what the sun played out as a fanciful passing, the last trout, cigar-dark, footpad furtive and slinky as sex, slipped unabashedly along the rock-bound bed. I eyed it against the tiled underworld of lichened stone, wet-gray mosaics pebbles cede where pools begin to tell tales, and dark shank of fallen pine settled like old dories, ribbed,

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Title: Cliff Jumpers, La Chucha PS, MLF, 2019

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Abandoned Jumper By Dolores Duggan The darkness on the rooftop, Eerie shadows playing tricks With his mind. One; a spear-holding Viking. Others; a gang of hunchbacked Gnomes, as he crossed the tarmac And leaned out over the ledge And looked beyond into the dark. The North Wind wanted to see His gravity torn body plummet Towards the pavement cracks. His ex wife wants him dead too But for other reasons. This was his mission today To decide to stay or make The leap into the unknown. So. He went into the dark Falling past the lit up floors With office girls inside. They didn’t notice much Until the glare of the blue lights Reached the sixth floor.

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Title: Burying the Dead PS: MLF, 2019, Linnet´s Wimgs Design

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remembrance

By Dolores Duggan remember, that bloody scene. bodies, blankets wrapped around the old man. he was bald and bloody. remember, people screamed. children cried, soldiers shot those who stood and stared. remember, priest whispered prayers in ears of the deadand dying. remember, times past, that Sunday when fourteen died lest we ever forget.

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Title: Snowdrops in the Forest Photo: Oonah Joslin, 2018 Photoshopped: MLF 2019

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Library Reading Room By Jan Wiezorek

Living dust is always learning, tucked along bookshelves, lining in graphite fill, filmed across flamboyant ice blocks of glass. It cushions the amperes of greenfocused lamps, is sewn in goldfiligree frames, taunts the colors themselves, inviting the eye to image what is paint—and what is disguised brushwork of somber dust-catchers. Sitting, turning, trading eyeballs, clicking surfaces, they fail to alphabetize correctly when the librarian asks again and again. He brushes them off. And so we come to this—pour out the vacuum; empty it before the second seating.

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Where Is MyHaunting? By Jo-Ann Newton Death is practical. A To Do List of grief to be lived through yet no sense of a job well done. No room for beauty in endless forms that now record your life.

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Your death. Your essence in bullet points. Like a times table I trot out details surprised when my voice catches. I did not want this normality. A hum drum nod to your passing that makes me choke on every intrusion of memory. And where is my haunting? My soul screams to feel an echo of your mothering.

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Art: Title: A Rose for Mum, OIl on Canvas, MLF 2017

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Driving to the Dementia Convention By Anne Donnellan Driving to the dementia convention May morning in Connemara As cotton wool clouds compete With sunshine sprinkles I embrace the optic banquet Of roadside mixed greens Copses crawling with shimmer Ivy and holly leaves glazed Porridge white hawthorn flower Dressing the hedge rows Lusciousness luring me Deeper into trance Of majestic mountain way Wrapped in awe I spot tall yellow irises Signpost of the marshes Changeing blue forget me nots Splashed on hillsides Colonising clusters of mauve

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rhododendrons Brillant five - lobed bell flower Sucking toxic layer Space invading Destination reached I peel myself from the scene To hear your pleas Locked in mind marshes Thought streams swamped

Dont shut me out Find my roots Feel my loss I am alive Forget me not.

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Title: Feeding the Swans PS: MLF, 2019, Linnet´s Wimgs Design

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Note: This piece was found in remnant notes and marked pages after my maternal grandfather John Igoe passed on in his 93rd year and were in my possession until they were transcribed to my first computer. John Igoe often recited pieces to us many times in our early years. (Tom Sheehan)

The Dream of the Roscommon Emigrant By John Igoe

There is a land though far away that’s very dear to me, an island in the ocean most picturesque to see. As each day goes by I heave a sigh for those lovely native scenes: Ah! Isle of Saints and Martyrs, I see you in my dreams. I’m at the gate of Clooniquin, I hear the pearling stream now wend its way to Ross and then to far Culleen. I hear the thrush and blackbird in the holly and laurel tree; my soul says I must loiter in this fair locality. I cross the bridge and up the walk and toward that lovely grove; with ecstasy my heart does bound as onward I do rove. From the countless pines a shadow runs to meet me on the hill

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where the pheasant and Rabbit doth wander there at will. Ah, solitude, thy charms are dear, to me how sweet they seem as I set me down and look around on Nature’s lovely scene. The hills of Ross are beautiful, and so the lovely glen and meadows fair that stretch between those hills and dear Elphin.** From Castlerea to Carrick I see the places all, from Roscommon down to Lulsk and to the Plains of Boyle. As I travel o’er that scope, with Nature’s gifts so strewn, I stop halfway where I was raised now aided by the moon. I look around bewildered on all that I behold; the tree of ash, the hawthorn bush, now burnished in their gold. The cottage I was born in and raised by parents kind, I enter with impatience but there I could not find the one above all others whose love was dear to me. She has gone to her heaven For all eternity. Father, brothers, sisters, I join in fond embrace as tears of joy and sorrow

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The Linnet´s Wings roll swiftly down each face. I see the good old nabors, each remembered a pleasant day, and shake each hand with affection as I did when going away. In harmony we all did join and traversed those weary years since that eventful morning when I left them steeped in tears. Now fond adieu to all my friends around the dear old isle, though adopted by Columbia I am Erin’’s faithful child; for the Stars and Stripes with the flag of Green will line in unity. Adieu again, old Ireland, farewell my dear country.

______________________________ **My wife Beth and I on our honeymoon in 1973 visited at Elphin the cottage John Igoe was born in, and where lived my mother’s last two living first cousins, Peter and Joseph Cassidy, met and since gone.

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