CHARLIE'S DEAD!

 Emily Dickinson says that in poetry you tell the truth but tell it slant. Poetry might also be regarded as a kind of code that uses similes and metaphors to express something about life that can't be easily captured; something that has to do with intuition rather than reason.

For some reason I've just remembered a code which the girls in my hometown used, to convey that one of them was showing their slip below the dress: Charlie's dead.

This case of the slip showing below the hem of the dress was regarded as indelicate to speak of in those days (1950's Ireland) hence there had to be a code for it. 

The Iranian activist Mahvash Sabet was accused by a judge of saying one thing and meaning another, which was  what the girls of my home town were doing, but the consequence for Mahvash Sabat was that she was given a hefty jail sentence rather than experiencing a moment of slight embarrassment and adjustment.

Poems That Mean Something Else

I wrote a poem once about seagulls.

Well, it wasn’t really about seagulls.

I was in love with the next-door ballet student

and having sweated for weeks, I plucked up courage

to ask her out and brought her to the cinema

where we watched a film called Mise Éire.

It wasn’t long before the seagulls came in view,

scudding the waves and rising into a gale,

the sound track’s orchestra rising with them,

and I loudly whispered ‘Symbols of Freedom!’

to my wafer-thin companion.

Back home, I wrote about those freedom-seagulls.

I meant to show the piece to my lissom dancer,

but time overtook resolution. Later,

the poem was published in some small magazine.

Still making poems, I haven’t yet been charged

with writing one thing and meaning something else,

as Mahvash Sabet was by the Iranian judge

who sentenced her to twenty years in prison.

Note: Mise Éire = 'I am Ireland' the title of a documentary film about the Easter Week Rebellion of 1916.

From Angel Hour  Ciaran O'Driscoll 2021

 

THE PATIENT ETHERISED UPON A TABLE

 HELLO AGAIN.  While I am bewildered by many things and while I have, up to now, lived in a perpetual state of bewilderment, some things are eventually becoming a bit clearer to me.

For example, I now understand why T.S. Eliot wrote these lines at the beginning of his poem The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock:

"Let us go then, you and I,

when the evening is spread out against the sky

like a patient etherised upon a table...."

The first two lines seem to promise a typical romantic poem,  a couple setting out for an evening stroll and perhaps a bit of billing and cooing, but suddenly the carpet is pulled from under your expectations by the third line.

Edwardian critics choke on their olives.The evening is compared to a patient etherised on a table? Egad Sir, this is definitely not cricket! 

The third line introduces a sense of unease. And why wouldn't it? It was written in 1911, just in time for two world wars, the Bolshevik Revolution, the Holocaust and all kinds of other disasters and upheavals.

Poets have a kind of built-in barometer, even if they live in polite society.

MORE ON THE SUBJECT OF BEWILDERMENT

      In the words of an Irish-language poet, bewilderment had the effect of 'coming steadfastly between him and God'. The Irish language poet, however, wasn't talking about bewilderment in the abstract, he was talking about a young woman by the name of Oona (Úna) who came steadfastly between him and God. Perhaps he was a priest who 'lost his vocation on account of a woman', as they used to say. And it appears that, to add to the poet's bewilderment, he also lost the young woman.

      But belay there! It doesn't always happen that way. I too 'lost my vocation' on account of a young woman, and I also lost the young woman. But after a while, I met another young woman. In a London pub called 'The Drum and Monkey'. She is now my wife and we sometimes speculate jokingly as to which of us is the Drum and which is the Monkey. We celebrate the anniversary of our first meeting in that pub as much as we celebrate our wedding anniversary. We usually celebrate both in 'The Mustard Seed' in Ballingarry, Co Limerick.

      'The Drum and Monkey' is no longer there, on Junction Road, near the Archway. But we are still together, we have outlasted our meeting place.

         

      

NEW POEM: THE SPELLING OF AUTUMN

For the benefit of the Bewildered, of which group I am a fully paid up member, here is my latest poem, composed earlier in the year:

THE SPELLING OF AUTUMN

1.

When I said that it was autumn,

I could sense the soft departure

of my deity and calling

as they left me to the wasteland.

This occurred as I was moving

from the failure of my harvest

in ’25, though pausing

to admire the elegant spelling

of autumn and its bonding

of m and n that made

a tacit kind of music.

“What a lovely word,” I mumbled

vocationless and godless 

at my computer screen.

‘The rest of this existence

may flounder into nothing

but the graceful spelling of autumn

has what it takes to stay.’

2.

When I said that it was autumn, 

autumn said that it was me –

we were identical 

creatures losing leaves.

Heeding the long-range forecast,

I’m busy bailing out

the bilgewater at last

to sail the Stygian seas 

between here and hereafter,

both cabin boy and captain

of a craft with a single mast.

Reluctant, not the least

resigned to my departure

from the shores of everyday,

I’ll keep a cherished charm

against demons and delay – 

the graceful spelling of autumn

my travel pass and totem.

3.

When I said that it was autumn,

with the stripping of the trees 

and the leafy agitation,

with the failure of my harvest

and the death of my vocation,

with my fear of nervous breakdown,

distressed by all events

I prayed Emitte lucem

tuam et veritatem

but was granted no assurance,

not a prayer of breaking into

the light and truth away from

life’s headlong floundering.

What keeps me compos mentis,

my one and lone asylum,

is the minuscule epiphany

of a needle’s-eye redemption,

the graceful spelling of autumn.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2026

NOTES:

* “a craft with a single mast”:  craft, boat or calling; a single mast, the t in autumn perhaps??

* “Emitte lucem tuam et veritatem (tuam)”: Send forth your light and truth (Psalm 43) 

 Of my two grandmothers, my father’s was the most popular with us as children. My mother’s mother was a grimmer kind of person. I eulogised ‘Granny-in-Cork’ in my memoir A Runner Among Falling Leaves (Liverpool University Press 2001). The poem below is a characterisation of my maternal grandmother whom I spent many a night with when I was seven or eight, ‘to keep her company’. This is yet another poem I had forgotten about as my literary trajectory took various swerves and directions. As I now realize, it is no joke to be the age my ‘Granny-in-Callan’ was when I was seven or eight!

GRANDMOTHER

Blackcurrants, apples

in the back garden, turf

and wood heaped in the yard.

The hens’ feeding troughs

were halves of a sliced tyre.

She had the electric light,

a chemical latrine.

The acre was well let.

Fresh eggs in the morning

from the roosting shed.

Mick Reilly brought goats’ milk.

“How bad we are,” she said.

Tom Butler brought her pheasants

with half an eye to the acre.

“I’ve no meas on game,”

she declared and kept them for

my aunt and uncle who’d come

to keep her weekend company.

With precious little patience

for children on the stray

she’d be on the road with a switch

to beat me under the knees.

“Galang outs that,” she cried.

“Wait till your father hears.”

Funeral attendance

rates were of importance

to her: she’d count the cars

from behind her kitchen curtains.

With carving knife or breadknife

she’d cut hens on the head

and pluck them on the table.

“We’ll ate our ’nough,” she said.

Published in Trio 4 (Blackstaff Press, Belfast, 1985)

I WAS ON THE POINT OF GIVING UP ON THIS BLOG.....

 ....when I saw two responses today that weren't totally off the wall and irrelevant, as most of the previous responses were, sadly to say.

The first was a beautifully relevant appreciation of my sonnet, 'The Heart in the Wall', with some questions which I tried to answer. I was somewhat late in getting back to the pseudonymous enquirer, as the appreciation was published on 05 January last! Coincidentally, I have just come back from a poetry festival in Italy in which I read the same poem with an Italian translation by Rita Castigli. 

I am encouraged to post the same poem again, as it is one very dear to me.

THE HEART IN THE WALL

In the boundary wall of a convent school

close to my home, there’s a heart-shaped stone

beneath hanging leaves. Half-meshed in sleep,

I’m waiting at a bus-stop by the wall

to join the Monday morning's obsequies, 

and notice that the stone has been redone 

bright red, the scrawl of teen initials gone:

a valentine shines nameless under boughs.

A boy once loved a girl who took the veil,

choosing the ghostly company of saints.

An old man now, at night he travels still

once or twice a year to rejuvenate

the heart contained within the convent wall.

Somebody holds a torch for him; he paints.

The other query was from a secondary school student in London asking some probing questions about 'Please Hold', which is on the EdExcel A Level English Literature Course. And as the fella said, 'If ya haven't heard of it by now, you're not really in the loop.'

POEM FROM NEARBY WHERE I LIVE

 

This sonnet from my latest collection Angel Hour (2021) is based on a heart-shaped stone in the wall of a former convent school on O'Connell Avenue, Limerick City, not far from where I live.

Who keeps re-painting the stone bright red?

I suggest an answer to this question in the second part of the poem.

THE HEART IN THE WALL

In the boundary wall of a convent school

close to my home, there’s a heart-shaped stone

under hanging leaves. Half-meshed in sleep,

I’m waiting at a bus-stop by the wall

to join the morning rush-hour’s obsequies, 

and notice that the stone has been redone 

bright red, the scrawl of teen initials gone:

a valentine shines nameless under boughs.

A boy once loved a girl who took the veil,

choosing the ghostly company of saints.

An old man now, at night he travels still

once or twice a year to rejuvenate

the heart contained within the convent wall.

Somebody holds a torch for him; he paints.

© Ciaran O'Driscoll 2021