Post-St. Paddy's Day Poem: What is the language of the heart's red blood?

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bullet holes at the General Post Office, Dublin, 2007

Last post was praise, and I loved you joining me.

Then Sunday, the day after St. Patrick's Day, I spent hours rereading Irish history (from the Great Famine, aka the Potato Famine 1845-1852, through the Easter Rising 1916), and the poems of Padráig Pearse (Patrick Henry Pearse). He was gifted with words, and was chosen to be spokesman for the Easter Rising in 1916. He wrote of a mother’s heart awash in the blood of sons who fought for country in his poem "The Mother," something I can relate to, at least in part. (I have not had a son at war, but I have experienced childbirth, and a mother's heart.)

The Mother

I do not grudge them: Lord, I do not grudge
My two strong sons that I have seen go out
To break their strength and die, they and a few,
In bloody protest for a glorious thing,
They shall be spoken of among their people,
The generations shall remember them,
And call them blessed;
But I will speak their names to my own heart
In the long nights;
The little names that were familiar once
Round my dead hearth.
Lord, thou art hard on mothers:
We suffer in their coming and their going;
And tho' I grudge them not, I weary, weary
Of the long sorrow--And yet I have my joy:
My sons were faithful, and they fought.

~ Padráig H. Pearse

Sadly and synchronously, Padráig, his brother Willie and thirteen others were executed after the rebellion, after being held in the Kilmainham jail. Into our psyche all this bloody history and the bad news of today gets tucked, apart from our will or intention. (For some very good news, take 16 minutes to watch Peter Diamandis talk about Abundance in our Future in this TED video.) Anyway, I'm sorry for the downer post.

About the photos: I took the photo at top in front of Dublin's General Post Office in 2007 to document the bullet holes from the 1916 Easter Rising. When I took the picture, I did not even see the man in the background. Later, someone pointed out the remarkable and eerie resemblance to Padráig Pearse (second photo), who proclaimed an Irish Republic practically on the same spot where the man in my photo stands.

What is the language of the heart's red blood?

The slosh and drone of the washing
machine could be the sound track
of my wrestling dream last night,
my secret self soaked in her lonely
unconscious waters, agitated between
pain and beauty. What is the place
for me, inside and outside dark caves
of nature, and the long rooms
of strategy, men, and war? And these petty
winds that blow into sleep out of this or that
maternal forest or sacred mountain of love.
They dissolve like sugar in public life. I sit
with a ceramic mug in the pinked dawn,
my tongue tucked in its habitual chip. 
Vanilla, coffee, daylight. What is the language
of the heart’s red blood, grown sweeter, or
more bitter, through the tossing, washing,
roast and ferment in fields of sleep?

March 2012

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Seamus Heaney: "Digging" in Ireland

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Portrait of Seamus Heaney (b. 1939), by Peter Edwards

National Portrait Gallery, London;
I have a postcard of this painting
taped to my file cabinet at work.

For St. Patrick's Day stores are sprouting plastic shamrocks, a paltry substitute for the island rock of green that grows deep down in many of us, even if we're not Irish: green and purple hills, icy lakes, soft woolen caps, pocked stone fences and crosses, rain on the roof, a fiddle, a fire on the hearth, a glass of stout, a never-ending talker on the other side of the table, an old history of pain and struggle, faith, and writing. A smile, a song and a lament.

Poet Seamus Heaney is a lighthouse in an island country cultivated with literary lighthouses. He was born in County Derry in Northern Ireland, and many of his poems are rooted there in the rural countryside of his childhood. I just love this one, one of his most famous, about his father the digger. See how he alludes to a gun, which was a familiar and ugly character in the Northern Ireland of his youth. In the YouTube video is a montage of clips in which he recites "Digging" in many different venues, at different ages, with different timbres in his voice. Think of that. One life, one family, one man, one poet, who harvests and feeds us riches like this, in and out of just one poem. Oh my dear friends, the world in one person! See the spade and hear it slide into the wet dirt. Smell the iron, the wet steel, the potato mold. Feel the hands of father and son, one with a shovel and one with a pen. Hear the pen, Heaney's shovel, that digs for sustenance, and replants it too, to come up for us again and again, like Swift, Wilde, Beckett, Lewis, Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and a lot of other pen-diggers. (There are no women in my list, for I have not studied Irish women writers, but here is a list to explore; no doubt you could help me too.)

After the video, I've lined up my own St. Patrick's Day parade of photos taken over two summers, 2006 and 2007, while I helped students traipse around Dublin, Killarney and Cork. I have not been to Northern Ireland, or I would share scenes from those counties. Six out of thirty-two Irish counties are in Northern Ireland. As you probably already know, Southern Ireland became the Irish Free State in 1922, now known as the Republic of Ireland, and is no longer part of the United Kingdom. I knew Ireland as the Celtic Tiger in the mid 2000s high-tech boom, but now, Ireland has the highest ratio of household debt relative to income of any developed country in the world. I really feel for those young families who thought prosperity would last forever. As Roger Cohen recently said, maybe it's time for "emotional prosperity" since the financial kind is becoming a thing of the past for many of us.

Digging

   by Seamus Heaney

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; as snug as a gun.

Under my window a clean rasping sound
When the spade sinks into gravelly ground:
My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
Bends low, comes up twenty years away
Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
Where he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge deep
To scatter new potatoes that we picked
Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handle a spade,
Just like his old man.

My grandfather could cut more turf in a day
Than any other man on Toner's bog.
Once I carried him milk in a bottle
Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up
To drink it, then fell to right away
Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods
Over his shoulder, digging down and down
For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mold, the squelch and slap
Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge
Through living roots awaken in my head.
But I've no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I'll dig with it.


- from Death of a Naturalist (1966)

 Students on study abroad program, Cork

Graveyard on the Hill of Slane, site of St. Patrick's Paschal Fire

County Meath, Ireland

Killarney National Park

County Kerry

 Residential neighborhood
Kinsale, County Cork

 Cork, County Cork

Kinsale, County Cork

 Trinity College, Dublin, County Dublin

 Killarney National Park
County Cork
The sheeps' heads are red, not because they are Irish redheads, 
or because they are bleeding, but they are marked by their owners

 Killarney National Park
County Cork

 Street in Cobh, County Cork

Window in Cork, County Cork

 Blarney Castle, County Cork

Ha'penny Bridge, Dublin

 My dear friend of the mind-heart, Inge,
at Four Knocks, the 5000 year-old passage tomb
in County Meath; Inge taught on the study abroad program

Me, photographed by Inge, who taught in the program in 2007,
looking at abstract art in the 5000 year-old passage tomb
at Four Knocks, County Meath

Beech tree in the church yard at Tara
County Meath

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Christmas fires

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We're closing the circle of the year. Christmas for me is a spiral of memories, unwrapping tree ornaments from worn and wrinkled tissue paper, laying out glass and glitter, like stars burning light years away. When it's time to rewrap them, clouds will cover them until next year's opening into another season of light in Nature's darkest days.

Besides personal memories, there is genetic memory. Don comes from Brits, and I come from Swedes, Brits, and maybe some Irish. Traditions from those ancestral families were not given attention when I grew up, and I felt the lack when I saw other families make German lebkuchen or Swedish papparkakor. Whatever European landscapes are in our past, I know in my blood that I am from old stone houses with ten foot hearths, where mutton from the moor bubbling in a pot fills the room with savory smells.

This Christmas, without our Lesley, Brian and Peter to celebrate with us - Don and I wanted to honor the day simply, in new Old World ways. We found three traditions.

1 We burned our first yule log Christmas Eve, cut from a fallen French lilac branch that I'm dragging, below. For centuries European barons had laborers carry in a felled tree to their hearth, sticking its end into the fire - the rest jutting out into the room. That night everyone was invited to party - servant and master together, equal and friendly. Old feuds were drowned in flowing wassail. Then a brand was taken from the fire and set aside as a talisman against fire and evil for the year ahead. This same remnant from the yule log was used to ignite next year's holiday fire.

Smoke from our lilac branch smelled like sweet pipe tobacco outside. Christmas evening, with fireplace tongs we grabbed a charred remnant from one of its pieces in the wood stove, cooled it in snow, then set it up on the mantel to be a symbol of safety and hope for the year ahead. We'll ignite next year's yule log with this year's piece.






The whole time we focused on this yule log thing, I had my mind on another Christmas fire - the devastation I'd driven up to going to town the day before Christmas Eve. A siren-screaming fire truck barreled past me on our country road, and there ahead I saw billowing smoke, and a little house in flames! Fire trucks blocked the road, so I had to turn around and go to town a different way.



When I returned home later in the day, I drove by the charred house and could still smell fire though there wasn't any smoke in the air. We read in the paper that two young men lived in the house, though only one was home and only had minor burns on his face. We were relieved but sad thinking of what gets lost in a house fire that can't be replaced. A nightmare before Christmas.


2 The second tradition we claimed was from Ireland, the country where we both have spent more time than any other in Europe.




For Christmas dinner we cooked lamb, carrots, onions, potatoes and turnips on top of the wood stove for stobhach gaelach, or Irish stew. The smell of thyme and all that goodness almost drove us crazy for two days, first cooking the bones for broth Christmas Eve, then the stew on Christmas Day. Christmas Eve Don had to run out for buttermilk when we suddenly decided Irish stew needed Irish soda bread. He got to the store (15 minutes away) one minute after closing (it only closes once a year, for Christmas), and the utterly worn out frazzled store lady at the door mercifully let him in when she heard his desperate plea for the soda bread. "Run," she said. He ran, picked up buttermilk, then grabbed a bottle of champagne, paid for them, and handed the merciful worn out lady the bag with champagne and the receipt (so no one would think she was stealing it) saying, "thank you, and Merry Christmas," and she wept.


3 On his way home from the store Don heard Lynn Rosetta Kasper rave about a French holiday cake on NPR. So, because I am a francophile and love to bring France to the farm, we added this Gâteau Basque for dessert: a shortbread type cake with Don's homemade blackberry jam layered in the middle. "It's a great cake to make for the holidays because it's sturdy and easy to transport and can be eaten at any time of day . . . it's a grown-up pop tart." Delicious!




When our grandchildren come on the scene one of these days, I want them to connect with their own memories, those of their parents and grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and also with those of their ancestors. Stone. Iron. Wood. Fire. Water. Bones. Edible roots out of the dirt. You know, they're just embers gone cold that get rekindled on our hearths, in our ovens and on our stoves. I am very thankful for what we have not lost.

I hope you had a wonderful Christmas.

Killarney, Ireland - 2006

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dishes

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With the onset of autumn, I remember that I have china. "The Holidays" are around the corner with all that feasting - the first being Thanksgiving in November when we'll welcome Don's family to the farm. I will be digging into the china cabinet for bowls, cups, plates, pitchers and platters to serve mashed potatoes, gravy, turkey, stuffing, cranberry sauce, candied yams, coffee, and pumpkin pie.

I collected the cups and saucers, above, from different antique shops because I loved the rosebud handles. Once I fell for the first set, it was not easy to find more. This was before eBay.

This egg cup is a good excuse for making soft boiled farm fresh eggs Friday morning after Thursday's Thanksgiving feast. My set of Spode buttercup belonged to Grandma Olive, then my mother, and now to me. When I pull them out, I feel I am touching my women, and their hands are now my hands.

No matter how humble the home of a woman is, she feeds her family on dishes. On special occasions she will spend extra time chopping, mixing, cooking and filling her best ones with feast-worthy delectables. If her mother used those dishes before her, their value goes deeper. And if her mother's mother used them before her, serving food in them is an even greater joy.

Every ladle of food - from the thinnest soup to the heartiest meat - becomes food for the soul as well as the body when family and friends come together and multiply memories and generations through celebration.

My sister Nancy gave me this Irish Belleek butter dish that looks like an Irish cottage. It is so lightweight, it feels like you are holding a seashell. You can tell it is European because it is square, not oblong, for the European shape of packaged butter. I cherish it as a gift from my sister as well as for the link to Ireland where I have fond recollections and connections.









Everyone in the world deserves to eat well, to live well. In photographs of the world's poorest communities, I have seen blue tarp shanties set up with style, neatness and grace. There is an instinct within us humans, in women especially, to nurture the family. This nurturing is for the body, the soul and the heart. When she feels her dishes are beautiful, the food is appealing, and that she is bringing her loved ones together at special times to create new memories and remember old ones, it is worth every chop of an onion, each whisk of butter and flour for a roux, all the stirring of thick batter for cake, all the rolling out of pie dough for custardy pumpkin filling, the kneading of bread dough for yeasty buns, and every heartfelt anvil of stress over the possibility that everything won't get done or taste delicious. There are many men, like Don, who also feel these instincts and spend hours in the kitchen out of a desire to nurture loved ones.

What follow are from a big heavy wonderful book called The Way We Live by Stafford Cliff with hundreds of photographs by Gilles de Chabaneix, showing how people live around the world. I chose some pictures of people preparing food, as well as dishes.

Romania


Bangkok




Sweden



Provence



Sweden

And this final photo is not from the book but was taken by rauf near Jaisalmer, Rajasthan, India. When I saw this at his post in February I was so touched I had to stop and be quiet. This is a mud hut, and the woman of the house designed and built the wall mounted dish rack herself.

gift from Ireland

Last week on the Hill of Tara in County Meath, Ireland, Inge returned to the churchyard where a couple dozen beech trees line a stone wall (the cluster of trees in the upper right of the postcard, above). Rising above the ancient seat of Celtic kings and neolithic tombs 5000 years old, these living beings lift their arms to the sun, surrounded by views down into half of Ireland's counties.

At the foot of one special beech tree Inge found a square stone - once a brick, I think (in the photo, below), to bring to me. This is the first summer in four years I didn't get to touch this goddess among trees that I first met in 2005. But thanks to Inge, now I can hold a piece of worn brick - symbol of human constructs - from her shade.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

I'm sorry I won't be going to Ireland for the University this summer. I was lucky to go the last three years.

Enjoy the green.