As I Rode by Granard Moat (19 page)

The night was falling dreary,

In merry Bandon town,

When, in his cottage weary,

An Orangeman lay down.

The summer sun in splendour

Had set upon the vale,

And shouts of ‘No surrender!’

Arose upon the gale.

Beside the waters, laving

The feet of aged trees,

The Orange banners waving,

Flew boldly in the breeze –

In mighty chorus meeting,

A hundred voices join,

And fife and drum were beating

The Battle of the Boyne.

Ha! toward his cottage hieing,

What form is speeding now,

From yonder thicket flying,

With blood upon his brow?

‘Hide – hide me, worthy stranger,

Though green my colour be,

And, in the day of danger,

May Heaven remember thee!

‘In yonder vale contending,

Alone against that crew,

My life and limbs defending,

An Orangemen I slew;

Hark! hear that fearful warning,

There’s death in every tone –

O save my life till morning,

And Heaven prolong your own!’

The Orange heart was melted

In pity to the Green;

He heard the tale, and felt it

His very soul within.

‘Dread not that angry warning

Though death be in its tone –

I’ll save your life till morning,

Or I will lose my own.’

Now, round his lowly dwelling,

The angry torrent pressed,

A hundred voices swelling,

The Orangeman addressed –

‘Arise, arise, and follow

The chase along the plain!

In yonder stony hollow

Your only son is slain!’

With rising shouts they gather

Upon the track amain,

And leave the childless father

Aghast with sudden pain.

He seeks the righted stranger

In covert where he lay –

‘Arise!’ he said, ‘all danger

Is gone and past away.

‘I had a son – one only,

One loved as my life,

Thy hand has left me lonely,

In that accursed strife.

I pledged my word to save thee

Until the storm should cease,

I keep the pledge I gave thee –

Arise, and go in peace!’

The stranger soon departed

From that unhappy vale;

The father, broken-hearted,

Lay brooding o’er that tale.

Full twenty summers after

To silver turned his beard,

And yet the sound of laughter

From him was never heard.

The night was falling dreary

In merry Wexford town,

When, in his cabin, weary,

A peasant laid him down.

And many a voice was singing

Along the summer vale,

And Wexford town was ringing

With shouts of ‘Granua Uaile!’

Beside the waters, laving

The feet of aged trees,

The green flag, gaily waving,

Was spread against the breeze –

In mighty chorus meeting,

Loud voices filled the town,

And fife and drum were beating,

‘Down, Orangemen, lie down!’

Hark, ’mid the stirring clangour

That woke the echoes there,

Loud voices, high in anger,

Rise on the evening air.

Like billows of the ocean,

He sees them hurry on –

And, ’mid the wild commotion,

An Orangeman alone.

‘My hair,’ he said, ‘is hoary,

And feeble is my hand,

And I could tell a story

Would shame your cruel band.

Full twenty years and over

Have changed my heart and brow,

And I am grown a lover

Of peace and concord now.

‘It was not thus I greeted your

Brother of the green;

When fainting and defeated

I freely took him in.

I pledged my word to save him,

From vengeance rushing on,

I kept the pledge I gave him,

Though he had killed my son.’

That aged peasant heard him,

And knew him as he stood;

Remembrance kindly stirred him,

And tender gratitude.

With gushing tears of pleasure,

He pierced the listening train,

‘I’m here to pay the measure

Of kindness back again!’

Upon his bosom falling,

That old man’s tears came down;

Deep memory recalling

That cot and fatal town.

‘The hand that would offend thee,

My being first shall end;

I’m living to defend thee,

My saviour and my friend!’

He said, and slowly turning,

Addressed the wondering crowd;

With fervent spirit burning,

He told the tale aloud.

Now pressed the warm beholders,

Their aged foe to greet;

They raised him on their shoulders

And chaired him through the street.

As he had saved that stranger

From peril scowling dim,

So in his day of danger

Did Heaven remember him.

By joyous crowds attended,

The worthy pair were seen,

And their flags that day were blended

Of Orange and of Green.

This is an evening for a hallowed landfall,

The landbreeze slithers down Brandon

Mountain where stone on stone the monkhives

crumble and no prayers drone since twelve evangels

voyaged to find the summer islands.

The light withdraws over the maudlin village

and upended curraghs upended like black cattle,

to follow the copper Atlantic shimmer.

O how could twelve exiles

return from voyaging, staring at wonders and charting

infinity, and raise dripping oars to glide

rejoicing, chanting laudate with salty lips cracking,

back from the peril of where the sun founders,

to search for lost Ireland round their cold mountain.

This is the evening. The bleat of melodeons

buckleaps fandangos and whips

up the hobnails to belt at the floorboards.

Thirst gravels the gullet; lads with puffed faces

muster a yowl for slopped foamy porter

and grope for the pence in the fist-hoarded purses.

Fug blears the wicks; the sergeant is strutting,

tunic neck-open, bellyband bursting;

Annastatia and Nellie slip off to go pairing

at a tip and a wink to the back of the graveyard.

Goat-music, fumes, the stamp of wild heel-bones,

dust whirling high with the din and the fag-smoke,

cries for a fight and calls for the sergeant,

the anger of louts for a gombeenman’s farthing,

follow the dayfall, out to the foundered

islands desired from bleak Brandon Mountain.

This is the evening, Brendan, O sailor,

stand off the mainland, backwater the glimmer,

though kirtles be flittered and flesh be seasalted;

watch while this Ireland, a mirage, grows dimmer.

What have you come for? Why cease from faring

through paradise islands and indigo water,

through vinland and bloomland and Caribbean glory?

Follow your chart with the smoky sea-monsters;

stay with the bright birds where music is pouring

balm for the hurt souls, and Judas repentant

sits for one day on a rock in the ocean.

Turn from the ghostland, O great navigator;

lower the oars for a legend

of journeys; scan tossed

empty horizons from pole to equator

for Ireland, time-foundered, that Ireland has lost.

Paler and thinner the morning moon grew,

Colder and sterner the rising wind blew;

The pole-star had set in a forest of cloud,

And the icicles crackled on spar and on shroud,

When a voice from below we heard feebly cry:

‘Let me see, let me see my own land ere I die.

‘Ah, dear sailor, say, have we sighted Cape Clear?

Can you see any sign? Is the morning light near?

You are young, my brave boy; thanks, thanks for your hand –

Help me up, till I get a last glimpse of the land.

Thank God, ’tis the sun that now reddens the sky;

I shall see, I shall see my own land ere I die.

‘Let me lean on your strength, I am feeble and old,

And one half of my heart is already stone-cold.

Forty years work a change! when I first crossed the sea

There were few on the deck that could grapple with me;

But my youth and my prime in Ohio went by,

And I’m come back to see the old spot ere I die.’

’Twas a feeble old man, and he stood on the deck,

His arm round a kindly young mariner’s neck,

His ghastly gaze fixed on the tints of the east,

As a starveling might stare at the sight of a feast.

The morn quickly rose and revealed to his eye

The land he had prayed to behold, and then die!

Green, green was the shore, though the year was near done;

High and haughty the capes the white surf dashed upon;

A grey ruined convent was down by the strand,

And the sheep fed afar, on the hills of the land!

‘God be with you, dear Ireland!’ he gasped with a sigh;

‘I have lived to behold you – I’m ready to die.’

He sank by the hour, and his pulse ’gan to fail,

As we swept by the headland of storied Kinsale;

Off Ardigna Bay it came slower and slower,

And his corpse was clay-cold as we sighted Tramore.

At Passage we waked him, and now he doth lie

In the lap of the land he beheld but to die.

I think if I lay dying in some land

Where Ireland is no more than just a name,

My soul would travel back to find that strand

From whence it came.

I’d see the harbour in the evening light,

The old man staring at some distant ship,

The fishing-boats they fasten left and right

Beside the slip.

The sea-wrack lying on the wind-swept shore,

The grey thorn bushes growing in the sand,

Our Wexford coast from Arklow to Cahore –

My native land.

The little houses climbing up the hill.

Sea daisies growing in the sandy grass,

The tethered goats that wait large-eyed and still

To watch you pass.

The women at the well with dripping pails,

Their men colloguing by the harbour walls,

The coils of rope, the nets, the old brown sails

I know them all.

And then the Angelus – I’d surely see

The swaying bell against a golden sky,

So God, Who kept the love of home in me,

Would let me die.

Praise God for Ireland, so – he said,

and raised his hand;

a poet he was whose withered heart and head

had one time answered as one cry

to every stir and sigh

of the quick, and the importunate dead,

to the windy fields and the high

desolate places of the isolate, seathundering, wrysmiling land;

he raised his hand:

Praise God, – says he,

calling a ritual, twofingered blessing

as from a liturgy.

Therefore, like daybreak, let his wishing spread

from here to the tufted sands,

and the shell-bestrewn silver and yellow strands,

from here to the dread

rockresisted charge of the western sea

where lies uncharted mystery;

– spread like the allmothering air

over all your people and mine; over the young and the old,

the dark, swarthy, grey, red and fair,

let the blessing unfold:

on craft and calling, profession and art and trade,

on all who make and all that ever is made;

on thinker, teacher, poet, priest, soldier and clerk,

on farmer, ploughman and herdsman, all who work;

on city and street, as tired as an old shuttered room,

on every long valley whence rivers run down to a tide,

to the quays and the bales and the stealthy slow glide

of the trafficking ships, and the dim muffled boom

of the lusty, the free,

the allfathering sea:

on the fishers who ride

with the nets in the night

above forests of weed and the round

immaculate shining white

bones of the drowned

bedded deep,

unrotten,

forgotten

in sleep.

Praise God for Ireland, so – says he,

and raised a blessing as from a liturgy.

Asleep is the street. One solitary cart rattles out.

The hot sweaty face of the driver is dark in the dusk.

He thumps the creel with his fist and out of his mouth rolls the brusque

bedamning abuse of the drinker who named him a lout;

and he settles his cap with a rakish jerk of his thumb

and fingers the fob of his vest for the wrack of his pounds,

and sways and grows wroth and mutters how beggarly hounds

would drink your health deep as long as the money would come.

The mare has her head; and drowsy and bothered he hears

the fair’s hollow hubbub

since cockcrow at cold showery morn

with one thrush on the thorn

to the arguments, squabbles and jeers

in the dark crowded pub.

Good morrow! God save you! I wouldn’t be seen with the beast!

The lowing of cattle creeps mistily up through the air.

I’ll not drink another. Enough is as good as a feast.

By God, there’s not much as a hap’orth to do on this fair.

Come all ye lads and lassies, and listen to me awhile.

This drink has me ruined, but come, man, a half-one or ale?

If Dublin would leave us alone we’d ride grandly in style.

Push up on the bench and listen to this for a tale.

Praise.

The stars weave a tale. A parish is belled up from sleep

by the howl of a dog that leaps to the walk of the dead;

the howl calls replies; and mongrels by tinkers’ fires creep

from the tents and the vans, and prowl on the stiff legs of dread.

And deep in a ditchful of ferns, cracked itchy Tom Straw

plucks his rags with the cold and clutches his dirty black cans;

‘O Jesus, protect me,’ prays he, ‘they’ll not credit I saw

the grand lady’s ghost and held her poor hands in my hands.’

Praise.

A train rumbling east trails a palely lit smoke through a glen.

There’s flame in the sky where the Liffey retreats from the tide.

The day fills the fields where the shiny damp cattle complain.

Slow over Allen the clouds with the rainlances ride.

How many men for Dublin?

Six men and ten,

shot in the dawnlight,

called to life again.

Wake up the mansions,

wake up the slums,

wake up the navvies,

mickeydazzlers, jems,

paperboys and joxers,

polismen and tarts,

butchers and bakers,

bankers and clerks,

dockers and coalmen,

milkmen and maids,

civilservants, busmen,

drapers and drays.

Steam up the hooters,

light is in the east, open up the churchdoors,

here comes the priest.

How many men for Dublin?

There they walk again!

Rebels in the ruinlight,

six men and ten.

Praise.

Ireland’s a rock that men scoop out for their bread;

Ireland’s a door where the living collogue with the dead;

Ireland’s a river, a valley, a young nation, an old,

a house guarded by heroes, a fair where heroes are sold.

Ireland’s a sow that farrows; then feeds on her young;

Ireland’s a queen for all the fine songs that were sung;

Ireland’s a speech, a mouthful of words cried in rage

by a rebel who gets a hempen cravat as his wage.

Ireland’s a south wind, a west wind, a blowing wet morn,

a ridge of potatoes, ditches, a few roods of corn.

Ireland’s a priest with a chalice, a scourge and a bell;

a monk who prays prone on the stony floor of his cell;

a singer’s regret, a dream of an exile who makes

a hovel a castle, and princes of randy old rakes.

Ireland’s a pasture where men are measured by breed,

Ireland’s a ploughman, a plough, and a handful of seed.

Praise God, – says he,

spreading a ritual twofingered blessing

as from a liturgy.