THE YELLOW RIVER - Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth

YELLOW
Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth
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TODAY IS NOT ENOUGH
Today is not enough
to remember forever this summer,
strolling late across emptied meadows
and the tumbledown yard.
How eerie the motionless grass
and the single bush of blackberries.
The cowshed smelling of its dung-heap
on this voiceless afternoon.
Wilkinstown, August 1969

YELLOW
Seán McSweeney & Gerard Smyth
Youth is gone from the place where I was young –
W S MerWin

MEATH
Gerard Smyth
Although I was born and grew up in the heart of Dublin, in the city’s Liberties,
some of my most cherished memories are associated with a small farm in
County Meath. It was my mother’s birthplace, a thatched cottage just beyond
the village of Wilkinstown. More specifically, that ancestral homestead was
located in Knightstown, as my Meath grandmother insisted. I have always
heard a hint of Medieval romance in the place name and the place itself was
a definitive force in the forging of my imagination, perhaps providing a counter-identity
to the one that my Dublin streets gave me. At the very least I can
say – and have frequently said – I was twice-blessed.
And so it was to Knightstown thwat I returned summer after summer. The
place – that house with a roof of straw, the farmyard and its nooks, the pastures,
meadows, nearby woods and railway line – became my childhood idyll and
playground, and later the Arcadia of my adolescence where whatever sensitivities
to the natural world that I possess were first incubated. At least that is how
it all now seems, looking back to those harvest times of the 1950s and Sixties.
I still have the clearest ingrained memory of the sensation, the frisson, that
entered me every time I made my annual entry into the stony farmyard and
saw again the things that gave it its character: dungheap, milking shed, chicken
shit and chicken feed, henhouse, bikes against the whitewashed gable wall as
well as the relics “out of time”: an old cartwheel from the time of the horse,
the hanging harness seen through an open half-door and “the plough that my
grandfather walked behind…left where it settled and ripened into rust in the
garden rain.” The whole scene resonated a sense of timelessness.
Back then little did I know that an artist I would come to admire as one of our
finest landscape painters also had a close connection to the same locality. It is
hard for me to pinpoint exactly when I got to know Seán McSweeney and his
wife Sheila. I was familiar with his work and was greatly attracted to what I once
When the Day’s Work is Over
Watercolour on paper
20.5 x 14.5cm
2016
9

called “ his personal language as a painter” and how he “renewed and brought
innovation, and a wholly original approach, to Irish landscape painting”.
Before we ever met I was aware of the McSweeney link to Clongill where his former
family home still stands, not much more than the proverbial stone’s throw
from my own mother’s home place and those fields where I did my boyhood
dreaming. Although his links with Sligo, through his mother, are more firmly
established I discovered that Seán’s father, from whom the painting gene was
inherited, was a Meath man. Over the years Seán has frequently acknowledged
this transmission of the gift – from father to son.
When I was first invited to make work for the Solstice Arts Centre that would, in
essence, reflect my relationship with Meath any hesitancy I might have had was
to do with the fact that I had been writing poems of memory about the place and
its ghosts for so long. In The Fullness of Time, a selection from over the course of
my writing life, there are about eighteen Meath-related poems. My country life,
as much as my inner city world, has been generous in the material it provided.
But such hesitancy was short-lived – this after all was my second first place
and as much a place or origin and of first observations as my urban streets. The
emotional tug had never dissipated. The invitation might well have been to a
homecoming.
Apart from familial roots, the emergence of my first poems took place in Meath.
Among early poems written during the summer of 1968 was one titled “Town”,
subsequently published in New Irish Writing in The Irish Press. That poem –
though not naming it – was about Navan, my introduction to the daily dullness
of the Irish market town in that era. When my first small booklet of poems appeared,
the poem most frequently noted was “Today Is Not Enough”, one of the
few poems to which I have attached a dateline: Wilkinstown, August 1969. I am
not sure if my 18-year-old self fully understood that I was attempting to freezeframe
a moment in that “tumbledown yard” and its adjacent fields, to create a
perpetual present.
In a sense that is what Seán has been doing in his wonderful and inward landscape
imagery. When I was asked about collaborating with a visual artist his
name came automatically to my tongue – not only out of my regard for his work
and my knowledge of our common bond through a shared set of topographical
references but also because I had never seen any paintings of his depicting any
aspect of the Meath landscape, although his paintings of Sligo and Wicklow display
an intimate feeling for land, sea and sky and are counted among the finest
interpretations of the Irish landscape by a contemporary Irish artist.
But now he has rectified that omission and produced for this book, and the exhibition
which also forms part of our Meath project, a body of exquisite and lyrical
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watercolour depictions of a distinctive landscape marked by trees and pastoral
acres. A landscape that holds places dear to both of us, including that point of
reference we chose as the title – The Yellow River. As Seán revealed the work that
began to emerge after each visit to old haunts – his and mine – and days spent
sketching, I detected a vital reconnection as well as the birth of a creative affinity
with the Meath side of his heritage. The way in which he has comprehended the
spirit and moods of a place so different to his usual stamping ground in the west
is a testament to his great artistry.
For obvious reasons I was particularly moved by and grateful for the
“Knightstown” series, his paintings of the cottage in which my mother was
born and which was my annual summer destination for the first two decades of
my life. Without my ever mentioning to him its importance in my memory, he
intuitively took notice of that small window that “rationed the light”. Looking
at his “Yellow River” I was reminded of the words of a song of the Sixties, “Ballad
of Easy Rider”, recorded by the Byrds:
Wherever that river goes
That’s where I want to be…
Remarking on Seán’s oil paintings, my former Irish Times colleague, Brian Fallon,
has pointed out that his “sensuous feeling for paint is something innate” – and
that quality is everywhere evident in these new paintings.
For both Seán and myself this project has involved acts of retrieval, going back
to the repository of touchstones scattered around Wikinstown, Clongill and
Knightstown and their surrounding areas. My frequent returns in the past two
years, revisiting and rediscovering those touchstones has stimulated a widening
of my view of the past as well as releasing hidden memories. Of course
memory and imagination coalesce and in doing so “modify and transform experience”
as the American poet Richard Hugo put it.
There were key associative prompts that had the power to immediately relocate
me back to the time and places of those summer reveries. One such prompt was
in the course of a conversation with Seán when he happened to mention that
Yellow River. I hadn’t ever given much thought to this lesser river of the Meath
landscape but suddenly its name evoked a whole series of images from my days
on the farm. Likewise, hearing a Jim Reeves song on the radio reminded me of
the very hot August day in 1964 when I heard news of his death on the kitchen
transistor having come in from the fields to get buttermilk for the haymakers.
Over the past two years, in the course of my Meath journeys to and through
the past, I have come to recognise the truth in what Seamus Heaney once said:
“There are only certain stretches of ground over which the poet’s divining road
can come to life”.
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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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In the course of a journey back to explore the places lodged in memory, Seán
and I shared with each other our individual sites of reference and stories that
related to our early experiences of Meath. There seemed to be much in common
to both our perspectives and to the resonances our places had for us. Seán’s recall
of his disrupted childhood in Clongill was full of very exact detail, his sense
of attachment utterly palpable.
It was as a result of my treks back to haunts that had stayed in my mind for so
long that the search for my maternal great-grandparents’ grave finally yielded a
result and, for the first time, I stood where my Great-grandfather Michael Bathe
was laid to rest in 1904 in the beautifully located old cemetery in Kilshine.
The graveyard stands on a raised stretch of ground from which there is a
panoramic view of the surrounding countryside. In that moment I had an immediate
sense of what my ancestors must surely have regarded as their “most
lovely Meath” – as the poet F R Higgins once described it. For those ancestors of
mine it was also of course the land of their toil, land which for me later became
my “allegorical landscape”, where place and circumstance conspired to create
my country of memory.
As for the powerful bond of attachment that even now still clings to both Seán
and myself, I am reminded of the words of Wallace Stegner: “Expose a child
to a particular environment at his susceptible time and he will perceive in the
shapes of that environment until he dies”.
Shoreline
Watercolour on paper
14.5 x 20.5 cm
2016
13

Yellow River
Watercolour on paper
14.5 x 20.5cm
2016

TODAY IS NOT ENOUGH
Today is not enough
to remember forever this summer,
strolling late across emptied meadows
and the tumbledown yard.
How eerie the motionless grass
and the single bush of blackberries.
The cowshed smelling of its dung-heap
on this voiceless afternoon.
Wilkinstown, August 1969
Trees Along the Railway Line
Tempera on paper
20.5 x 14.5cm
2016
17

THE BLACKBIRDS OF WILKINSTOWN
It is spring now and it must be lovely down in
Wilkinstown. Are the birds singing yet? When you
hear a blackbird think of me.
– Francis Ledwidge
There’s a village where nothing has changed for years,
sweet pastures through which the railway track
is a memento kept as part of the scenery;
the bog where bog work was a tug-of-war,
where Ledwidge’s blackbird flaunted her song.
The gatekeeper’s cottage is gone, no need now
for the gatekeeper’s morning and evening vigil.
The trees are like trees in a Russian novel –
tall and gaunt, some ready to fall
in the next winter storm. The righteous
have their inner sanctum: the country chapel
where they pray for the bride at the altar,
the soul in the box. No spectacle ever intrudes
except when the blackbirds arrive.
Through the sweet pastures, meeting ground
of the harriers, it’s a short walk
from schoolhouse to cemetery where husbands
and wives are resting in peace
and stone walls keep a little of the sun’s day-warmth
for night that comes darkening the harvested fields.
18

THE YELLOW RIVER
for Seán McSweeney, on his 80 th birthday
Not the Boyne and not the Blackwater
but the Yellow River is the river of nostalgia
that along the way has shady places
never seen by any cartographer.
The whole distance of it
is the distance back to where
a boy spent a days-of-boyhood summer
when it seemed as if time was just beginning.
More days than he remembers or can forget.
The books he read had many ways
of changing a story, of taking him
into the shadows of poetry.
On an errand to the village shop
he could add an extra mile to the half-mile journey.
It was a summer of discovering
that nothing much happened at crossroads
on a sunny morning, that many souls
were already gone from the ground he walked on –
some leaving barely a footnote,
some a full account as long as the Yellow River.
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Ploughed Field
Tempera on paper
14.5cm x 20.5cm
2016

KNIGHTSTOWN
When mid-August masquerades
as two seasons, I want to be back
in the turf-smoke kitchen of her house,
watching the hours change,
the bread rise, stretching my hand out
for the first crust, the first taste.
I want to be safe in the old iron bed,
listening to the night visitor
who never knocked just lifted the latch,
never learned how to whisper
or speak without cursing
the wet summer, the late crops.
I want to stand in the yard,
alone with the stars of Heaven –
seven of them sisters;
travel the roads under rain-rinsed trees
then cross the boundaries
into the field of a thousand thistles.
In the breathing space at day’s end
I want to sit in the chair under the lamp
with the ghosts of the dead
who sat there before me but vanished
before they could take me by the hand,
tell me about the lives they had led.
Knightstown
Watercolour on paper
14.5 x 20.5 cm
2016
22

GOLDEN WONDERS
They were watching the hayfields becoming abundant.
For the boiling pot they uprooted the crop of Golden Wonders.
They spoke in the language of where they were born –
an open house on the road to Cavan and Monaghan.
They had lived through commotions and troubles,
frugal winters, cold comforts. This was the old country
in the old days – nights of looking into the fire,
listening to the rafters creak; the roads were desolate,
strangers seldom seen, maybe a cyclist pedalling hard,
face flushed, remembering stories about the ghosts of Pikemen
on their way to Kilmainham Wood.
At night the first to sing was the one who staggered in,
an ardent singer, back-of-the-chapel Sunday worshipper
down on one knee for the final blessing but gone in a second
before the Ave Maria.
24

RELICS
Among the relics that were out of time
the plough that my grandfather walked behind
was left where it settled and ripened
into rust in the garden rain.
And down the lane I thought I heard
his plough horse, a piebald on the trot
trying to find the gate to the paddock
and the voice that used to lead her home
along the way where my grandfather saw
that winter wore its crown of thorns
and the stubble fields were all
like the whiskers on a corpse.
He would go out armed with spade or fork
or maybe a stick to beat the bushes –
grandfather who hammered the nail in the wall
that a horseshoe hangs on, who never envisaged
how his saplings would flourish
from supple branches to strong sinews
or how his virgin grass would become an idyll
for a city child in summer months.
I stand at crossroads where he stood
looking in four directions – this way and that,
a man of the last generation
to blow out the candles, put oil in the lamps.
25

AT THE GRAVE OF MICHAEL BATHE
This could be where you stood to see the stretch
in the evenings, a change in seasons,
to let your long gaze reach
the far end of your Elysium: its endless grass
and bridle path, the whole expanse of shades
like a dictionary of viridian.
This could be Thomas Hardy country:
trees and birds and birds in trees.
The first young buds appearing
before the branches become radiant again.
Spire and steeple on the green hill
that is an easy incline to church and churchyard
and ancient graves that long ago capsized.
Their stones have toppled, tilted, worn away
so that now dates are missing,
names are riddles or non-existent.
But yours is clear and upright Michael Bathe,
a Celtic Cross from Brunswick Street
still standing since the day they brought you here
and bedded you in: a rise of starlings above you.
the earth of Kilshine at your feet.
Kilshine, April 21 st , 2016
The Gates, Kilshine
Ink and watercolour on paper
20.5 x 14.5cm
2016
27

THE TURNPIKE ROAD
In memory of my mother
Each year there came a time for going back –
always the same route, the city exit
through Phoenix Park, then a country road
she knew by heart: each bend
in the road was a bend closer to home
with its sods in the grate, cooking smells.
Home – a word that tasted of the old recipes,
of salted butter, coarse-grained bread,
the froth at the top of a white enamel bucket.
O the city was hard to cherish but not the place
she left to live among city dwellers:
the kingdom of cut meadows, the crossroads
where she used to dance and those sheltering
branches where the road unravelled –
the last stretch before she entered the yard
of little windows that rationed the light,
where morning came with the cockerel crowing behind
the tin door of the henhouse, the smoke
of a fire rekindled from one last blackened ember.
28

ON THE FARM
Don’t look for those not here: the people
from the year the willow trees were planted
and another room was added to the house.
Don’t look for the egg box
that was never empty but always replenished,
loose straw that sailed across the threshold;
the wardrobe crammed with crinoline
and cotton dresses, the suits with stripes
and wide lapels, porter stains and elbow patches;
the bad luck that came and went
and came again, the letters
kept in envelopes with foreign stamps.
They lived a life of chance and whatever
tradition demands; their fasts were long,
table talk began with a pinch of salt.
Don’t look for signs of blessings, ordeals,
what caused their troubles.
Someone has planted a lawn where once there was
a garden of potato furrows.
There is nothing left and no one to tell
of the drudgeries of pulling weeds:
Where one was plucked the next day two appeared.
29

Where’s the Moon Tonight? (for James)
Tempera on paper
28 x 38cm
2016
30

31
Summer Field
Tempera on paper
28 x 38cm
2016

TRICKS OF THE NIGHT, 1965
In the late twilights
when summer was half-dark at ten o’clock
you had to run home from a neighbour’s house,
down a country lane
where the hedgerows had eyes –
a trick of the night
and bats in flight were catching up
on time they lost in the daylight hours.
You ran with speed,
glimpsing things not there,
imagining that the phantom shape in the field
was something other than the obsolete plough
snared in a tangle of ivy and bramble,
forgotten since the time of the horse.
The figure passing by on the high saddle
of a bicycle, was that the bogeyman
or banshee, a scarf tied under her chin,
on her way to spook a countrywoman in Clongill?
And when the scar-faced moon appeared,
half-in, half-out of the clouds
it changed the whole perspective,
blanched the high summer hedges.
32

THE RAIN BARREL
Grandmother was a rain-harvester.
Rainwater for the washing of hair,
for the drowning of kittens.
I would lie awake and listen
to the music of her rain-barrel.
It was under the eaves catching what it could
of the downpours and drizzle.
I would listen to every tick and every drip,
to the steady beat of repeating rhythms.
and the lull between –
it all seemed soothing and in tune
with the slow progression of the night.
But when it rained in torrents
the running water was mutinous.
The dreams I had were of rivers
on the loose, a great flood.
That the thatch in the roof had holes in it,
was not weatherproof.
33

NEIGHBOUR
They worshipped in different churches –
remained steadfast to different truths: one drank
Communion wine, the other the blood of Christ.
Two neighbours willing to cross the fields
dividing their separate traditions, happy to step
over boundaries that kept others in.
In a house without electricity
they sat under the flickering kerosene lamp,
yapping like children at the back of the class.
The hands that lay in their laps looked crippled,
their veined arms like maps with rivers.
Two matrons still in possession of clear minds,
still counting their losses and griefs –
who could look up the sooty chimney
and see the light of heaven.
Above the Trees, Rossnaree
Pencil & watercolour on paper
14.5 x 20.5cm
2016
35

WHEN THE ELMS DIED
When the elms died and the one that shaded
grandmother’s house had to be cut down,
all things changed.
In the days that followed when the tree was gone
I was more aware of it than when
it was there dripping rain, stencilling dapples
across the country lane, sometimes even through
the window onto the kitchen table.
It stood like a sentinel opposite house and yard.
But above all else its disappearance took away a sound
of nature: the push and shove
of leaves and the high winds making love.
When the elms died and the tree-cutter left only a stump
the songbirds travelled on.
A new loss was added to the melancholy roll call.
When the Elm Died
Ink and watercolour on paper
14.5 x 20.5cm
2016
36

A SUMMER SANTA
In memory of my godmother, Phil Keating
A puzzle, a paintbox, a toy gun that popped –
bought in Woolworths, wrapped with love.
On the day my gift arrived as parcel post
the postman was a summer Santa Clause
appearing in the yard of whitewashed walls.
You know the scene: a place where nothing
has changed since the last time you were there.
A skirt spread on the rosebush, drying in the sun.
Little wisps of feather trapped in the chicken wire.
The morning was quiet enough.
A magpie on the chimney pot
looked to see where the smoke was coming from.
No sounds except the clip-clop of Peggy the horse
on the tar road, ignoring the fidgety crows.
Already they were stacking up – a godmother’s gifts,
my August birthdays: single numbers
changed to doubles, then childhood lost its innocence.
38

THE KILLJOY MONTH
…..and I knew
that part of my life was over.
Stanley Kunitz
When the coming of the killjoy month
meant back to school, I stood where four roads
converged and blackberry bushes
were in their days of renewal.
I was waiting for the country bus to pick me up
and when I said farewell, she looked bereft –
the unmarried aunt who was my summer mother.
I didn’t want her fuss, her hugs
and not her kisses that drew a crimson blush.
I was returning to a city school
and schoolyard blues:
the spit in the eye, the thump on the back,
the look that said You’re dead.
Where you had to be quick, no time for rhetoric
when the bully’s bare fist was scoring hits
on the weakest member of the gang.
Where sticks and stones could break our bones.
Fingernails scratch until our faces bled.
But what hurt most were the names
that were falsehoods: Snake-in-the-grass,
Piss-in-the-bed. Telltale. Teacher’s Pet.
39

BUTCHER, BAKER, ACCORDION PLAYER
(1)
The butcher in his slaughterhouse apron
whistled, crooned, serenaded the hanging sheep –
anyone passing might have heard
a snatch of My Darling Clementine.
At the slaughterhouse gate
the cows were jittery, kicking, resisting,
slipping on their own foul dung
as if they sensed the butcher’s intention.
Twice a week he performed his routine
with a rope to pull the stubborn beast in,
then the mercy gun, the gutting knife.
His killing floor was like the scene of a crime.
(2)
When the breadman came with manna
and manna’s aroma, he signalled his arrival
with the sound of the horn.
His bread van was a cornucopia
of cakes and buns and loaves
still warm from Spicer’s ovens.
His knowledge of local quarrels
was what she waited for –
a rumour from another parish
or picked up from the man in the garage.
His way of telling embellished
all local tragedies, all genealogies,
what someone said to someone else,
the final shot that won the match.
40

(3)
i.m. Paddy Traynor
With his turf-cutter’s strength
he shook melodies from the accordion:
old time waltzes and céilí storms,
the quickstep, the foxtrot.
Music that brought speed to his fingers
and sweat to his forehead.
What he knew he knew by heart –
old tunes from the past
made new for the step-in step-out dance.
The squeezebox he once held in his arms
has been silent since it crossed
the Irish Sea, home from the dance halls
of nineteen-fifties England.
land of the homesick,
a place he called Over Beyond.
41

YANKS
The house of dereliction is rotting
from within – gathering dust,
falling to bits. In its small rooms
sparrows have made their nests and sing
the only lullabies this house has heard
since the year after a difficult birth.
Between the wars it was deserted
for a sailing ticket, a New York job.
Now yanks who return to the spot,
stop five minutes and aim their cameras
to take a picture of the remnant
of what once was the heart of things.
At the tourist office they receive a map
of the heritage sites and good advice
on where to cross the river,
where to find monuments off
the beaten track but seen on postcards
showing the treasures of the Boyne.
Since childhood they have listened
to lore from a family archive,
the names of distant cousins.
They cannot stay long,
just enough time for the scenic drive.
Another country is waiting for them.
Passing through the Night
Tempera on paper
14.5 x 20.5 cm
2016
43

MYSTERIES
Who wore the Tara Brooch before it disappeared,
lost for centuries until brought to light on a sandy shore?
Who illuminated the corners of the Book of Kells,
shouted An eye for an eye at the Battle of the Boyne?
Who took the Red Flag down the copper mines, stopped
the night in Dunshaughlin, argued with Swift at Laracor?
Who told the blind harper it was time to play,
that the crowd had gathered, an audience was waiting?
Who first noticed the solstice on a solstice morning,
saw it creeping in and lived to tell their children’s children?
44

POEM BEGINNING WITH A LINE FROM F R HIGGINS
Our most lovely Meath, now thinned by November
with its days too short to leave and return.
Suddenly it’s a winter of bare thorn,
songbirds with only half-a-song.
Pastures are empty, herds have been sheltered.
The sea once a generous giver
now has nothing to give. No one swims in the river,
whoever wades in will never come back.
Up on the hills, in an allegorical landscape,
there’s a fallen tree – its growth rings
recording the ages that lead to the wood-burner’s
flames, the carpenter’s nails
or the floor of wood shavings
in the workshop of the furniture-maker.
The snow that falls during winter in Meath
doesn’t last long – but minute by minute
vanishes to reveal the bog
where the buried are carefully hidden
from the diviner. No tell-tale signs
only a reminder that this is the shadowy bog of riddles.
45

THE SALTED ROADS
Land pays the price for becoming human.
Fanny Howe
These roads are for the monster trucks,
once they were smaller
in days when the cattle drive
was what roads were for.
These roads were never on the map
until someone decided nothing was sacred,
not even the ancient path of kings,
the weather watcher’s hill above the plain,
the raggedy hedgerows, the rainbow ditches,
the village of old neighbours
who gave and received, the field
where the ploughman could see all that was his
and where the tree of crows still stands
in the tall grass, on wintry land.
These roads with their roadside shrines
and mystery crosses
are where car-wheels danced on black ice
and someone died in a stew of glass
and engine oil – a crash that happened
because speed merchants take a chance
crossing bridges in the dark,
hurrying on the sunny roads of May and June,
the salted roads of winter.
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GAELTACHT
One word and tomorrow became amarach.
One glance and they saw
that the fattening grassland was fair exchange
for the vowels of Connacht.
With luggage and a language from the west,
that was native in their bones,
they came with seed to sow
and grow into the artistry of their hands.
Some brought baby carriages,
rooms of drapery and family furniture,
some brought love and marriage
but few possessions just the essentials
to make a respectable house:
cups for the table, a kettle for the stove,
a tune for the fiddle, a ballad of chivalry,
a dance that was a window-rattling jig.
From the night of the census
there will be evidence of lives once lived
in those life-changing days
when newcomers made a journey in reverse
centuries after the exodus
of their ancestors to the west.
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BECTIVE
The house still stands but the rooms are bare.
This year’s crop of scrawny apples
has no one to shake them
from the scrawny branches.
The trees have liturgies they repeat
and woodland songs.
The arabesque of fallen leaves
is wet from recent drizzle.
Something somewhere creaks on its hinges.
The only new colour is the colour
of rust and nothing marks
the spot of the storyteller’s epiphany.
We pick a way through tangled bracken.
There are secret places
and sidetracks hidden in the old demesne
that shows a fall from grace,
a shift in the foundations
made by the trammelling of generations.
The tenant shadows of this place
are forever trying to escape.
Beech Trees
Pencil on paper
28 x 20cm
2016
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LITTLE VILLAGE
It was where first and last things happened,
the summer hayride, the classroom chant,
then fond farewells before lads and lassies
scattered away to seek their chance.
Village news was all about who was at the dance,
whose dress was extravagant,
the men who couldn’t stand.
On Sundays they passed the basket
in a church that had a choir in harmony
for the Sabbath but not the six days after that.
Crosswinds blew through the chapel gates
and over hardened graves with headstone dates
that revealed what only a fool would fail to see:
that measures of time are seldom the same
for the bridegroom and the bride, the firstborn
and the one who would always be the last child.
August Field
Watercolour on paper
17.5 x 25.5cm
2016
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SUNDAY IN CATTLE COUNTRY
Sunday had its transcendent hush.
A few bell chimes, a day that lacked
the noise of other days.
A day of stillness, nothing to disturb
concordance between the cat and dog
and the hens in their squat
under sycamore branches.
No bread in the ovens,
fathers and sons in starched white shirts.
All doors and windows open,
a day for listening to radio wisdom
or an old time waltz giving slow rhythms
to the seventh day of the week.
It was as if no-one dared to speak.
Then Sunday lost its transcendent hush,
those who never doubted began to doubt,
roads were busy with travellers
in a rush to supermarket aisles,
towns with boutiques,
happy hour in a heritage pub –
its carvery serving Sunday lunch.
Clongill
Watercolour on paper
18 x 26cm
2016

HISTORY MAKERS
William of Orange on his victory horse:
far from the scene where the battle was
his moment in history is recorded
in the print that hangs in a sunspot
on the wall of a house in East Belfast.
For Oliver Plunkett
it was open-and-shut: the hangman’s knot,
the chopping block.
His only words, Deo Gratias,
when sentence was passed.
In Loughcrew, Drogheda, Ardee,
in the one-room school
and church with no steeple
there’s an image that makes him seem
more like an ancient mariner
than a servant of Christ, a scholar of Latin.
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LEDWIDGE IN LOVE AND WAR
A small house, unadorned –
a country road and farther on
high walls around the local aristocracy.
You remained polite but in broad Meath vowels
could put on rage when it was needed
for loudmouth politics or when you heard of poets
shot at dawn for noble failure.
At the end of a day in the copper mines,
or working the long miles on roads of dust,
you joined the blackbird in the orchard,
Keats and Shelley in the library
of a castle lord. The bohemian look
that you put on and tied with a velvet knot
did not impress that girl you loved
and for whom you wrote your threnodies.
Where Aegean shores sparkled
and in the muddy ranks
you spent your time remembering that Sunday spin,
peddling through bog hush and riverside chill
where the Boyne was strong and fast at Swynnerton.
A friend who said he saw your ghost
slip by in midnight rain did not know then
that you were safe in your soldier’s grave
in Passchendaele.
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A WHISPER RAN THROUGH LARACOR
We missed a turn or followed the wrong road
or maybe Laracor was a place that disappeared
and took with it Swift’s electric ghost.
We could not find the lovely hideaway
of light and better air where the Dean and Stella
walked together, their footfalls quiet
( he away from the Liffey’s stinking tide,
the souls in distress, vesper bells that chimed
in the parish of dens and dead-end alleys,
loves cries in Hoey’s Court ).
She, in eighteenth century bodice,
played the role of Counsellor Mistress.
Where better than Trim to take the country air,
he wrote to her in journal prose.
In Laracor she led the way to his grove
of hollies, row of willows.
The sun burned through an early mist
or evening starlings swooped in high wind.
He bowed before her, their fingers met.
A whisper ran through Laracor.
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THE DAY JIM REEVES DIED
The day Jim Reeves died
I was haymaking in a long meadow in Meath.
Jim Reeves was never my kind of idol:
a voice too soft at the edges,
but I knew his death left a hole in country music,
a sorrow on the prairie.
There were tears in Texas, the rodeo was cancelled.
Strong men cried in Nashville
and Kells and west of the Shannon.
Road-menders stopped digging the roads
and filling the holes, their tea water turned into vapour
in kettles left unattended.
At the end of the day radio DJs abandoned
their playlists. That night we forgot
to close the gates, lock the henhouse.
Cattle strayed. The fox came.
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ONLY ROCK ‘N’ ROLL
Guitar riffs like sexual thrills
when the band played Jumpin’ Jack Flash –
and Jagger did his Shiva dance,
sounding a little possessed.
The crowds who wanted it never to end
sat in the sun and under darkening clouds.
Biblical numbers, someone said –
like worshippers in a big temple.
The drummer’s beat and the stomping feet
could all be heard far beyond the river
bend and the road that turns
to the ancient ruins of Monasterboice.
For the last of the day they were Lords
of the Night, still rolling
and tumbling the dice, making hearts race,
the castle walls shake,
guitars and percussion taking the long way
to the fadeout of encores,
before everyone scattered,
became fellow-travellers on the roads
through Dunsany, Dunshaughlin, Dunboyne.
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THE OLDCASTLE DANCE
for Shay Keogh
In 1971 at the Oldcastle dance
it was Bubblegum and slow set ballads –
we held our breaths
and waited for the secret signs
when the DJ put on The Jackson Five.
There was a glitterball for glitz,
its hundred mirrors showing
the new beginners learning the rituals
of the dance pavilion.
The girls of summer still had names
chosen from the list of saints –
they were lissom, sinuous
and in their night disguises they looked unlike
the truer versions of themselves –
dreamers staring into the distance,
convent girls in modest dress.
The air was thick with their perfumes.
In another age they might have been
the temptress in the opera,
Botticelli’s muse
or the Queen of Sheba
when she stood before Solomon.
59

COAST
At Mornington, out on the estuary
a ship that makes slow-motion strides
advances to its mooring.
At Mosney the ghosts of holiday-makers
still dance the anniversary waltz.
On Laytown strand you can hear the gallops
of horses raising sand.
At Bettystown a sun-haze fills the day
with golden air, it is like a fairground –
strong swimmers, sunbathers, day-trippers.
The fully-clothed ankle-deep in blazing sand.
Some wait for the evening tide,
the sea coming closer, the waves rolling over
a pair of sandals left behind, a child’s wind-broken kite.
Shoreline 2016
Tempera on paper
14.5 x 20.5 cm
2016
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KNIGHTSTOWN, CODA
In memory of Mary (Finnegan) Traynor
The ash from the last fires was cold in the hearth.
It was as if the old house was making a gradual departure.
When I opened the door I knew it was a place
where an epic story had ended.
Three generations, four if you count
the children of emigrants who sailed to America.
There was dust on the windows and dust in the cups
and on the framed photographs of emigrant sons.
A house of hush, a crack in the glass
letting in draughts that blew the heart away.
A beam in the rafters was ready to collapse,
the fabrics had holes in them where moths
had been busy flitting from blankets
to blue apron, curtain to curtain.
The blackened pan still held a whiff of bacon
and the empty teapot on the table
was left there like her first thought after waking.
The ash from the last fires was cold in the hearth,
the odour of turf smoke faint but refusing to die.
September Field
Ink and watercolour on paper
14.5 x 20.5cm
2016
62

THE YEAR I TURNED TO POETRY
The year I turned to poetry
sixteen years of dreaming were all I had
when my first muse put
the scribe’s pen in my hand.
Now my life is four times that
and I am back where it all began
looking for the midden that expanded
like the universe in a corner of the yard
under daytime’s silver birches,
night-time’s bottleneck of stars.
It was here my forefathers laboured for years
grinding hard clods into fine clay.
Their house of sanctuary still stands
but rooms have been added
and I cannot find the window
where they scanned the Milky Way.
It was here I first looked for words
to describe the sacred and absurd.
I looked in the furrows, the stubble,
beneath pine needles lying
where they fell, under leaves that dropped
from branches of the elm.
Old Apple Tree
Pencil and watercolour on paper
29 x 21cm
2016
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Autumn Bogland
Pastel on Paper
14.5 x 20.5 cm
2016

BIOGRAPHIES
Seán McSweeney
Seán McSweeney was born in Dublin in 1935.
Self-taught as a painter, he lived in Wicklow for
many years before moving to the west coast of
Sligo in the 1980s, surrounding himself with
the landscape that has been the leitmotif of
his work ever since. Consistently drawn to the
characteristic "horizontality" of the bogland,
sea fields and flat expanses of shoreline
that surround his home on the Sligo coast,
he returns repeatedly to the same subjects,
painting them in various lights and through
changing seasons. The resulting paintings,
drawings and prints verge on abstraction:
bog pools are reduced to rectangular shapes
bordered by grasses and plants while coastlines
are represented by bands of colour that
demarcate the boundaries between land,
sea and sky.
Seán McSweeney began exhibiting at the
Cavendish Gallery on Parnell Square, opposite
the Gate Theatre, in the late 1950s and featured
in the first Irish Exhibition of Living Art in
1962. He had his first solo show with Leo
Smith's Dawson Gallery in 1965 and has been
represented by Taylor Galleries since 1978.
The recipient of numerous awards and prizes,
he has exhibited extensively in Ireland and
abroad and is an Honorary member of the Royal
Hibernian Academy and a member of Aosdána.
His work is represented in private collections
in Ireland, the UK, Europe and North America,
as well as public collections including The
Arts Council / An Chomhairle Ealaíon, Trinity
College Dublin, Limerick City Gallery of Art,
Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Dublin
City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Ballinglen Arts
Foundation and Boyle Civic Collection.
Gerard Smyth
Gerard Smyth is a poet, critic and journalist.
He was born in Dublin where he still lives. His
poetry has appeared widely in publications in
Ireland, Britain and the United States since the
late 1960s, as well as in translation in several
languages including Italian, Romanian, French,
German, Ukrainian, Spanish and Hungarian.
His eight collections include A Song of Elsewhere
( Dedalus Press 2015) and The Fullness of Time:
New and Selected Poems ( Dedalus Press, 2010 )
He has published two limited edition books
with The Salvage Press, We Like It Here Beside the
River, with a drawing by artist Donald Teskey
and After Easter with artwork by Brian Maguire.
He was the 2012 recipient of the O'Shaughnessy
Poetry Award from the University of St
Thomas in St Paul, Minnesota. He has given
readings of his work in Moscow, St Petersburg,
Paris, Berlin, Minneapolis, St Paul, Stuttgart,
Bucharest and London, as well as participating
in many of Ireland's literary festivals. He
is co-editor, with Pat Boran, of If Ever You Go:
A Map of Dublin in Poetry and Song which was
Dublin's One City One Book in 2014. He is a
member of Aosdána and is Poetry Editor of
The Irish Times.
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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
While the creation of this book has been a deeply personal journey, many others
have accompanied me on the way and I wish to thank them: first and foremost Seán
McSweeney, his wife Sheila and their daughter Orna. I am particularly grateful
to Belinda Quirke, director of Solstice Arts Centre, for initiating this project and
providing me with this opportunity of a Meath homecoming - and not least for her
care and attention on my trips to revisit old haunts in the county. My thanks to the
board of Solstice and Meath County Council for its support of Seán and myself as
writer and artist. Professor Thomas Dillon Redshaw in Minnesota, whose instincts
I trust, was my first reader of these poems and his feedback was invaluable. My
editor and friend at Dedalus Press, Pat Boran ( three poems in this sequence initially
appeared in Dedalus books, "The Blackbirds of Wilkinstown", from A Song of
Elsewhere, part 3 of "Butcher, Baker, Accordion Player" (revised here ) and "Today
is Not Enough" from The Fullness of Time: New and Selected Poems - the latter was first
published in my debut book of poems, The Flags Are Quiet, New Writers' Press, 1969).
The line from F R Higgins is from his poem "Father and Son" ( Father and Son: Selected
Poems, Arlen House ). And always, my wife Pauline - the first of our many journeys
together was to Meath. GS
Published on the occasion of the exhibition
THE YELLOW RIVER
28 January – 23 Mar 2017
Produced by Belinda Quirke for Solstice Arts Centre
Published by:
Solstice Arts Centre
Railway Street, Navan, Co. Meath, C15 KWP1, Ireland
Tel. 046 9092300 | info@solsticeartscentre.ie | www.solsticeartscentre.ie
© Solstice Arts Centre, the artists, and the authors and may not be reproduced in any
manner without permission
ISBN 978-0-9957041-0-7
Photography: Sheila McSweeney
Design: Oonagh Young at Design HQ
Print: Die Keure, Belgium

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