Cromane
I push through withered sedge, past upturned boats
wildfowlers have long abandoned to the rain,
and at the waters edge begin to scan
grey mud, grey lough, the marching skys 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, theyre there and gone, like whisps of smoke.
Ive 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 Delaps poems on openDemocracy are from his collection River Turning Tidal (Belfast, Lagan Press, 2003 / Lagan-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 caves 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 hed 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
For details of Lagan Press and other poetry publishers in Ireland, see Poetry Ireland. River Turning Tidal is reviewed in the imaginative literary journal Ratapallax (Issue 3)
