THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth

My divining rod – and Seán’s rapture before his field of vision – were, I think,
reactivated by this renewed contact, not just with the land itself but the way in
which a road here, a signpost there, the old – now redundant – pump that I so
often carried buckets of water from and even the names on the headstones in
Fletcherstown cemetery, all added up to a vista of what Yeats called “those recollections
which are our standards and our beacons”.
Seán and I began the partnership process with a dialogue, an exchange of the
recollections each of us had stored away. People and moments of great personal
significance came back into the frame of memory. Like myself he had retained
a very profound sense of connection even though his time in Clongill came to
an abrupt end at a young age following the tragic early death of his father. That
did not in any way sever his bond of fidelity and affection. In fact for both of us,
Meath has been a place of harsh truths: an abiding image that has remained with
me to this day is of my mother being placed in an ambulance that arrived in the
farmyard during our stay in the summer of 1957 – she was taken to hospital in
Navan and then to Dublin where she died in the autumn of that year.
As well as imaginative journeys back to certain Meath moments of the past we
made physical journeys – separately and together. When I became aware that
there was one dominant feature of the local landscape that had stuck in Seán’s
memory – the trees – it struck a chord. My own image hoard also had its trees,
often overarching the much quieter roads of those years and particularly along
the half-mile stretch from Wilkinstown village to my grandmother’s cottage, a
road which only recently I learned was once called the Turnpike Road.
There were also the trees in the farmyard and its adjacent lane towards the old
railway line that once served the Gypsum train, their sounds in the night breezes
heard beyond my bedroom window as well as the magnificent elm – one poem
here is a lament for its loss after it was cut down during a bout of elm disease
in the Eighties – on the lane and which Seán’s imagination has restored in his
evocative watercolours of the cottage at Knightstown.
In another poem, “The Blackbirds of Wilkinstown”, I recall the trees as being
… like trees in a Russian novel –
tall and gaunt, some ready to fall
in the next winter storm.
Almost a hundred years before I wrote those lines, the presence of so many trees
as a characteristic of the landscape around Wilkinstown was noted by the poet
Francis Ledwidge. In a letter written in 1915 to Lizzie Healy, then resident in
the village, he asks her to “ remember me to the bog and all the trees around
Wilkinstown”.
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