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

Cotton sheets flying

On the line capturing the

Essence of sunbeam

 

 

 

This week in Corrogue…

 

We still are subject to frost at night but we have been having a spate of surprisingly warm days. It’s as if we skipped the slow, stately progress of the typical Irish spring, with its increments of snowdrop, daffodil, primrose, creeping buttercup and then field buttercup and jumped forward to the usual cool Irish summer. Our damson tree sported a single blossom this morning. The apple trees are budding. I hope the frosts will dissolve. A late hard frost last year put paid to any fruit.

With the damp showery weather temporarily in abeyance I strung up the washing line this week. Load after load of damp laundry was pegged out in the sunny breeze to dry. I have to confess that this is an occasion for one of the most primitive (or is it primal) pleasures to people who make and keep homes. There is nothing quite like the scent of laundry that has dried in sun and wind. I bury my nose and inhale deeply. I sniff essence of sunlight and ozone.  

Here in the Northwest of Ireland we enjoy the cleanest air in Europe. This is very unlike the laundry days of my friend Brenda’s childhood. In Salford near Manchester during the 1940s smog enveloping England before the Clean Air Acts, they hung out clean laundry and pulled in dry, sooty ‘washing’. The smog was everywhere – inside and out. There was no way of escaping it, so Brenda informs me. So I feel especially blessed as I breathe in this scent. It’s such a simple pleasure. But it is was that very few people may experience if they live in built up areas with lots of motorcars or manufacturing nearby. 

It’s a singular experience perhaps as endangered as the corncrake or the capercaillie. 

A number of years ago some advertiser used the tagline “Accept no imitations!”  There is no way that the scent of sunshine and a stiff breeze blowing over gorse bushes and flowering blackthorn can be synthesized and put in a bottle of fabric conditioner.  

© 2006 Bee Smith

Mrs. Should

•  

  • Mrs. Should, I could murder you today!                                   

  •  Stifle or smother her maybe? 

  • Why can’t you take a holiday? 

  • I have helped you on                                   

  • With your coat, handed you your hat, bagged   

  • And baggaged you.  Just for one day I want   

  • To wave you away and let myself play.         

  • But honestly!  The nerve of the woman!      

  • She keeps coming back from the bus stop all

  • A flurry of “Mustn’t forgets!”   I bar          

  • The door and barricade myself in the      

  • Bedroom.    I take to my bed with the cat     

  • (Surely as good a role model of steely     

  • Indifference and determination                      

  • As I know.)        I pretend that I am again         

  •  A teenager, impervious to all                

  • Injunctions, enjoinders, wheedling at    

  • Conscience.  But it’s no good.  Hopeless even.  

  • My husband says I shouldn’t sack Mrs. Should. 

  •  After all, domestic help is so hard           

  • To find these days.  She needs managing though.

  • She’s become a bit of a bully of late.                

  • “Be Firm,” he counsels.   He advises, “Take Charge!” 

  •  It’s so hard to have this great guilt machine

  • Cluttering up living room.  “WASH THAT!” she shrieks, 

  • Sharp-eyed, noticing all.  Right down to the       

  • Flea dirt on the slipcovers.  She likes to clean

  • Does Mrs. Should.     Or rather, likes to            

  • Keep me busy.    Oh, so verrrrrry busy.                                      

  • So for my next project                                   

  •  I shall take apart the Great Guilt Machine.          

  • I shall treat it to a folk cure for clocks which         

  •  Time has stopped.  First, dismantle from case.    

  • Boil workings. Add a handful of soda.       

  • When water is black remove from heat and          

  •  Oil with a tad of tractor grease.  Pop into a 

  • Moderate oven with the Sunday joint.               

  •  By Sunday evensong that clock chimes like    

  • A dreaming spire.  A very Mrs.Should 

  • Remedy.  Always so happy to help.     

This week in Corrogue…

 Tony requested that I post this poem as a companion piece to this week’s Blessing for YOU! It’s part of a trilogy of poems with the second one about Mrs. Should’s cousin Mrs. Must and the finale is Christmas with Mrs. Demento. Mrs. Should and Mrs. Must have finally unhinged our heroine and all the tinkly musak has finally made her go off her rocker. Everyone has this inner voice about should and must. Some of those are useful.  The ‘Thou shalt not’ of the Ten Commandments does spring to mind. But that is the point. They say what we should not do.  They are ten simple pieces of advice on what it’s really not cool to act out. They don’t create this never ending and increasingly demanding list of  ‘I should be doing this’. Instead of…what? ‘I really must do…’ Just what exactly? Should the weather be warmer just because April should be?  According to whom?  My impatience with the weather acting in an unpredictable way will not make the soil warm any faster. But the gardening books and seed packets say I should be doing such and such in April!  But April is behaving much more like March and occasionally like February. After five years of looking at the lie of our acre of land I am squelching the impulse to press on just because it is April. This is very uncharacteristic. Nature has it’s own wisdom and it’s own timing that has nothing to do with calendars or clocks. It’s an enormously resourceful teacher but not in a didactic way. It will get around to everything in it’s own time. It does feel a bit unnatural not to press on with certain tasks.  But I am trying to pay more attention to my intuition then that roaring Mrs. Should who wants me to tick off the  ‘To Do’ list for April.  I am trying to not take responsibility for everything – especially not the weather. What Mrs. Should never realised is that there are some things we are never meant to control. Those matters that are out of our control are not necessarily an enemy to be eradicated. They are just like the phases of the moon, an eclipse of the sun, or the shifting of tectonic plates. Discernable, sometimes understandable, but not always explicable. © 2006 Bee Smith

The sun room is my
Rain room – restful patter -plash
Of April showers.

This week in Corrogue

Springtime beckons visitors. This week my writing friend Helen came from Yorkshire for a break. That it was typical April showery weather did not dampen her holiday. She was content to lie on the ‘sun lounger’ in Shannon Park’s conservatory and be lulled by the sound of raindrops on the glass roof.

Like me, Helen is fair skinned. “I like rain. I know people think that is strange but I am fair skinned. Too much sun makes me uncomfortable.” Helen and I are in unity about this. I am also one of those strange people who appreciate rainfall and a temperate climate. Too much sun and I get itchy and irritable.

This week we are still getting frosty nights and early mornings but the sun is warming up the earth. I finally tackled the polytunnel to get ready for some late sowing. ‘Late’ is a relative term. I could have sowed seeds and watched them creep along in germination. Intuitively, I know that the climate is more benign now. It is a kindness to hold back and let nature dictate the timing rather than rely on a calendar. Last year I went by the book. I sowed basil and then waited and waited and waited for it to germinate and begin to leaf. When I talked to one of my fellow students on the horticulture course they noticed that their basil was ‘standing still’ too.

It was too early and the poor plant was struggling. This year I am practising plant compassion. The polytunnel is now warm enough to nurture them so long as the door is kept closed for part of the day to help retain the heat to get through the cold nights.

In the meantime, while the rain slashes our field I am weeding, digging, manuring and preparing the ground for them. The raindrops pound on the polythene greenhouse. Rain is my companion and sings its own April song. After the extremely dry winter it is reassuring to hear a gurgle and glug in drainage ditches.

Water is so precious. So I bless the rain and welcome it.

© 2006 Bee Smith

This Week in Corrogue …

Finally winter seems to be loosening its grip on the landscape. The starlings have returned again this year to nest build under the eaves of our porch. As I walk down our lane the air is alive with much birdsong.  There is courting, mating; nest materials are coveted and carried in beaks. Blackbirds and thrushes dart low out from hedges. Coal tits sweep out of the pine forest beside us. Pied wagtails dip up and down by the River Shannon’s tributaries. From the boggy meadows, not yet in bloom with ‘bog cotton’, comes the harsh call of the water hens. 

The swallows have not yet returned. Nor have I heard the first Cuckoo of spring. It will be nearly a month before I expect to hear that totemic bird of the Cuckson clan.  April 20^th is the earliest I have ever heard the cuckoo’s springtime call.  

The reality of our country life is that death strides behind all this burgeoning life. Mink, also with hungry young, have taken a number of my friend Isabella’s chickens. A young kid died when its mother’s got into difficulties with delivering all the afterbirth. The nanny is hanging onto life by a thread.  Seamus has lost some of his guinea fowl to pine martens. The pine marten is becoming endangered because the mink are out competing them in their native habitat. What the mink and pine marten do not prey on, the fox will stalk. With ewes in lamb at this time of year it is an anxious time for hill farmers. 

The cycle goes round and round.  Death is in the midst of life and life, certainly as celebrated with the Irish wake, is in the midst of death.  Sometimes the wake can be sedate with whispered condolences, passed out with the cups of tea and slices of brown bread; by the end of the evening it turns raucous with singing fuelled with tots of Power’s whiskey. 

Life and death are like a courting couple. Emily Dickinson once characterised death as a gentleman caller.  Certainly with her ever observant eye trained on the changes and character of nature Dickinson is not proved wrong with nature’s ritualistic unfurling in springtime.   

© 2006 Bee Smith 

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 …

 
One of the benefits of this unseasonably cold weather this March has been the amazingly clear night sky. Without light pollution out here in Corrogue each night when I take the dogs out last thing we pause and have a good look at the moon and I try to pick out the constellations and some planets. Venus is easily the brightest, but Saturn twinkles fairly brightly too at the moment.
 
Earlier this year I was with a few Cub Scouts who went out sky watching with me. Saoirse, (pronounced Sir-sha, meaning freedom in Irish) a very perceptive ten-year old, commented on how ancient those stars were and if we were there (up in the stars) we wouldn’t even be born yet. By the time we see the light twinkling it is in the star’s past.  The star may even have died out by the time we see it in our now.  And, she further reasoned, up there in the stars because of the time difference people who have died are still alive. . Her father died when she was six years old.  But when she looks up into the night sky and looks at the stars he is still alive and well.
 
Some academic has said that our human intellect is at its sharpest when we are ten years old. I was in awe of this fine young woman in the making.
 
© 2006 Bee Smith
 

An exuberance of yellow-

coconut scented, gaudy gorse

         teasing us with the tropics

amidst westerly blasts and downpour

 
celandine creeping commando style

         from the verge to

create a carpet of a meadow

 
the daffy-down-dillies are turning heads

 ancient ladies go giddy

in the blood (and glad of it, too) 

 
the primroses are not entirely

         sedate, sitting prettily as a

complaisant cat, without the calculation.

 
meanwhile self-aggrandising narcissi

         brashly stick out their orange tongues

defying frost, a wildish windiness

 
The very light has gone gold-

the frost in the morning

         relaxes into the sun’s embrace

kissed by an old and skilful lover

 
while all around there is a loosening

          a suffusion of Eros

as the earth widens her thighs

 
 Day and night are equitable-

yet how can the work a day world grasp

this too sweet, too sexy sensuality

 
our hearts become like wellsprings

         we collectively tip our chins

and bask, adapting to the blink of warmth

 
we all roll back on our heels

         turning our cheeks towards joy

balanced between earth and sky

This Week in Corrogue…

 
It’s been unseasonably cold with March growling and howling Siberian gusts in from the east. March brought our first snow of the winter.

 
As one local said of the weather, “All the old signs seem to have gone.” You used to be able to forecast the weather from knowing all those signs. But they do not seem to signify in ways they were once understood.

 
Certainly everything is quite mixed up. Snowdrops that should appear in February for St. Brigid’s Day are flowering still in my neighbour’s garden. The daffodils are out, which is heartening but my crocuses collapsed with the unexpected onslaught of frost.

 
What began to encourage me that March might depart lamb-like was sighting two phenomena. First, the mint, dormant all winter, is re-emerging.  Today, I could have leapt if I hadn’t been tethered to Murphy and Pippin’s lead, when I sighted the first primrose on the Relic Road.

 
What is truly immutably seasonal is the light. Dawn is smudgy at 7:30 am. It is still light at nearly 7:30 when I take the dogs out for the last walk of the day. This is what I love about living here in Ireland. I love the lengthening days to summer solstice when it feels as if we only really have two hours of ‘real’ dark and a desultory twilight up until midnight.

 
The flip side of this is that the winter dark is intense and the hours are long. Too long for many people. I, however, was the child who sunshine made itch and loved the cool shade of the cellar during the long, hot and humid summers of my childhood in north-eastern American. I am sure it rather alarmed my mother, but it seems to be constitutional. I like the cool temperate climate with its dramatic light and dark and equinoctial slant.  The light is so numinous I don’t even mind the rain.

 
 
© 2006 Bee Smith

Tobar Mhuire, St. Brigid’s Day
Stone steps lead down to a
floor of leaf mould,
seasons upon seasons
composted ivy and hawthorn.

The well is dry
as a crone’s ovaries.
In this driest of winters
there is neither a puddle or even
a thimbleful of dew pooling.

Berried ivy strangles the thorn.
The healing flees to the tree nearest,
so they say, when a holy well
runs dry. Listen to its panting,
a small sighing, as
the ivy grips tighter.

Yet we leave bits of ourselves here-
coins – varying denominations and
dominions of change, the ragged
red Bhrat Brid, some rosary beads,
paper hankies disintegrating our ills.

Still the supplications come
rising up in puffs of frosty breath.
Let the snowdrops come. Let the snowdrops come.
Oh Blessed Lady, please,
hear our prayer.
 

This Week in Corrogue…

I walk our two dogs, Murphy and Pippin, at least twice a day. Frequently we walk up our lane to the next townland, Tubber, or Tobar Mhuire (Mary’s Well) in Irish. The well’s stone structure is still sound. Local long-term unemployed men keep the grass trim in summer.

The well has been dry for a long while. The townland was well populated in the nineteenth century and supported two shops. A huge freak flood wiped out the townland. It may also have physically altered the watercourse that fed the well. Today the townland’s only residents are cattle and sheep, foxes and badgers, as well as many wild bird species.

Despite the holy well’s dry status people do still visit and leave the traditional offerings. Someone has left a rather 1960’s style glass picture of the Blessed Mother. It is alleged that Our Lady appeared at this holy well at some point in the mists of the past. But as to the exact date when this may have happened that too has merged back into the mists. It is even beyond the memory of my ninety-four year old neighbour Delia.

There is a bottle of Lourdes water from a pilgrimage in 2005, bootlaces tied to ivy clinging onto the stone, rosary beads festooning the branches. There is an assortment of American quarters, English pennies and Irish euro cents. The tradition is to tie a hanky or rag on the tree beside the well. As the elements wear it away so your ailment will disintegrate. The wishing well tradition of tossing in money in payment for favours granted has got mixed in with the original rag offering tradition.

Locally, the ‘pattern day’ – the day when you do a ritual rota of prayers (the pattern) to effect the cure – is 15th August, the feast of Our Lady’s assumption into heaven. However, there are even older traditions that say that the well’s power to cure is effective at Halloween (31st October – 2nd November), St. Brigid’s Feast (1st-2nd February), Beltaine (May Day or 1st May) and Lughnasa (31st July – 2nd August. These are equally propitious times to visit a holy well for a required cure.

©  2006 Bee Smith