In honour of the forthcoming end of his second and final Presidential term, this week’s archival blog features a number of poems by President Michael D. Higgins.
First published in Studies in the Autumn of 1991, at the time of publication President Higgins was a T.D., Mayor of Galway, and lectured in Sociology in the-then University College Galway.
Michael D. Higgins, ‘A Selection of Poems’, Studies: An Irish Review, Vol. 80, No. 319 (Autumn, 1991), 300 – 305. JSTOR link: https://www.jstor.org/stable/30091625
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The ivy’s leaves are bright and green
Don’t bring it home
Our Mother said
There’s bad luck in that ivy
I plucked its branch and laughed
and ran
And said it was like holly
Whose berries fed the birds
And made our Christmas folly
But later now her voice comes back
Our bodies old
Our spirits weak
No blossoms now
No fragrant Spring
The ivy’s leaves are bright and green
Don’t bring it home
Our Mother said
There’s bad luck in that ivy
When we were young my leaves were bright
I twined around your bark
I hid your silver from the sun
And both of us grew tall
You pushed your limbs past my embrace
And blossomed for the Spring.
The ivy’s leaves are bright and green
Don’t bring it home
Our Mother said
There’s bad luck in that ivy
I fed on your young sap and grew
And slowly you grew tired
And yet you could not leave
I wrapped your broken wood with green
And covered you from light
The ivy’s leaves are bright and green
Don’t bring it home
Our Mother said
There’s bad luck in that ivy
The ivy cannot love the tree
Its green can only kill
And yet we live together still
For is it love that trees must die
While locked in ivy’s twines
The ivy’s leaves are bright and green
Don’t bring it home
Our Mother said
There’s bad luck in that ivy
She stands
Supported by her stick,
In front of the gilt mirror
Her husband bought
In a mad moment,
After selling the calves in Claremorris,
In the first year of their marriage.
Neck stretched back,
She drops the lotion In her one good eye.
The tears come
And she remembers
In her solitary kitchen,
Times when she stretched her neck back
To show the stars to her seven children.
Uranus, Mars, Venus and the Milky Way
In the canopy over Claremorris.
She had traced them all
With her bright bride’s eyes.
The tears come from her one good eye
For her scattered children
And her children’s children,
Seed of her seed.
The range is cold that once was warm.
On it she rests her head
And remembers
Times when, pressing her forehead
Against the warm udder of a cow,
Reluctant milk-giver,
She told them stories from Dickens,
Of Ham and Twist:
And always they would say,
‘But tonight, you will show us the stars’.
She stretches back again
To drop the lotion in her one good eye.
Alone, she steadies herself
And cranes her neck.
The darkness comes as the drops fall
On her one good eye.
Through the mist of tears,
She sees the empty kitchen.
There is nobody to ask now for the stars.
There is only silence
And the memories of a world emptied of people,
Of feeling.
She straightens in front of the gilt mirror
And wipes the tears from her face,
Lined with a thousand stories.
Sleep was but a dark night,
And death a journey to the stars.
Mother of mothers,
Stargazer,
Dust of dust,
Tonight, you say,
You do not need your one good eye
To read the signs of the sky by night,
To read alone is all you ask,
Be told of distant things.
Go out tonight
Stargaze
And plot your journey home.
They all knew about him
But nobody ever spoke
to the man who never had a visitor
In St Teresa’s Ward
He had come so long ago
Nobody could remember
It was the neighbours who brought him in
they heard,
On a strange night,
of a high tide;
He spoke occasionally to the bushes
Or arranging the flowers in vases
He would be heard to whisper
‘But I know, I know
Why I did it’.
In the village the story was well known
Of the man who burned his wife’s house
Together they’d lived for thirty years
Without benefit of chick nor child
But he would look at her
In a slow way that they both knew
Was love in a time when softness was not allowed
And the day he found her
stretched in front of the fire
The tongs grasped in her hand
He screamed and ran from the house.
It was poitín that made the funeral pass
The neighbours shovelled out the clay
From his mother’s grave
And one dead lover met another
And it was the poitín that did it.
They said.
When weeping in the corner of the bar
He could take it no more
And never returned home
The priest, a young man, came
And brought him home
‘Pull yourself together Colie’, he said
‘Life must go on’
But all he could see was the dresser
And the two plates where she left them
And the two mugs
And the two chairs
‘There will be one of nothing’, He screamed
And ran outside
The Man whose lover had died
And coming back
He brought a car
Asking the priest to come outside,
He cast the petrol at the gable thatch
And his house burned he fell to his knees
The tears came and he shook and screamed
They said it was the Poitín
But all he said was
I will not let it be
There will be one of nothing
And the neighbours saw the flames
Of the house of the man
whose lover was gone
‘My God’ they said he must be mad
To burn his cosy little house
And they brought him here On a strange night,
Of a high tide. And
They all knew about him
But nobody ever spoke
To the man who never had a visitor
In St Teresa’s ward.
He had come so long ago
Nobody could remember.
It’s when the circle closes,
No courage left for encounters
Offering new experience,
Relationships. That’s when it is
The closed circle offers its security
Of those familiar and safe.
Is it age or the death of courage?
For, after all, Russell began so late
A new relationship with dead ideas.
Outside the circle it’s noisy, some say,
Dangerous. You’d need to know
What you’re doing, rely on advice
Of taxi-drivers, hotel staff and all those
Energised by a tip. In your youth
You’d lived the fantasy, were open
To all the experience of life. ‘I won’t
Die wondering’, you’d quoted the old waitress
Divorcee who swung her ample bottom
At you when, as a student, you thought
It was all laid out before you.
Now it’s your turn
To rely on the predictable
Reproduction of safe environments,
Fantasies abandoned, you shuffle
With what you had of experience,
Ransacking, comparing against the fantasy,
You need your circle now.
It is not age alone.
It is not the void of courage spent.
It is maybe some ancient fear,
Against which there is no defence,
Not even the gift of reason,
A hollow give when the climate changes,
And the death of the heart
Is required.
Image Credit: The Labour Party on flickr