from The Splinters

(Skellig Michael) does not belong to any world that you and I have lived and worked in: it is part of our dream world…then (heading back) we were pursued by terrors, ghost from Michael… George Bernard Shaw I The ferry furrows the foam, leaving a wake that quickly settles and forgets us, as it has forgotten all those who’ve opened these waters: fisherman, monk, pilgrim and pagan, some foundering here. Our mainland world diminishes. There is respite. A cloud engulfs us out of nowhere as if the miraculous were about to appear. The veil lifts to reveal the small Skellig and Skellig Michael rising like chapel and cathedral. II We forget speech, hypnotized by the climb, concentrating on narrow, rock-hewn steps that spiral up like the gyres of the Book of Kells, whirling in labyrinths of knowledge, turmoil and eternity. They lead to the beehive huts and oratories packed with a congregation of sightseers who whisper in disbelief and reverence at how those sometime monks lived in this wind-tugged cloister of shells. We browse in each dome’s live absence and picnic above the graveyard that’s no bigger than a currach with a crucifix for helmsman navigating his crew to the island of the dead. We’re eyed by the staunch, monkish puffins. Our tongues loosen, but, in keeping with the somberness of this sun-haloed place, we chat about the world with an earnestness that would embarrass us on the mainland. You tell of medieval monks charting world maps with countries drawn as humans gorging upon each other’s entangled bodies. We go on to the lands and demons of the world of poetry. I’m flummoxed when you ask what poetry is. I recall how the earliest musical instruments were hewn out of bones, and that poets carve their words out of those gone before. They are the primitive musicians who beat and blow words back to life. More than that I don’t know. III […] That dusk at Dún an Óir we slaughtered even the pregnant, whimpering women methodically while a bloodstained sun drowned in the ocean. Each fetus struggled in the belly of each slain mother as desperately as a lobster dropped in a boiling pot. Had shed blood been ink, I could still be quilling The Faerie Queene, but I did not allow a drop to blot a mere sonnet that you, trapped in complicity, can never quite break free of. Admit it, hypocrite! In your time few are not guilty of slaughter. Even the page you’ll pen this upon is of pine that Amazonians were shot for. I could go on. (Edmund Spenser) I lifted the pitch of my grief above the storm-lashing waves for my world breaking on the reefs of foreign, land-grabbing knaves, who ignore dependence upon the lowliest plants and creatures as the hermit crab and cloak anemone depend on one another. But no matter what, you must keen for the world’s theft as I keened mine, despite knowing soon no one may be left. (Aodhagán Ó Rathaille) Lend an ear to one of your own kind and do not let yourself be caught by the winds of lust, like Dante’s starlings blown this way and that by every gust. I myself was borne on this wind as I rode across country, always wary that around the next bend my life would catch up with me. My rakish ways squandered energy that I should have instilled in song, more worthy of the muse-gift given to me than my odd aisling, Pay particular heed to me, especially since your word-talent is less than mine. I’m still too bushed to eke out a last line. (Eoghan Rua Ó Súilleabháin) Sing up front, cold-shouldering the fashionable low key of your time, closed, cautious and crabbit as a farmer. Sing as open-throated as my curlew keen. I supped the red wine of Art’s blood as he lay slain, already becoming Cork mud. Sing as full-throated as my unmatched plaint; matching my words to his cold body that would never again rouse to my touch. My hands wept that day’s icy rain as I swore to undo that kowtowing dribble of a man who slew my Art of the winged white horse. The spirit of that mare I rode fleeter than any hare, fleeter than any deer, fleeter than the wind through Munster’s open country. Sing your provenance, our elder province. (Eibhlín Dubh Ní Chonaill) I sang not for my own or for beauty's sake as much as to keep our spirits fired, knowing as long as we sang we'd not break, refusing to allow the country be shired. But it was too much when even our lands turned hostile and drove us like lapwings in the hard winter, together in dying bands, our swollen bellies pregnant with nothing. Even the birds seemed to give up singing. So I lay down and relinquished song. But I should have kept up my amhrán-ing, adapting and transmuting their tongue. Transform the spirit of where you belong, make something right out of what's wrong. (Tomás Rua Ó Súilleabháin) Tell of those weather-sketched Attic islanders who half-tamed their school of rocky Blaskets, water spouting from the blowholes of cliffs. Tell how they were forced from their Ithaca, still dreaming in the surf-rush of Irish, the inland longing for the lilt of the sea. In them uncover the destiny of everyone, for all are exiled and in search of a home, as you settle the eroding island of each poem. (Robin Flower) […] The islands' standing army of gannets fiercely snap, stab and peck one another. Few could match the spite I unleashed on any who encroached into my territory. I spat with petrel accuracy. I should have had the wisdom of the sad-eyed puffins who let everyone come close, sensing few mean hurt, though when forced to tussle they'll show their worth. So learn from me. When I come to mind don't recall how, feisty, I knocked nests of words over the edge, splattering on the rocks the crude squwaks of other ravaging, wing-elbowing birds; rather think of the winged poems I hatched, seen, regardless of time and place, gliding and gyring with their own grace. (Patrick Kavanagh) Life when it is gone is like a woman you were glad to be quit of only to find yourself years later longing for her, catching her scent on a crowded street. Tell us of the seagull plundering your picnic before it wakes you. Tell us of the rain tapping a pane while you're ensconced by the fire cradling a pregnant brandy glass. (Louis MacNeice) Can you still hear a distant train whistle blow? Wet my whistle with a slug of Guinness. What is the texture of fresh-fallen snow? Do girls still wear their hair in braid? What's tea? What's the smell of the sea? Tell me. Tell me. I am beginning to fade. (Dylan Thomas) IV The alarming, silhouetted bird has a preternatural quality as it flutters about my head, drawing me from sleep's underworld. I resist its pull. Everything turns into dream's usual montage. Another figure emerges but says nothing, as if that's what he came to say. His face merges into one of a gagged female. She shimmers and vanishes. Dolphins break beyond Blind Man's Cove, returning the dead to Bull Island, transmitting their encrypted, underwater Morse. The savant local ferryman informs us that Skellig Michael was once a druidic site. His oil-wrinkled hands tug the engine cord, coaxing our boat out of the cliff-shaded cove. We withdraw into the distance, leaving a disgruntling sense that we've only touched the tip of these dark icebergs.