Wild Cherries - poem

I never knew my maternal grandfather. When I try think of him the image that comes to mind is that of his namesake, my Uncle Dinny. I was so delighted my uncle made it to my launch in September but saddened to say now that he died a few weeks ago. So, I'm not sure if this poem is about him (indirectly as a guiding character) or my granddad himself, though they were, in the end, quite different men - though great musicians both. I can see no immediate place for this poem in terms of work I am currently writing. I decided, in any case, to add here to have it available somewhere as a standalone piece, though it throws up a somewhat complex range of emotions. In any case, here it is. 


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Wild Cherries 

In Memory of Denis O’Brien

i. Prelude

You were a man I never knew

and never will – one whose life

mine depends upon, yet you are ghost

to me, grandfather, dying far away

across the sea before I was born,

fading like all others to an imagined past

that I will never understand or fully grasp.

ii. 'The Rath'

O’Brien’s Bridge and the stony fields,

the lands your father and his brothers ploughed,

their lasting mark upon the landscape

of their birth to leave their old life behind

with the promise of a better future

in this newly-minted Nation: a good holding

far from the wild Atlantic shore

and the winding roads of County Clare,                   

a farm in north county Dublin, Kilsallaghan,

as much country back then as the lands

your father had come from, its soil

dark and rich and good, but too little of it,

in the end, for all his sons to prosper by.

Young you left and went to the city.

iii. Uniform

My mam said you looked as smart                

as a policeman in your dark navy uniform,

the JJ&S insignia on your cap marking you

employee of John Jameson & Sons,

Whiskey Makers since 1781, a good job

by any measure as you led your dray horses

down along the banks of the Liffey and on

to the docklands where the barges waited

with their cargo of amber, ready to move

this seemingly inexhaustible bounty

to the four corners of town and country.

iv. Music

I will never know your gait or manner

or how you held yourself as you walked

into a room or pub, though I heard once

that you could set the place alight with talk

or your playing on the fiddle, a Woodbine

browning your fingers at the tips as it burnt

down to a butt, a pint of Guinness and a Jemmie

on the table before you as you played reels

and jigs at the barroom or kitchen session,

these places where happiness found you, music

your one true gift to those you tried to love

though sometimes failed, you sliding then into the well

of drink and the sinking regret that fell over you,

stumbling home late below the Harvest Moon

rising above the rooftops of these regimented streets,

no crops to be gathered in this over-filled place,

just to walk and walk and never reach home,

the darkness and the dark thoughts descending again

as if the very stars had died and dimmed to silence.

v. Exile 

You were not one spoken of often
as though something unspeakable had happened
to cast you in shadow; perhaps that day you laid
an envelope of money on the kitchen table
and told my grandmother that she’d never see
or hear from you again – the poor woman,
her nerves already gone – then hugging my mother
in the scrap-filled yard, telling her
what an elegant young woman she was
and why couldn’t her younger sister be like her,
ladylike and well-mannered in all her ways
instead of a tom-boy staying out late
and chasing boys twice her age.
                                                     Gone,
half the children were sent to relatives in the Rath,
my mother, the eldest, left to raise the rest,
stealing from her the hope to go on in school,
though she never said a bad word against you.
It was just how life was, she said, in the tough
trenches of the 1950s, getting by day to day,
depending on the kindness of neighbour
while working long hours in a sewing factory,
half her siblings more like cousins in the end,
big-boned men like him and country in their ways.
 
And so, grandfather, you chose your exile
the day you left that envelope on the table
leaving for Manchester on the morning ferry
to work the building sites and never come back,

taking digs in Levenshulme, your fiddle sold,

and dying there at sixty in the deep of sleep,
though three of your sons by your side by then
at least, returning you safely home by night 

so that you could be laid to rest, finally, in Irish soil 

- the year Kennedy died.

vii. Memory

I try to fill the gap with fragments, anecdotes

and clues, though no concluding image comes

to mind to complete my rag-tag picture of you.

How we each pass with our dying breath into

the foreverness of forgetfulness – like the land

you once walked with your brothers so many years before,

the hope you felt out there in the wide open fields

fading now to a monochrome photograph

of another time, a different place; and the stories

that may yet still await to add again your human face

to those gathered around the family fireplace:

this partial and imagined portrait I try make for you

– grandfather I never knew.