Sea of Clouds 

A bank of mist rolls down the mountain

like a breath of God in the morning.

White and smoky cloud conjugate.

The ghost of the waxing moon yields.

On the left hand corner of the horizon

a prism of colour shivers through wet sunlight.

My wish is not for gold – just a

thank you, thank you, thank you -

rolling out as surely as the ocean tide.

This week in Corrogue…

The rains came. With the rain came intervals of cloud, sun showers and high wind. I had been just about keeping up with the weeding. Now they have romped ahead. As soon as I finish this piece I will be donning gardening gloves and getting the sickle to chop away at the knee high growth.

My suspicion this year is that given the cold temperatures in March and August that the early vegetables are not going to be prolific. But the late and autumn vegetables – white turnip, swede (rutabaga), brussel sprouts – are looking extremely happy in their beds. The rain has helped the potatoes leaf as well. Given our chilly days I have my doubts that I will be unduly worried about the prospect of blight, which needs hot and humid weather to strike. The rosemary, sage and lavender are beginning to throw off the effects of being frostbitten in April.

Despite concentrating on vegetables and herbs I do have a love of flowers. It’s the spring flowers that I especially appreciate. Pink cilenta just beats purple aquilegia in flowering. Along with a white chrysanthemum, these were all slips given to us the first year of making a garden in Corrogue by our neighbours Brenda and John Joe Gaffney.

There is something about swopping plants that is very bonding in friendships. This year I have given away some slips of chocolate mint, St. John’s wort, some kale and oca (a Peruvian potato that has leaves that look like shamrocks) and have been given a blackcurrent bush and cornflowers. Plants make great housewarming plants. It was particularly satisfying to send some plants north of the border to a young girl who is working her first garden with her grandfather as mentor.

We were driving back from Sligo yesterday and I was marvelling at the multitude of wildflowers in the hedgerows at this time of year. I can’t be too hard on weeds. They too are wildflowers. I felt moved by the fertility and bounty of this planet in the delicate billowing of cow parsley and the brazen canary colours of wild cabbage. Walking through Slish Wood beside Lough Gill (watery home of Yeats’ Lake Isle of Innisfree) you could see great cataracts of peaty water gushing down the mountain to feed the lake.  Lough Gill supplies most of the water in County Sligo. What a blessing to have pure water.

Which is why I was happy to sign an email petition protesting gold mining up in the Andes. The chemicals used to mine would have poisoned the water supply of an indigenous population that already has a very good standard of living. This week in Corrogue I thought locally and acted globally.

© Bee Smith  

The Fairy  

I saw a fairy in a tree

And it just threw red shoes at me.

I just happened to slip then on

And then I started to dance along.

The fairy laughed at the sight

As I was dancing day and night

For until the dawn of light. 

© 2006 Oisín Bancroft, age 9 

Red Shoes 

Red shoes are made for fairy’s feet.

When music comes they dance to the beat.

But when dawn comes and the cock crows

the fairy music and elves go. 

© 2006 Saoirse Bancroft, age 11  

This week in Corrogue…

It’s unusual to get such immediate feedback to a piece of creative work. Last week I had the pleasure of the company of three children one of whom has a name that translates from the Irish as ‘Little Fairy.’ It seemed appropriate to read them Tony’s story Tell me a Riddle, which you can read on this website. These children are not so jaded as not be interested in fairy stories. They live in a hollow below Cuilcagh Mountain at a place called Glen na Sidh, the Fairy Glen.  Fairies and stories about them are…well, normal! When you live in this landscape there is no suspension of disbelief on otherworldly matters. It feels as natural as the morning mist. You get intimations almost daily if your ears are finely tuned. Dragonflies are prolific at this time of year; some stories would tell us they are simply fairies that have shape shifted into these insects for ease of travel. The mayflower on the hawthorn fairy tree is nearly finished. Its blossom showers us as we walk the lanes and boreens. 

There are two points in the Irish year when fairies – the Tuatha de Danaan – the shining tribe of the goddess Danu – are thought to be particularly active. At May Day, or Beltaine to name the Celtic festival that is also the Irish for the month of May, fairies are meant to be in high celebratory spirits. Then at Halloween, or Samhain, the Irish for both November and the Celtic New Year festival over Halloween, children dress up as ghosts and goblins so that the fairies will not steal away our chubby mortal young’uns. Mortal children and babies are particularly attractive to fairies. They also have not completely lost touch with that ‘otherworld’ of joy and non-separation from love. It is easier for them to cross over into the world of fairy than serious grown ups. 

Fairies need to be treated respectfully, if not reverentially. If they like you they will heap good fortune upon your head. If they think you are truly special they will gift you the ability to prophesy and heal, like Biddy Early, the white witch of Clare. But if you cross them – and that usually means you have literally crossed over or built onto their territory – then they will take no prisoners. 

At any rate, the two elder children set to writing poems inspired by the story. This week they came again after school and proudly brandished their poems and wrote them down so that Tony could read them when he came in from work.     Many thanks to Oisín and Saoirse Bancroft for their permission to post their poems this week. Also thanks to their mum for agreeing to the poems being posted. 

© 2006 Bee Smith    

Homeplace 

I love the way Eugene Clancy says the words homeplace.

This battle-scarred boxer lets the syllables roll.

They reverberate in his throat – homeplace.

I envy the way he can say it so tenderly-

Just like John Joe up the mountain at Moneen

where all that is left of his family homeplace is a stone floor,

his father’s name carved on the hearth,a chimney and

what was once his parent’s bedroom.

He carved his name too when he left for forty years,

working away but always feeling the tug and dream like draw.

These words are an embrace, a welcome and a safety.

I know that there is no place that I can call homeplace

in the same way as Eugene or John Joe with that sound

so grounded and assured, rooted on a square space

where blood and earth mingle.

It is my earth, too, but not a homeplace.  

This Week in Corrogue…

 ‘Homeplace’ has a unique meaning to Irish people. Germans would translate it as heimat. It is an emotional attachment to place that speaks of family and rootedness to property and townland where generations have lived, worked and died. 

I tend to divide the world into two types of people – the settler and the nomad. The Irish who have left for economic and political reasons tend to view the leaving as an exile. Indeed, in the not so distant past they held what was called the ‘American Wake’ for a child the night before they emigrated. Before the time of jets it was assumed that parents would never see their child again. They stayed up all night – partying, dancing, storytelling – having good Craic as one would say in Irish. At dawn when it came time to set out the family would bid farewell to the child and then lock the front door on them. It was considered bad luck once goodbyes were said for the émigré to turn back for one more hug from a loved one.  

I know of a woman who left in the early 1950s whose family did just that. As soon as they saw her running back they barred the door. She did well in America and owns a house for holidays in the family’s townland. But she still shudders over the remembrance of that ‘farewell.’

 For many people who are settler by nature but are forced by circumstances to become nomadic, there is a perpetual sense of displacement. There is a whole genre of Irish traditional songs that are ‘the émigré songs.’ These songs are laments for the homeplace and are plangent with uprootedness. There is the rock and hard place of desire to return and the knowledge that there is no going back.   

It’s as if they have been flayed alive. And in a sense they have because a profound sense of place – and one’s part in it – is a covering that that is woven into the soul’s skin.  

© 2006 Bee Smith