For Ronan Mac Aongusa, Transparent years (a poem of UCD)

For Ronan, for 25 years.



Transparent Years

25 years ago
On the concourse of UCD
Or hanging in the students union
We were arrogant and lost
In impossible measures

Transparent in our voices
Ideals worn with cynical pride
Titling at dragons and chasing dreams
Angst and alcohol, side by side

25 years ago,
you became a sentinel in my life
prompting me when I stumbled
one of the foundations
of who I am.

We have both made our journeys
In miles, in thought, in dream or deed
Each one ending in our reunion
Friendship it seems, is our only need.

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In Search of a Lost Girl

Inspired by Immrama, and the bringing of meditation and journeying techniques into modern life

In search of a lost girl

The summer of my youth was spent
In smoky pubs; making rain
While the sun shone.
On and on, I traversed the lines
And wasted time like golden coin.

How to glimpse again the vanished day?
Travel through the shades and speak
To my younger, lost self? And take
her by the hand and reinvent
the landscape of my past.

I have lit incense to the god of time
And sweated out the years
I have shed tears and offered wine
And burnt meat. They will not treat
With me, and silently disdain.

I will return to the ways of my mothers,
And sail into the western seas,
Mannanán will guide me to Hy-Brasil
And I will alight at the sacred Isles
Where all answers lie, hidden.

Among the old, I will walk with ease.
It will please me to hear the old words
And sing the old songs, among the trees.
I will make a harp of my sorrows and dance
And woo time with my lips.

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Making Amends

This poem is about the loss of innocence. not in the conventional sense; but in that loss of illusion, loss of comfort sense. The illusions produced by ignorance, which is really another word for innocence - lack of knowledge - are sweet and impossibly pure. They are the illusions of loyalty and friendship and love that make our childhoods and adolescence so vivid. The loss of these illusions, no matter how much better off or safer we are in knowing, is something to be mourned.
And now I pride my adult heart/For adult sins to see./Yet as a dupe in innocence/In summer games and pretty play/My heart was far more free.
I wrote it in my late twenties, which for me was a time of realisation in itself; when the seperation between adulthood and childhood, youth and maturity, innocence and knowledge became set and unyielding.


Making Amends

You used honeyed words
I used wildflowers in a glass jar
It seemed mad to be at odds
While bees and flowers and summer sun
Conspired to make us smile.

All childish grief dispersed
Games and play resumed
Our chubby arms entwined
Like honeysuckle ropes that bind
Our idols to their throne.

And now I wiser am,
And hear beneath your tone
To all the use you have for me
To all the use you ever had
Had I but ever known

And now I pride my adult heart
For adult sins to see.
Yet as a dupe in innocence
In summer games and pretty play
My heart was far more free.

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Lament for Setanta

"Setanta" was inspired by a conversation with a friend and fellow poet, J Evans, who remarked on the difficulty of actually liking Cú Chlainn the man; which led me to consider poor Setanta the boy, and all that was innocent and lost as the legend took over.


Setanta

Setanta! hard syllables of boyhood
matured into Cú Chulainn, soft vowels
sinister in their promise
of war; lovely in their pledge of honour.

Setanta, young man of flawed ability
ran with hounds and stepped lightly
over the heather. Now how the ground
trembles at the approach of the man!

Setanta, did your friends ever mourn you?
regret the impulsive youth, the boy
or were they all too dazzled by the warrior
Cú Chulainn Champion of Ulster?

Setanta, I will shed a tear for you, torn
from the bosum of your family to run across
foreign hills, losing in the chase the lad;
to forge in his stead, the legend.

Geraldine Moorkens Byrne 2006

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