to Ignazio Silone

Much I remember of the death of men,
But his I most remember, most of all,
More than the familiar and forgetful
Ghosts who leave our memory too soon
Oh, what voracious fathers bore him down!

It was all sky and heather, wet and rock,
No one was there but larks and stiff-legged hares
And flowers bloodstained. Then, Oh, our shame so massive
Only a God embraced it and the angel
Whose hurt and misty rifle shot him down.

One by one the enemy dies off;
As the sun grows old, the dead increase,
We love the more the further from we're born!
The bullet found him where the bullet ceased,
And Gael and Gall went inconspicuous down.

                                       II

There are the Four Green Fields we loved in boyhood, 
There are some reasons it's no loss to die for:
Even it's no loss to die for having lived;
It is inside our life the angel happens
Life, the gift that God accepts or not,

Which Michael took with hand, with harsh, grey eyes, 
He was loved by women and by men, 
He fought a week of Sundays and by night 
He asked what happened and he knew what was
O Lord! how right that them you love die young!

He's what I was when by the chiming river 
Two loyal children lone ago embraced
But what I was is one thing, what remember 
Another thing, how memory becomes knowledge
Most I remember him, how man is courage.

And sad, Oh sad, that glen with one thin stream 
He met his death in; and a farmer told me 
There was but one small bird to shoot: it sang 
"Better Beast and know your end, and die 
Than Man with murderous angels in his head."

                                    III

I tell these tales - I was twelve years old that time. 
Those of the past were heroes in my mind: 
Edward the Bruce whose brother Robert made him 
Of Ireland, King; Wolfe Tone and Silken Thomas 
And Prince Red Hugh O'Donnell most of all.

The newsboys knew and the apple and orange women 
Where was his shifty lodging Tuesday night; 
No one betrayed him to the foreigner, 
No Protestant or Catholic broke and ran 
But murmured in their heart: here was a man!

Then came that mortal day he lost and laughed at, 
He knew it as he left the armoured car; 
The sky held in its rain and kept its breath; 
Over the Liffey and the Lee, tric gtills, 
They told his fortune which lie knew, his death.

Walking to Vespers in my Jesuit school,
The sky was come and gone: "O Captain, my Captain!"
Walt Whitman was the lesson that afternoon
How sometimes death magnifies him who dies,
And some, though mortal, have achieved their race.
 

The Colours of Love
 

to my wife Caren

Women that are loved are more than loveable,
          Their beauty absolute blows:
But little, like the urgent, carnal soul,
          More than its leaves so mortal in the rose.

O rose! O more than red mortality!
          What can my love have said
That made me her imagine more than be?
          Her mind more than mind, blood more than red?

As the noise of cars and chariots fades,
          And the empire of the stars
Reconquers with its bright and lusty blades
          My room, and heals my scars,

I raise my arms to that mistress planet,
          Venus, whose hunting priests explain
My heart and the rush of legend on it,
          Making me man again!
 

Those beautiful women shone against the dark
With flowers upon the breast, and birds 
Disturbed by foreknowledge, sang some notes.
There were unshed tears, reproach and fret;
I wondered if their women's time was yet.

And the flowers like milk in a dark pantry at night
Offered themselves to the groping hand:
The cliffs fell faster than tears
Reaching that pain where feeling does not matter;
Nor through the house the ghosts' averse patter,

Repeating their old theme of the unknown
Birds or women never did translate:
It was as if eternity were breathing
Through the small breathing of the flowers
Shining upon its breast with speechless light.

Remember! do you think I could forget?
The pigeons growl like dogs in sleep remote.
Yet now if you should ask, I could not yet
Forswear that fascination, break that note

Which death in his lush arden exercised, 
The habit of repentance leads the sin, 
I know that sloth the solitaries disguised, 
I know the door the sweet fogs entered in.

As memory more fitful daylight makes, 
Death can increase his holdings in my sleep: 
While benched and cheery drunks pull up their stakes 
For one more day in search of food and keep.

Abundant stone figures sun themselves 
In the precarious granary of the fight, 
Husbanded by our father, our farmer, selves 
Against subversive, supernatural blight.

Voices from the shrubbery nearby: 
"Smile with your eyes," one says, "what sweet invention! " 
What did that Mediterranean nymph reply? 
"Smile with your fables and their sweet intention."

Listen in the gold confusion of the wheat, 
Inside mortality, to what can move you: 
The protests, the protection, the defeat
"When I am gone," the voice asks, "who will love you? "

The crackling lightwaves overhead 
Minimise our human year.

O blond haunches! O white bed!

O harmless, ultramundane fear!

Refuge of sinners! Night by night! 
Bury your head beneath the sheet: 
Still the unworldly angels fight 
And casually tear their meat.

It cannot well be said of love and death 
That love is better and that death is worse, 
Unless we buy death off with loving breath 
So he may rent his beauty with our purse.

But is that beauty, is that beauty death? 
No, it's the mask by which we're drawn to him, 
It is with our consent death finds his breath; 
Love is death's beauty and annexes him.

While pestilence feathered down, the hero wasted 
Nor would he "cry aloud" or "breathe a prayer" 
It being essential to the gall he tasted 
That bitterness only bitterness can share.

How could he climb the glen through ruined farms 
Nor hear his dead fathers take up arms? 
He is a hero, and must make his peace 
With all that's left-a few unfrocked police!

I think of seal-barking seas in the West, 
It's all between a cry and a caress, 
Where the windy islands yield no yeast 
And men bake their own bread of bitterness;

Carry the soil of salvation in their arms 
Lay it on rock and put down the seed, 
It's all in a bed that chills and warms 
With too much brood and too little feed.

I saw him move among the iron leaves 
Which were to carbonise through his love's breast. 
Hers, and the raves of lechers, louts and thieves, 
Would sag and musty change be all their rest.
 

When leaves have fallen and there's nothing left 
But plainsong from ascetic bony birds, 
I say a prayer for all who are bereft 
Of love, of leafy summer, of loving words.

I met a kinsman in the market-place,
Singing, and as he sang my courage grew,
It was about betrayal and disgrace,
He said "Love falls but love of love stays true

Singing in vain and formal in the shade 
The noble poverty those houses made.
 
 

Divinities of my youth, 
Expound to me my truth;

Whether from Judah or Rome 
Or my nearer Gaeldom.

The driven horse formalises
His speed for prestige and for prizes,

The girl swinging on the swing
Of the convent, makes me sing

And apples drop like centuries from 
The tree of life, so long in bloom;

But divinities of my youth,
You can no longer tell the truth,

It is too much a struggle to 
Keep quality confined to you.
 
 

When Spring with her lambs and sea-cries rises, 
Her fluent fantasy makes a mock of me; 
I throw off my absolutist devices 
And dissemble in the loose, resplendent sea:

Yet think on how San Juan, bitter and bare, 
Wrapt in his drama, sent his cry above, 
And though, through layer on suffocating, layer 
Nothing came back, he loved; and so I love.

At the Bar du Départ drink farewell 
And say no word you'll be remembered by; 
Nor Prince nor President can ever tell 
Where love ends or when it does or why.

Down the boulevard the lights come forth 
Like my rainflowers trembling all through Spring, 
Blue and Yellow in the Celtic North . . . 
The stone's ripple weakens, ring by ring.

Better no love than love, which, through loving 
Leads to no love. The ripples come to rest ... 
Ah me! how all that young year I was moving 
To take her dissolution to my breast!