> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://www.opendemocracy.net/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# Dissolving history: two poems of Mick Delap
- URL: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/article-1829jsp/
- Published: 2004-04-07T23:04:00.000Z
- Updated: 2026-04-17T11:12:43.000Z
- Author: Mick Delap
- Tags: #en, #Migrated, #Import 2026-04-09 19:08, #ImagesUploaded

**Cromane**

![Upturned currach at Brandon Creek, Co Kerry, Ireland (photo: Bernd Unstaedt)](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/currach_J3gveT8-1776424225041.jpg)

Upturned currach at Brandon Creek, Co Kerry, Ireland (photo: Bernd Unstaedt)

I push through withered sedge, past upturned boats  
wildfowlers have long abandoned to the rain,  
and at the water’s edge begin to scan  
grey mud, grey lough, the marching sky’s grey soak  
for winter flocks of plover the murk still cloaks  
in driving squalls. I hear them first, that run  
of fluted calls. Then, before they can turn,  
take off, they’re there – and gone, like whisps of smoke.

I’ve lost them – and this incompleteness hurts.  
Until far out over the empty lough  
they wheel back into view. Like feathered sighs,  
their fluent strokes relate swift air to earth,  
wild sea to stone-walled fields, smooth to rough,  
the trace of winter to a winter sky.

*Cromane, Kerry, western Ireland*

**Sea Cave**

Mick Delap’s poems on **openDemocracy** are from his collection *River Turning Tidal* (Belfast, Lagan Press, 2003 / [Lagan-press@e-books.org.uk](mailto:%20Lagan-press@e-books.org.uk))

Out where it first fists Europe,  
Atlantic has hammered, salt-scooped  
this sea crypt, cliff cellar,  
from a fingered Irish headland. Today,  
as I row in under a black wall of rock,  
the cave’s waters are lulled,  
a bright lens on depths  
of blue-white sea anemones,  
red wrack, translucent parachutes  
of jellyfish sinking faintly  
through the membranes  
of the deeper past.

My great-aunt rowed here, eighty years ago,  
throughout the Great War,  
to townet her indifferent specimens –  
tiny medusas, budding hydra;  
squeezing in like me, oars shipped,  
past the pillared Altar Rock,  
up to where the cave narrows  
to the strange canals  
smoothed deep under the headland,  
pink sponged, amniotic,  
sucking salt breaths in  
and out; in and out,  
dissolving history.

Looking back, she would have seen  
her green island framed for a moment  
in rock, and flashing sea, and sun;  
northwards, glimpsed Dingle across waters  
that heaved Roger Casement  
from his German submarine.  
Easter 1916; and the night  
the British hanged him as a traitor,  
he wrote his mother  
how he’d landed back in Ireland –  
wading out of the sea  
onto a dawn strand  
fringed with primroses, violets.

Tremors in those quiet waters,  
rumour of storm,  
a distant quiver off the land  
of tiny black seeds of poppy,  
generations stirring themselves slowly,  
redly, along the valleys: Laune,  
Liffey, Lagan, Somme.

Where Europe ends, this sea cave  
is still cathedral cool,  
its hushed waters embracing  
all we have committed to the deep,  
and to the softness of corruption and  
the mighty workings of its salt-stained resurrections.  
What lives on here swims  
small and beautiful.  
And as I back my boat out again,  
past the Altar Rock,  
warm sun strikes as a blessing  
lazy sea, tiered cliffs, the immensities  
of the oceanic West; and celebrates  
each springing tide, each high,  
each ebb.

*Valentia Island, Kerry, western Ireland*

![Co Kerry, Ireland (photo: used with permission from www.ballyhea.net)](https://www.opendemocracy.net/content/files/2026/04/valentia_vB2v61S-1776424225080.jpg)

Co Kerry, Ireland (photo: used with permission from www.ballyhea.net)

For details of Lagan Press and other poetry publishers in Ireland, see [Poetry Ireland](http://www.poetryireland.ie/resources/general.html?ref=opendemocracy.net). *River Turning Tidal* is reviewed in the imaginative literary journal *Ratapallax* ([Issue 3](http://www.rattapallax.com/fusebox%5F03reviews.htm?ref=opendemocracy.net#03%5Freview2))